FTA: "The likelihood of objects surviving and being discovered is similarly unlikely. Zalasiewicz (2009)speculates about preservation of objects or their forms, but the current area of urbanization isless than 1% of the Earth’s surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drillingsites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface.Note that even for early human technology, complex objects are very rarely found. For instance,the Antikythera Mechanism (ca. 205 BCE) is a unique object until the Renaissance. Despiteimpressive recent gains in the ability to detect the wider impacts of civilization on landscapesand ecosystems (Kidwell, 2015), we conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4Ma, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples oftheir population is small. "
These people have clearly never been to the beach--any beach. The oceans are absolutely chock full of our garbage and it is being deposited not only on the ocean floor, but on every shoreline the world over, where much is ground up and still more silted over. Plastic trash wafts the world over. Everything from beer cans to glass bottles to cars to aircraft are strewn through the entire industrialized world, in forests, creeks, and backyards. We have landfills the size of small towns. There are thousands of shipwrecks all over the oceans. Bazillions of items will be fossilized and preserved, and the odds of stumbling over something just digging anywhere will be very high.
This article is completely full of shit. Humans have left their mark and our junk is going to be here, fossilized, for eternity. If we've discovered hundreds or thousands of fossilized dinosaurs from over 100 million years ago, when there might be only a few thousand such skeletons even to be found, there's a damn good bet that someone is going to find one of the tens of billions of beer cans or beer bottles that are lying around, even if only a tiny fraction survive the aeons.
You've provided a good argument that it's obvious _right now_ from our junk that we live here, but what of that do you expect to last, and how long? Pick a type of object or two and let's look into how they are expected to last and what they'll look like.
Fossilization isn't a universal process, there's no such thing as a fossilized beer can.
Anything corrosion resistant that ends up entombed in geologically stable strata will stick around. There will be lots of anamolous ceramic and glass mixed in with the fossilized human bones strewn about.
Sure they can, if surrounded by stable strata in the same way that dinosaur bones were. In fact, beer cans can bottles won't be broken down by natural biotic processes; they just need to be protected from erosive forces.
These people have clearly never been to the beach--any beach. The oceans are absolutely chock full of our garbage and it is being deposited not only on the ocean floor, but on every shoreline the world over, where much is ground up and still more silted over. Plastic trash wafts the world over. Everything from beer cans to glass bottles to cars to aircraft are strewn through the entire industrialized world, in forests, creeks, and backyards. We have landfills the size of small towns. There are thousands of shipwrecks all over the oceans. Bazillions of items will be fossilized and preserved, and the odds of stumbling over something just digging anywhere will be very high.
This article is completely full of shit. Humans have left their mark and our junk is going to be here, fossilized, for eternity. If we've discovered hundreds or thousands of fossilized dinosaurs from over 100 million years ago, when there might be only a few thousand such skeletons even to be found, there's a damn good bet that someone is going to find one of the tens of billions of beer cans or beer bottles that are lying around, even if only a tiny fraction survive the aeons.