The Earth Day Special

[hounddoghowlie]

If civilization fell ... in a thousand years ... there'd be little to nothing left.  Megaliths (that would likely include your mines) tend to stay.  Probably our nuclear waste will too, unless we find a way to give it back to the Earth's core.  Kind'a wonder about the micro-plastics issue too.

 True, any thing that wouldn't rot, deteriorate in a few years would be incorporated back into nature somehow. Like the cities that have been swallowed up in south and central america by the jungle, before lidar you could be walking in the middle of one and never know it.

My mind always goes to concrete.  Ours doesn't last anywhere near as long as the stuff the Romans built their aqueducts with.

So, I guess there would be deposits of the stuff thousands of years from now, but would anyone from a follow-on civilization be able to deduce what they once were.

I've thought about concrete myself, it's not unusual to be digging in the yard and find some or get a load of fill dirt that had big chunks of it in it.
Another thing I thought about is land fills. The county I live in when we first moved the farm here landfill, you used to have to drive down into the pit that was about 75 foot deep, that was 50 years ago. Now you have to drive around a a trash mountain that I'd say is least 150 200 foot tall.

Some trash depending on how it is compacted takes for ever to deteriorate, and some never does.glass, some metals, plastics, hell on the farm we use to find trash dumps of old bottles and coffee cans and even had some paper you could still read the writing on. We knew that the family that owned the 500 acres use to dump trash in several spots and it was three generations that lived on it.