"If Earth Has Continued Human Civilization For 500,000 Years" Topic

So, imagine no major Dark Ages in the near future. No major Apocalyptic events. Just continued human civilization for the next half a million years … how ever unlikely that sounds …

QUESTIONS

How much of our current modern 21st century AD city architecture or infrastructure elements do you think will survive below ground?

Example – Do you think that remnants of today's sewer or subway tunnels will continue in use to some extent in the distant future, or as some type of forgotten catacomb complex, deep below cities (like those seen in movies like The Matrix)?

krop.com/simonmurtonart

imdb.com/list/5OxC39n2jfM

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Just wondering.

Thanks,

Dan
TMP link
TMP link
TMP link

500 thousand years? I suspect even plastics would have degraded. Concrete structures would likely last.

Wouldn't plate techtonics have destroyed just about all of it by then?

Dan,

You could take your cue from the archaeology of the city of Troy, where multiple layers of urban building accumulated over time.

I suspect that it might go much the same way, but remember that we have a shifting energy paradigm going on right now, and that too will play a big role in how civilization evolves, directly impacting architecture and infrastructure in the process.

Something to consider in your ruminations on this idea is the practice of recycling, such as what if the inevitable contractions of the consumer economy take hold, and we move away from a petroleum driven system. This will mean tens of thousands of shipping containers piling up even more so than they are doing right now. These could very well be the building blocks for major residential areas in certain population centers as well, if only given their age perhaps the more run down parts of town.

Hope this helps?

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

I've read the Portland mix of cement that is commonly used today does not last very long--the article was talking about how Roman concrete is more durable, so presumably 500,000 from now most of our modern cement will have crumbled away.

500k years isn't enough time for tectonics to have a significant effect however most natural caves only have a lifespan of around 100k before being filled with limestone so our underground relics probably won't be around in 500k years.

Since no human civilization of any sort has been discovered of such an age, it is nearly impossible to guess.

But, given the premise of no worldwide apocalypse and no global economic, technological or societal collapse, I predict that much of what we are now would either have completely vanished or been preserved as historical curiosities. Indeed, in 502013 AD, I rather expect that people may have crafted "reenactment" societies to re-create the (somewhat imagined) life styles of past cultures, but with all their "modern" technology fully in reach. Who knows— one of those cultures might be The Information Age, with people pretending to be "Gheecks" living in underground rooms and battling "Trohjyans" and "Mahlwairs" while in a perpetual state of semi-undress.

I imagine that in a few decades or so we will have developed a technology that will allow us to destroy and rebuild buildings rather quickly. This will lead to a similar condition that is depicted on Courscant in Star wars. Large machines move along the surface and destroy buildings replacing them with new ones.

This creates a cycle of renewal. It does cause some social issues but I suspect they just round up the criminals in the low income areas and boot everyone else out.

Y'all dhould check out the "Diana: Warrior Princess" rpg.

We don't currently build much of anything that will last 500,000 years – much of it probably won't last 500 years! That being said, it would certainly be interesting if someone was to invent a very long lasting building material – I suspect that CorSecEng's scenario is more likely

There are really too many variables to make any sort of prediction. For 500,000 years to pass with no major man-made or natural apocalypses means that we've manage to solve the problems of war, over-population, food, energy and environment. We have some sort of stability. But whether that means a stable society with 50 billion people all living in super-cities, or a few hundred million living in a park-like paradise, who knows? Either possibility is valid and either possibility could have some remnants of the 21st century world still in existence--or not. No way to tell.

There will probably be a "swinging load" of "Commission Hour" passengers *still* waiting on a VERY "badly" delayed NYC Subway train…

Motorman (Tube Driver to our Brit cousins) on the pa system: "Er, Conductor, inform your passengers that we're STILL bein' delayed by red signals… Problem wit' the tower at West 4th Street"…

Conductor (Guard): "ah, Motorman, do you have any idea what cent'ry we're in?"…

Motorman on train radio to CC: "Ah, Command Center… 435 Dog outta Bedford Park… North of West 4th on Three Track… We still havin' switch problems at West 4th?"…
"Command?"…
"Command?"…

"Yuppie" passenger (er, "customer") in the "north motor" crushed by two-hundred fellow sweaty, angry (and VERY old) folks: "Goddamn dinner's gonna' be cold AGAIN!!!"

