(June 17, 2025 at 7:20 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(June 17, 2025 at 5:02 am)Paleophyte Wrote: 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.
Fossils. We should have found fossils by now.
Boru
Maybe, maybe not. It'd depend on the nature of the critter and any odd behaviors that they might have. That said, burial of your dead to prevent disease is a near-universal and a great way to make people into fossils. What we should have found long ago is fossilized structures. Any advanced society is going to need permanent structures, and we'd expect some part of those to survive, especially along the coast and at the mouths of rivers. Any civilization coming after us is going to find some very strange hydrocarbon deposits that are 2 inches thick, 20 feet wide, and 200 miles long.
