100,000,000 Years From Now
For hundreds of years before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, American cultures like the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas flourished. Millions of people lived in sprawling cities full of sophisticated culture and technology. Yet today, just centuries after the last of these empires disappeared, we’re left with just a few traces of their time on Earth. Wait a few centuries more, and even less will remain. How can so much rich history just vanish?
Mainly because, for many reasons, these cultures were built out of stone and cloth rather than metal and glass. Fast forward a hundred thousand years or even a few million, and it’s not unlikely that the nearly all of humanity’s pre-industrial history, from Egypt to China to Europe to the Americas, will be invisible to future geologists for the same reasons. Soft stuff, ground to dust, just another rock.
But it will be different for us. Thanks to modern technology, we are the richest, healthiest, most comfortable, most mobile, most well-fed, and perhaps one of the most deadly species to ever live on this planet. As a result, the past 150 years or so have also reshaped our planet in some extreme ways, leaving impacts so deep and so transformative that future geologists, were they to analyze the layers of Earth’s crust, would see the beginning of a new geological epoch right around the time that you and I are alive: The Anthropocene.
Over the past few years, scientists have been arguing whether the Anthropocene is a real thing, or how big of a mark it will leave on a future Earth. But new research, released last month, has taken stock of humanity’s 20th century impact and declared that the Anthropocene is definitely real, and it will be unmistakable to future geologists.
This week, we look at these impacts, from plastic manufacturing and livestock breeding to chemical pollution and nuclear weapons, and attempt to draw a picture of what future explorers might see, what footprint we will leave for them, and what story they might tell of us.