…AND so it goes in the year 959595.

I doubt that anything of our current underground will survive. However, that is no fun. Underground labyrinths inhabited by morlocks, now that is gameable.

Well isn't there an extensive underground in places like NYC that are not used any more? Could just be a case of it being easier/cheaper to go deeper and make a new subway then to fix the old one. You probably can't dig 2 feet without hitting some sort of pipe up there now as it is. Data, Water, Sewer, Phone, Power, and gas. Some go boom some don't.

Of course that isn't any fun for the Junior Urban Explorers club on their July 503,423 field trip. Well unless we decided to genetically modify the entire race to be 1/10 the size we are now to over come the issues of overpopulation and food consumption.

"unless we decided to genetically modify the entire race to be 1/10 the size we are now to over come the issues of overpopulation and food consumption."

LOL. Wasn't that what someone said in the miniaturization comedy film "Inner Space"?

Dan

There is an island off Japan where there was a city I think for a Mine, it played out and they all left.

It is now kept that way as folks watch nature reclaim the land, in about 25 years she has done a fair job on that city.

Lee

There is an island off Japan where there was a city I think for a Mine, it played out and they all left.

It is now kept that way as folks watch nature reclaim the land, in about 25 years she has done a fair job on that city.

"Battleship Island," IIRC.

I honestly don't expect anything to last. Modern reinforced concrete doesn't last 50 years, especially with all the shortcuts [expletives deleted] idiots have made in the construction.

This Island

Whatever it looks like, I've been assured in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.

As others have said, the constructions you're talking about won't survive 500,000 years. If you reduce your time frame significantly, say 2000 years you may have some possibilities.

Here's a technical paper on the subject.

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Is that the island city used in Skyfall?

That far away, I suspect nothing will remain, assuming there is anyone to know, or look for it.

A TV series indicated that the great pyramids might, Might, last 500k years. Everything else would be torn down, and rebuilt over and over……..

@Parzival: Yes, Hashima or "Battleship Island" was used in Skyfall, but only the exterior establishing shots. The film company's assessment prior to shooting was that the site was too dangerous.

Here's the Wikipedia link if interested.
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As for the original question. As noted previously, many modern construction techniques and materials are shoddy and may not see out a century, never mind half a million years. So, nothing. (Except for Twinkies, which will survive the heat death of the universe!)

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Yokohama Shopping Trip) is a manga about a post-apocalyptic Japan. The violence and chaos (if any) is past and the survivors are just waiting peacefully for the end. Some of the pictures of nature reclaiming man's works might be of interest.
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For the real thing: An abandoned Japanese mountain village.
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WARNING: Sanaku Complex's ads are NSFW!

Dreamland, a rip-off of Disneyland
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An artist's conception of an abandoned Tokyo:
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Forgotten catacomb complex, definitely. With mole people. Don't wander down there if you don't want what happened to the ladies in 'Descent' to happen to you.

Hey CC;

I was okay when you typed '500'. I was willing to go for '5,000'. Then you kept hitting the zero key, and I realized you were completely mad ----

Go big or go home, Señor Squint.

Perhaps more of a feel of what we currently see, the more developed nations having a large decline in population, would more lead me to believe that if human civilization some how survived too that point, that cities would tend to not have as high as current populations.

We would probably see much of robots and machines running almost all forms of work in society, with only people doing work for the sake of having something to do. Probably fairly clean cities with a high amount of parks and natural settings as well as natural designed architecture, which currently is becoming more and more of a movement as far as I have seen :P.

So I would really say, very few if anything from now adays would be around, especially how everything is moving to being changed so fast, it could look very , very alien to what we know right now.

that's my thoughts anyhow :P!

Continous human existence for that long is mind boggling. The nature of man evolved by nature or with help may be hard to comprehend. If they did make it that far I am sure that they would at least have records of our time.

But its more likely the sentient beetle society would be in full swing by then.

Humans from half a million years ago could not remotely foresee the world we now live in.
I don't expect we are in any better position, even with SF inspired leaps of imagination.

There was a History Channel show, I think called Life After People that discussed how long human constructs would last if humans were suddenly removed from the picture. Left to the elements, even the largest structures failed in a fairly brief time, maybe 1,000 years. IIRC, the common US family home pretty much devolved into a pile of weeds in about 40-80 years.

