(June 17, 2025 at 4:22 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:(June 17, 2025 at 3:45 am)Paleophyte Wrote: Ever wonder what happens to a reactor core or a spent fuel pool after the grid fails and the last of the backup generators run out of diesel? Very Bad Things. Even assuming humanity doesn't extinguish itself with a thermonuclear firestorm, we're going to leave a pretty interesting layer of chemical and nuclear residue. Advanced civilizations don't sneak worth a damn.
Right, that infrastructure is not melting away any time soon, and I'm pretty sure we'd be able to detect and analyze remnants of nuclear or solar energy plants big enough to power a large energy ecosystem. The architecture as well may be discernible, even after a few million years; I mean, we analyze natural architecture such that we know a landslide happened here or the Chixulub comet left a deadly shower of fragments in modern-day North Dakota -- the latter evidence largely microscopic.
But somehow we can't see evidence of an energy-consumptive, advanced society and still, erm, want to believe.
Finding a discrete source like a landfill or a nuclear reactor is pretty low odds. Finding a global blanket of microplastics and radioactive waste would be a lot simpler. A bit like we felt that dinosaurs had too cool a signature and we needed our own K-T boundary layer. Once you recognize what that is then you have a much better chance of tracing it back to its origins, a bit like the way we traced Chicxulub based on a thin layer of clay that's found around the globe.
