I see people think about what evidence for what we've built might exist after millions of years but I wonder if evidence of what we've destroyed might be more lasting? Just out of curiosity I wonder if in the future we will be able to rule out "natural" causes (such as volcanic activity/meteorites/gamma ray bursts etc) and find otherwise unexplainable mass extinctions.
Read the paper. The fossil record is very incomplete, only a handful of species are known from it compared to the abundance of variations that have ever existed. We have evidence of mass extinctions far greater than that caused by humans but there were many smaller scale ones among the background noise of normal extinction.
Right.. but that's why I said "in the future". I know there's little evidence and I commented elsewhere that this paper comes to the same conclusion as the Kurzgesagt vid. What I'm suggesting is with future tech we might get a better mapping of these extinctions and the identifiable causes if known. I'm not suggesting we will find fossils that just don't exist.. but maybe getting a better holistic view of each layer around the earth.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...