Of course, the show presumed that there would be no on going maintenance efforts. Then again, based on our history of the past 100 years, preservation is not high on our lists for the most part.

500k years? I would suspect not much we present folks would recognize. It might be questionable if we would even recognize a future "human".

That long, plenty of time for several ice ages and periods of much higher than now sea levels. Most cities are on low lying land, so most current cities will have had plenty of opportunity to be completly obliterated – several times over!

I'm not so concerned about 500,000 year from now, but more like 30-40 …

DuncanIdaho: "It might be questionable if we would even recognize a future 'human'."

You mean something like this, but mostly organic, and with some cool photosynthetic skin? That could eliminate the need to grow, harvest and prepare foods, eat and … eliminate.

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Dan

Well, according to this article: link we're going to resemble anime characters in 100,000 years or so.

I'm guessing that 500K years from now a tiny minority of humans will live on earth. But before we leave we will have pretty much dug up and reconstucted most of the planet's surface.

In other words, nothing of today will be left. Nothing built 300,000 years from now will be left, either.

Yes, those life forms from "AI" came to mind too …

As for what we'll *look* like, I expect we'll have found ways to do direct manipulation of DNA to produce whatever look we desire, and that humans will change their "look" over the span of a very long lifetime to suit whims or preferences. There will also be "neo-purists" who strive to achieve an idealistic "human" appearance, (probably based on preserved statuary in the Greek ideal), and "true purists" who refuse any DNA manipulation (but will therefore be subject to evolutionary development that will show significant changes from our current appearance). Others will want to experiment with animal forms or "manimal" forms— we might have "real" centaurs, werewolves, wolf-men, hawk-men, bat-men, minotaurs, satyrs, and even what we might perceive of today as "grotesqueries," from extra arms to tentacles to… well, I'm not going to speculate on what some people might want to do.

As a caveat, I really can't imagine that any of the above will develop without major societal and cultural upheavals, even to the level of major wars. In my DNA manipulation scenario, I suspect that certain highly restrictive religious factions would be willing to go to war or promote gross violence against those who practice DNA manipulation (can you imagine an Osama Bin Laden type reacting positively to a fad of "cat-girl" DNA fashion? Well, except when he thinks no one's looking.) Heck, that sort will go to war over clothing. So a half-million years without major upheaval is highly unlikely.

I forgot how cool and alien-like some hotel atriums can look:

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The person who took that photo immediately thought of the "Krell" from Forbidden Planet.

However, when viewed instead as a long horizontal space, I think it looks more like an underground energy complex designed by a a much more biologically and technologically evolved "human" race (pre-Eloi), in the far distant future , around 500k AD. And instead of eliminating poor us obsolete Sapiens, they mercifully allow us to live (albeit underground) and to occasionally come to the surface to build and maintain structures for them – mainly at night, so as not to upset their beautiful and perfect society.

Thoughts?

Dan

Actually, an apocalyptic event with the ensuing burying of stuff in ashes and such might help preserve some stuff.

The answer to the original question is found by investigating the atomic half life of the various compounds in question. Hard plastic, for instance, has a half life of approximately 10,000 years – no way its making it to the half million mark. If you look to the archeological record – or even the fossil record for this time frame – about the only thing likely to survive that time span is rock. So, maybe Michaelangelo's David survives that long, maybe Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. But not much else. I believe the oldest manmade non-rock items we are aware of are the cave paintings.

If I'm right on the rock element – imagine sentient life trying to interpret only the rock creations of man (and only fragments of those in most cases). Any anthropologists care to step in and give us a hypothetical interpretation?

As to humanity moving that far forward without a calamitous catastrophe, don't bet a dead ant's broken antenna on that. Too much to risk.

Humans wont even be human in 500k years, we will have evolved into a new/or several new species, at the rate we are going, cyborgs will be the normal state for a human in the next decade or 2.
Those that can afford the tech to be a cyborg will become the "haves" (or should I say, will stay as the haves) they will compete with the "have nots" (humans, otherwise known as the 99.999999% of the rest of the human race) for jobs/resources, the have nots will either die out, be enslaved (through limited tech, e.g. the Iphone), or be killed off by the haves.
The haves will become essentially immortal, and will no longer be human.
this will probably happen in this century, just my opinion.

