I wonder...

[davywavy]

...if the entire human race were to drop dead tomorrow of Bird Flu, how long it would be before there were no visible signs that we'd ever existed?

Comments

[mrmmarc.livejournal.com]

Quite some time.
Basically until a large ball of rock hit a precise part of the moon wherein a small plaque with Nixon's name on it exists.
Then considering the longevity of of SOME man made structures...
I'd say you'd lose all visible trace of the human race in about 8-10,000 years.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of extraterrestrial evidence - after all, V'ger is due to fall into a black hole pretty soon, I recall.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Nearest black hole was a good few hundred light years away I thought...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It'd better a get a move on, then.

[hiromasaki.livejournal.com]

Especially since it hasn't launched yet.

They have to launch four more in negative-6 years in order to catch up.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

You know, whenever there's anything geeky I don't know, I'm glad to have you about :p

[hiromasaki.livejournal.com]

No problem.

I'm wondering just how many Star Trek fans were more worried that Voyager VI wouldn't launch by 1999 than about their bank accounts mysteriously emptying on January 1st, 2000...

[cleosilver.livejournal.com]

Not really. We were too busy fighting the eugenics war to worry about it much.

[hiromasaki.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes.

I had forgotten that the Eugenics War / WWIII were during the 1990's.

Technically, we're only about 40-50 years away from Cochrane's birth, aren't we?

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

There are still man-made structures from the stone age visible today and considering the longevity of modern structures you mention (not to mention the amount and size, a city like London will be a lot more difficult to obscure than a small iron age settlement), it will take far longer if the human population just died.
It'd have to be worldwide catastrophic event (volcanic eruptions everywhere, a meteor the size of the moon smashing into Earth etc.) to obscure everything.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'm really thinking of everyone keeping over dead, and how long the ravages of time would take to remove us if that happened?

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

A lot longer than 10,000 years. Several 100K? A Million? I don't know. There's so much stuff built on the surface, it'll take very long indeed.