8 Ways Earth Will Look Freaking Insane In Thousands Of Years

It's only in the past decade that scientists have started to discover the bizarre way that plastic is incorporating itself into our natural environment. Like Ben Grimm, it's turning into rocks. Over many years of exposure to the elements, plastic clumps together and combines itself with rocks, sand, and minerals in the environment, producing weird, brightly colored stones. Millennia from now, rocky shores could look like they're made out of melted Lego bricks. Because they realistically might be.

And it's more than plastic. Other materials, such as glass, are also shaped by the environment into permanent reminders of how little of a shit we give about it. Future beaches might look like this:

That's Ussuri Bay in Russia, where the ocean has spat up tons of broken glass and ceramic fragments, which years of water erosion have reshaped into cute little pebbles that look like gummy candies. Don't put them in your mouth, though. Seriously.

Yet another variety of garbage-stone is known as Fordite, or Detroit Shale. It's actually dozens of layers of paint scraped from the floors of car factories, and it's already so ubiquitous that people are turning it into jewelry and selling it.

Dear lord, let's hope they don't find a way to play those games. Then they'll really hate us.

But then there are the "geosynchronous" satellites -- the ones which are designed to exactly match the rotation of the Earth. To us, they look like ordinary stars, except for the fact that they don't move as the Earth rotates, as if they were creepily staring at us the whole time (which they probably are, though the government denies it). They're calibrated so precisely that they don't experience any drag or friction, which means that they won't come down for literally billions of years. That's some enviable stamina.

Now imagine the scenario that scientist and photographer Trevor Paglen proposed in 2016 while studying these objects: A thousand generations after the fall of civilization, a new society (be it human, talking dog, or whatever) emerges from the dirt, survives its medieval period, and enters an Enlightenment. Some future Galileo analogue invents a telescope and points it to the sky in the hope of figuring out how the Solar System works, perhaps already harboring the suspicion that we're a speck of dust in an infinite cosmos of orbiting spheres ... only to get confused by the fact that a whole bunch of stars never move at all. He throws his (correct) telescope out the window and becomes a flute player.

It would be hundreds of years before we'd have the technology to correctly identify these unmoving stars as space junk from a prior advanced civilization. Until then, we'd probably have developed some "Facebook group for flat Earth enthusiasts"-level wrong theories about what stars are and how the Universe operates. In short, we've already started trolling our future descendants without even realizing it.

You know what doesn't change so quickly, though? Nuclear waste dumps, which will remain unsafe for tens of thousands of years. And this begs the question: How the hell do we keep humans away from there long after we've ceased to be able to interpret contemporary "Do Not Enter" signs? One of the fears is that no matter what symbols we come up with, future humans are going to interpret them to mean "buried treasure," because the various "holy fuck seriously do not dig here" signs posted by ancient Egyptians didn't work so well on Europeans.

Scientists have been giving this conundrum a lot of thought lately, and they've been coming up with some truly bizarre ideas about how to communicate danger through the eons without using language. For example, we could plausibly genetically engineer a race of Technicolor cats. This idea isn't as insane as it sounds. Or OK, maybe it is, but it's one that they've been seriously considering. Because cats are likely to remain ubiquitous companions of humankind until the end of our species, if we could engineer them to change color in the presence of radioactive material, theoretically, future humans might learn to associate such color-changing felines with danger and stay the hell away. That or we'll think they're witches and burn them all.

Other ideas include trying to create some type of religion, a so-called "Atomic Priesthood" which keeps future generations away from waste dumps, like the guardians in the non-Tom-Cruise version of The Mummy. Others suggest we could cover waste sites in a "Landscape of Thorns" -- fields of jagged, impassable, ominous stones that would make excavation both difficult and frightening. Future people might think we're dicks, but hey, at least their dicks won't fall off.

We're really hoping for the color-changing cats scenario, though. That sounds awesome.

Hansen had greater aspirations for the dam than it being a big power station. He compared it to the Great Pyramid, and wanted it to stand as an equal testament to mankind. And like the Great Pyramid, he covered it in hieroglyphics that nobody will be able to understand now that he's too dead to explain them. On top of the Sphinx-like Winged Figures, the dam is decorated with bas-reliefs ...

... and celestial maps which cryptically record the date that Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the structure in September 1935. The star chart was created so that "those versed in astronomy could calculate the precession of the Pole Star for approximately the next 14,000 years." We imagine our descendants will probably be disappointed if they ever decode these symbols and discover they just reveal the date that the dam opened, and not, like, the cure for cancer or something actually useful.

According to the scholars who study the legacy of humanity long after it's perished, the presidential carving at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota is likely to be the last human construction that remains after the Earth's natural housekeeping processes blow away every other trace of our existence. The dirt, sand, and oceans will sink our cities beneath the ground, but Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and anyone else we add (Kanye?) will continue to stare down at a planet otherwise swept clean.

That's because the Black Hills, where the monument is, happens to be one of the most tectonically stable places on Earth. On top of that, the statues are carved out of solid Precambrian granite, one of the toughest naturally occurring rocks on the planet. According to science writer Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, the faces on Mount Rushmore will be recognizable for around 7.2 million years, barring some freak event like a direct asteroid collision or alien death ray.

And this isn't a coincidence. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, chose the site specifically so that the sculpture would "last forever." In fact, he even specified that the statues should be three inches thicker than the ideal measurement, so that the natural erosion would take a few million years longer. He was pretty fond of presidents and/or faces.

As an addendum, there is a similar sculpture which geologists think might last almost as long: the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in Georgia. Also carved into solid, nigh-impenetrable granite, the statue is kind of the anti-Mount Rushmore, depicting Confederate figures Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the appropriately named Stonewall Jackson. Just saying, it's remotely possible that the final surviving testament to human civilization will be a celebration of slavery.

Well, for all intents and purposes, human beings are a burrowing species too, though on a much greater scale. Animals might build tunnels and burrows, but we build subways, boreholes, and mines. The (sexy) term for this is "anthroturbation," and it will be the last evidence that we existed. Things like the Salt Lake City mines and the London Underground will probably remain until the end of the Earth itself. This brings up an interesting point for those searching for alien life: Instead of looking for alien cities and giant Mars faces, we should probably be looking for evidence of ancient extraterrestrial subway systems.

With this in mind, some scientists have decided to go full circle, preserving the legacy of human knowledge using the best method we've ever figured out: etching it on stone tablets and burying it in the desert.

The Memory of Mankind Project intends to utilize the one technology that mankind has gotten progressively worse at over time -- data storage -- and etch as much of our knowledge, history, popular fiction, and culture into the surface of a number of ceramic plates, which they will then bury deep in an abandoned Austrian salt mine. Millions of years hence, the hope is that our future descendants will stumble across a treasure trove of ancient plaques which will teach them everything from modern calculus to the relativity formula to the recipe for a really great chili to ... Pepe the Frog.

Yeah, the MoMP people aren't the only ones seeking to create an eternal ceramic legacy to mankind's "achievements." In 2017, the website 9Gag also bankrolled a project to bury a carved stone tablet deep beneath the Earth for the benefit of future generations. But far from the collected enlightenment of a foregone past, its purpose is to record internet memes. You know, like Dickbutt, Philosoraptor, and Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen. On second thought, we deserve oblivion.

S. Peter Davis is the creator of the Three Minute Philosophy YouTube series, and is the author of the book Occam's Nightmare.

Get your cat ready for business because let's face it, cats are going to take over the Earth.

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