We May NOT Be the First Civilization

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What survives is not what you think.

When we imagine the end of our world, we tend to picture the classic Hollywood

ruins—the skeletal remains of the Eiffel Tower, the crumbling pillars of the White House,

or Manhattan reclaimed by a lush, green forest.

We imagine future archaeologists—perhaps not even human ones—stumbling upon our monuments of glass and steel 100,000 years from now and slowly piecing together the story of who we

were.

We assume that because we have built so much, so high, and so densely, we

have left a scar on the planet that time itself cannot heal.

But that is a fantasy. It is a comfort we tell ourselves because the alternative is much

harder to process. The reality is that on a geological timescale, our civilization won’t

remain in any way we recognize.

Most modern materials do not survive as objects at all. Our cities would not fossilize; they would disintegrate. By the time 100,000 years have passed—a mere heartbeat in the life of our planet—the surface of the Earth will have been scrubbed almost entirely clean of our existence.

So what does this mean for how we view our history?

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