Michael Button

Yeah, so this is the preservation problem, and this is something I talk about in my videos.

So I kind of always ask the question, like, what if human culture had flourished in the Eemian, for example, which was from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, what realistically would survive?

Because...

It's such a vast, vast length of time that it's really unlikely, at least as far as I can tell, and obviously I'm not a scientist.

I'm not like a, you know, a materialist.

I'm not any kind of, I'm just a guy.

I'm not even a historian technically.

But as far as I can tell, it's extremely hard for these, for any materials, but even our modern materials in our huge civilization that, you know, 8 billion people, industrial society, sending rockets to space, you know, all the crazy stuff that we're doing.

Even us, if we disappear tomorrow, I think it would be,

It's extremely unlikely that pretty much anything would survive when you get up to these huge timescales of like 100,000 years.

And so I've been doing quite a lot of, you know, research into this because I don't... I obviously don't want to, you know, get things wrong and put falsehoods out there and mislead people.

I don't want to look like a dickhead in front of like millions of people or whatever.

So I've been trying to like...

you know, debunk myself or play devil's advocate to myself on this point because, you know, that's the best way to make your argument airtight and no one's really out there debunking me.

I don't know if that's because I'm right or because, like, no one knows me.

Maybe that would change after a show like this, but...

I've been really looking into the kind of degradation of modern materials as much as I can and trying to work out how much would survive from a civilization like ours if we disappeared tomorrow in 100,000 years' time.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, of like an actual modern city.

And the scary truth is it's almost nothing.