Drop Two Atomic Bombs on a City. Wait 10,000 Years. What Would You Find?

The thought experiment Randall poses is deliberately visceral. Drop an atomic bomb on a city and obliterate it. Then drop another on the same location. Now wait 10,000 years - or 20,000. What remains? What would an archaeologist looking at that site even recognize as artificial? The answer Randall builds toward is the one that undermines one of the most common objections to the existence of advanced ancient civilizations - that we would have found the evidence by now.

The geological process Randall describes is precise. The rubble of an obliterated city, given sufficient time, gets reincorporated into the geological stratum - compacted, cemented, and reconstituted into what geologists call conglomerate rock. A jumble of broken material cemented together. Within that conglomerate could be fragments of an advanced civilization that no researcher would recognize as artificial, because nothing in the conventional framework would prompt them to look for it. The absence of recognizable ruins is not proof that nothing was there. It may simply be proof that enough time has passed to make the evidence invisible to eyes that don't know what they are looking for.