What (pretty much) everyone else said, Dan.

We'll be lucky if everything we are isn't just a smear of dark ash caught between two rock layers in half a million years.

Even the "mighty Krell" only left underground tunnels after 200,000 years en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krell

John T

I think that vanity will play a major role in the direction the "haves" will go. They will not want to become too freakish-looking and will be afraid to lose their "self" in a merge with technology.

Consider how much they spend in cosmetic surgeries and procedures yearly, just to blend in with younger and healthier people during their public events and parties. That's why I don't know if the average multimillionaire would want to merge with machinery.

I think they will definitely have a subdermal link to make "calls" and access the net, but will be enticed more by designer genes than by more extensive cybernetic resources. They might, however, grow clones for spare parts (like in the film "The Island") or even transfer their minds into young full size copies of themselves.

That is what will set the trend in evolutionary development, and that will become a slippery slope down towards extreme elective eugenics, in their quest to become near eternal, godlike and physically "perfect" humans.

The geeks, on the other hand, will probably stampede to download their consciousness into machines, even though the technology to make them look convincingly human isn't there yet.

The majority of people will simply have to rely on cosmetics and diet and exercise to look better. Private insurance companies and government health programs may eventually intervene and provide preventative gene therapies to reduce the expense related to geriatric care for a population with a longer and longer life expectancy. Much like the way most dental insurance covers 100% of exams and cleanings, so as to reduce the chances of more costly dental treatments later. So the majority of mankind will likely be physically productive until almost their last day of life.

Dan

"So the majority of mankind will likely be physically productive until almost their last day of life."

I forgot to add that they'll have to work pretty much till the day their bodies finally give out and die because most people will not prepare sufficiently for a long retirement period, and who knows if social security programs will even exist for very much longer.

It'll be cheaper for the government to implement mandatory preventative gene therapies to augment performance* and keep seniors functional, active and producing until the very end. That way they can be taxed all their lives plus they won't draw much from government funds.

That will set the direction humanity takes to take itself to the next step in evolution, via genetic manipulation instead of cybernetics. Even now, most paraplegics will readily accept procedures to regenerate nerve function, but are hesitant to amputate limbs in favor of prosthetics even when the nerve regeneration therapies produce very limited results.

It will start as elective (voluntary) eugenics among the extreme wealthy, in their pursuit of perfect health, beauty, extreme longevity and greater intellect, for themselves and their offspring. Then as genetic manipulation progresses, undesirable traits are weeded out, and the process yields better and better results, it will become mandatory for the military and then the rest of humanity, but only to enhance functionality and compliance.

That's when society as a whole will rethink its values and morality, once again in favor of the "greater good" than for individual rights. Our society become more and more like that of ants or bees.

I think that, for the majority, the term "humanity" will almost become synonymous with citizenship, since the species will be manipulated and diversified into many offshoots, each geared for a specific class, function and lifestyle. So, as long as you submit to the rule of government, are productive and do not become a burden to society, you will be considered "human".

Scary stuff, if you ask me!

Dan
* The performance treatments might keep them going until they finally drop, but it will probably stop, or even reverse, the longevity trend among the masses.

"It'll be cheaper for the government to implement mandatory preventative gene therapies to augment performance* and keep seniors functional, active and producing until the very end. That way they can be taxed all their lives plus they won't draw much from government funds."

Or it maybe cheaper to make Soylent green.

Per Bill Gates, its better to hire 10 teachers than provide expensive medical care for 1 old person.

Futurama's suicide booths come to mind too!

But, who knows, maybe the news that Soylent Green is people spreads to the general public after all, and it's what eventually prompts the under dwellers to view open cannibalism as normal.

Dan

Hmm. I guess that Flickr picture of the uber-futuristic "robots" from A.I. got deleted. So here are some others that are still around:

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i.imgur.com/TsP4p0K.png

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Dan

All things fear Time, and Time fears the pyramids. No thing will last so long. Unless the provisional pavilion were I work, which was constructed almost two decades ago…

Maybe the above-dwellers will tinker a little bit with the DNA of the below-dwellers, just to make sure they don't decide to move upstairs:

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Dan