Friday, May 15, 2009

Without Humans: Most traces of civilization gone in 200 years

My son was fascinated by a program he was watching that showed that most signs of any civilization would be almost completely gone within 200 years of people free wear and tear by the elements. Grass breaks up cement and asphalt that is built on ground that grass and wild oats and little trees could break through. Wood rots after birds fly through windows by accident and break them. Wooden sidings begin to deteriorate without being painted. All metals rust slowly or quickly, with the exception of stainless steel.

So, literally everything mostly would be gone or collapse into disuse and ruin within 200 years except for things made out of stone like the pyramids, that don't rust or rot or are so far into a barren desert that nothing can grow there much to break up rock, or cement or asphalt. And even there sand might cover up whole cities for thousands of years at a time.

So, literally, if we were gone, within 500 years there would be almost nothing left for anyone to find of our having been here. This lends more to the possibility that there could have been many civilizations like ours on earth in the past in prehistory that existed thousands of years before history was invented.

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