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Have you watched the show "Life After People," which estimates how long man-made things would last...?
... if humans suddenly didn't exist anymore? The show speculates that it would only take about 10,000 years for all traces of human existence to completely disappear from the face of the earth.
Given that 10,000 years is less than the blink of an eye on a geologic time scale, how likely do you think it is that we are NOT the first iteration of intelligent homo sapiens to have ever inhabited the earth? Who's to say that - I don't know - maybe 30 million years ago, an even more advanced civilization was here, and got wiped out by a huge asteroid or something? We might not have any physical proof of their existence.
What do you think?
Kim M... Most things would be long gone way before 1000 years. The show speculated that only something as massive as Hoover Dam would even last 10,000 years. Cool, huh?
2 Answers
- c_kayak_funLv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
"Earth After People" demonstrated that the OBVIOUS relics of humans would disappear from the surface pretty quickly but there would still be buried evidence in the archaeological record below the ground and under the ocean. Just as our scientists (archaeologists, paleontologists, geologists) have excavated back through the evidence of millions of years to reconstruct the history of life on Earth, future archaeologists who might visit the Earth or evolve later would be able to find traces of the human uses and constructions on the planet over the million or so years we hom sapiens and our direct hominid predeccessors were here.
If there had been intelligent, technologically advanced beings on the planet prior to the evolution of humans, we would have found evidence by now. Since every area of the planet and every geological layer has been heavily investigated and we have not found such evidence, it is safe to say there were no previous "civilizations".
Source(s): student of archaeology - jennaLv 61 decade ago
Sure why not. It's always possible.
10,000 years seems like such a long time, I feel like everything we've built could be corroded away and overgrown in like 1,000 years. But most stuff like that is speculation because there's really no way to know.
Like I've always wondered how we get measurements for things like Pluto. We can't reach that far, our machinery can't reach that far, so it's really just estimations.