Everything We Build With Is the Pulverized Rubble of Previous Catastrophes.

The wait is over. Randall Carlson's digital academy is finally here. Kosmogonia is live.

If a catastrophic flood of sufficient scale hit a modern urban area, Randall Carlson asks what an archaeologist arriving thousands of years later would find to indicate that a complex civilization had existed there. The answer he arrives at is nothing. The flood would pulverize everything - reducing buildings, infrastructure, and all the physical evidence of organized urban life to rubble, rocks, sand, and gravel. The signature of civilization would be indistinguishable from the geological background noise of the landscape.

The observation Randall builds from that point is one that reframes something hiding in plain sight. Look at what modern civilization builds with - concrete. The main constituents of that concrete are lime and gravel. Lime comes from limestone - rock that accumulated on ocean floors over geological time. Gravel is the pulverized rock left over from catastrophic geological events. Every gravel pit Randall has examined tells the same story. The material humanity uses to construct its cities today is the processed and reconstituted rubble of previous catastrophes - possibly including the catastrophes that destroyed the civilizations that preceded us. We are building the next chapter of human civilization out of the physical remains of chapters that were violently closed before we arrived.