Michael Button

I've heard a lot of people say that glass would potentially survive because glass is a...

You know, it's a very durable material and glass would survive a long time.

But glass in the form of a human made recognizable artifact isn't going to survive in that form.

It's going to get crushed.

It's going to break away into tiny little nanofragments, into silica grains that are just invisible in the kind of archaeological record when you get up to these huge levels of time.

Yeah, I mean, I would say almost nothing would survive that long.

And again, with the caveat that I'm just some random dude who's investigated this on the internet and researched this myself.

Not a scientist.

If anyone out there is a material scientist, I'd encourage them to reach out to me.

But as far as I can tell, there are very few things that could possibly survive that long.

I mean...

We're pretty crazy fucking apes, like we do crazy shit.

So things like nuclear weapons, like we test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.

You could argue if we knew when to look and what to look for, we could see traces of plutonium in the atmosphere from our nuclear weapons testing, or you could see our nuclear waste deposits.

Or things like carved stone, because stone obviously survives a very long time.

Human carved stone, you'd be able to find that.

But we do find that.

We find stone tools.

But just because ancient humans used stone tools doesn't mean they didn't use anything else.

It's just stone is the most likely thing to survive.