When our species has become extinct, is there anything that would survive long enough to tell the next intelligent species to arise that we were a technological civilization? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by Crackhappy@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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[-] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 9 months ago

I've heard that our nuclear impact will be seen for a very very long time from all the nuclear testing we did

And plastics

And our fertilizers

[-] chaogomu@kbin.social 20 points 9 months ago

A sharp increase in Carbon-14 would be visible for a few thousand years.

The rest of the elements released by nuclear testing? Not so much. Cs-137, and Sr-90 both have half lives of about 30 years. That means that after about 300 years, they're both completely decayed into their daughter products.

Now, Cs-137 decays into Ba-137, which is stable. It's also naturally occurring as about 11% of all Barium.

Sr-90 decays to Yt-90, spends a few days as such and then decays to Zr-90, another naturally occurring isotope. Zr-90 is a bit over 50% of all naturally occurring Zirconium.

[-] fidodo@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

You're thinking on the scale of thousands of years, you need to think on the scale of millions

this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024

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