> despite saying they're "harmful", they've been everywhere for all these decades that a lot of other measures of quality of life have been increasing?
Might be unrelated (or not), but cancer rates have been exploding the last decades. Example via Google-Fu:
> Cancer cases in under-50s worldwide up nearly 80% in three decades, study finds
>cancer rates have been exploding the last decades
For reasons that are really quite well-understood. PFASs are not known to be significantly carcinogenic, particularly not at the miniscule levels most people are exposed to. We willingly fill ourselves with things that are definitely very carcinogenic - processed meat, alcohol, tobacco smoke, diesel fumes, etc etc ad nauseum.
Exposure to some of these carcinogens has been static or declining in some western countries, which has led to static or declining age-adjusted cancer incidence rates. They have vastly increased in the middle-income countries that are home to most of the world's population. The life of the average Chinese or Indian person has been transformed beyond all recognition in recent decades (for better and for worse) by urbanisation and industrialisation.
There isn't some unseen and unrecognised carcinogen that is sweeping the world and wreaking havoc; the global poor are just getting rich enough to develop the kind of lifestyle-related cancers that we're accustomed to in the west, while also getting rich enough to be diagnosed rather than just getting sick and dying.
Look at the source cited by that article - the growth in cancer rates is completely dominated by rapidly-growing economies in the global south.
And just as importantly, is it controlled for changes in diagnostic criteria, improvements in testing and pre-screening? In the past decades, we got better at classifying and discriminating between cancers and other illnesses and causes of death.
We have fossils from the Cambrian period ~500 million years ago that include many traces of holes from burrowing animals. We've identified animals from ~500 million leaving many different kinds of traces as well as from fossils. 500 million years from now humans will have left many remaining traces. While older fossils are rare and precious, there's no generalized entropy that just destroys all old things (until there's a supernova/mega-meteor/etc., eventually the planet will be gone with enough time). In the right conditions much can be preserved for hundreds of millions of years. Many human artifacts like gold and other inert metal tools will be around besides the many physical changes we've made across the surface of the Earth.
There is one constantly happening thing that wipes the slate clean - tectonic plates movement. You can be lucky with a spot that doesn't disappear into Earth's mantle, there are few spots like that on Earth, but its not granted.
While it is true that over deep time less and less survives due to subduction not all areas do, and human activity covers vast surfaces now leaving many artifacts and traces. You should also consider that we do have fossils from > 3 billion years ago. Certainly not everything will survive but there’s no question some human traces will persist for hundreds of millions of years.
How do we even know those holes are 500m years old? You cannot carbon date a rock (that's when the rock formed, not when the hole was made). Perhaps we're missing evidence of earlier civilizations in plain sight
It’s well worth reading about this. The ways that scientist have determined these things are complex but easily discoverable on the Internet.
Also, while I was using hundreds of millions because that was the timeframe of the original question, the reality is that we actually have fossils that are more than 3 billion years old.
There's more. At the same time oil well holes are drilled many orders of magnitude deeper making them cross thousands of strata rather than being limited to a meter or two. Most oil drilling is in areas prone to subduction but there are areas in Canada where they're drilling over surface rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old. Those won't subduct soon and are far more discoverable than an animal burrow due to size. We've got around 1 million active oil wells in N. America, fewer than animal burrows, but in areas they'll be preserved in deep time and in sufficient numbers there's a reasonable chance of discovery.
Its a reasonable question - what human made artifacts would survive for hundreds of millions of years? Would concrete and steel buildings still be intact after hundreds of millions of years of erosion and weathering? Would objects in a 5 story deep basement be intact? Would even something we placed on the moon be visible after a 500 million years of micrometeorite impacts?
Erosion would happen, but also icebergs would wipe out anything like buildings during the next ice age. And eventually subduction would consume the existing earth’s surface into the inner molten layer, leaving behind zero trace, but that might take hundreds of millions of years.
Interesting! Thank you. So craton areas, say, near the equator where icebergs may not reach, could possibly contain remnants from indefinitely old civilizations?
Which exact artifacts do you have in mind that won't desintegrate in a few hundred million years? Pyramids won't last even one million and they're not among the most fragile products of human civilization.
You may have confused geology with archeology, they operate on completely different time scales.
Coins in the right conditions last two thousand years easily (I collect ancient coins, have some that are 2500 years old that are in excellent condition). I expect in the right conditions some would last a few hundred million years. There's plenty of other non-biodegradable, chemically inert, discoverable things like stainless steel tools, gold jewelry, and other artifacts that humans make that could easily persist for millions of years.
As soon as coins appear in a geologic stata they become the most common archaeological artifacts found from humans, and at this point we've got hundreds of billions of them spread all over the globe with many becoming lost in spots where even if they were submerged in water, they could easily still remain intact for hundreds of millions of years. Not all coins are inert, but many are, and many really are going to stick around millions of years. While volcanic heat and pressure can mangle inert metals, not many other natural processes will. There's no magical entropy that would cause inert artifacts in geologically stable areas that some coins would wind up in to just lose their form magically. In our world today there's a lot of stainless steel, gold, and other inert artifacts that are going to persist for hundreds of millions of years. It's not like there's volcanoes everywhere, nor do tectonic plates subsume everything - we've got Cambrian fossils after all...
Depends on the sort of water, I guess. Salty and oxygen-rich wouldn't be so good. I'll just leave the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism here for you to think about. That had ca. 2100 years +/-ca. 100 years of underwater seawater exposure, and look what it did to it.
What would only 10000 years more of that have done to it?
That's bronze. I'd assume any brass/bronze/copper to corrode away, that's what it does naturally. Now consider gold, stainless steel, and the many other inert materials humans work with. I assume 10,000 year old gold artifacts would look the same as the 5000 year old artifacts we know of which are very well preserved, and other similar materials would fare similarly.
A million is a mind bogglingly large number, especially in years. I honestly can not say eitherway if anything survives. Coins might end up as a lump of rock with slightly higher metal content than surroundngs.
It is a very long time, but we still do have a lot of fossils, and with many human artifacts they won't fossilize so much as just sit there in their strata - we make artifacts that don't even need to fossilize since they are already stable, chemically inert, and resistant to biodegrading or corrosion, and if they do corrode, then in the right conditions those would be a kind of fossil. Ancient life made left lot of traces and humans are currently leaving as many traces as any other species has ever left, and we're leaving artifacts and other traces spread all across the globe, even in the oceans. We have fossils from >3 billion years ago. Not everything subducts. There's existent areas of long term geology stability and those areas are as littered with human traces, artifacts, and other remains as anywhere else. I honestly can't imagine all traces of humanity being undiscoverable considering in 100 million years, in 400 million subduction and time will have erased a lot, but I'm pretty confident there would be quite a few discoverable traces if some future life form were to apply modern archaeological methods then, esp. given that the scale and scope of changes humans are making is massive and global. At the very least future paleontologists would see the effects of humans on their habitat in the fossil record of the ongoing mass extinction, but I expect much more would be discoverable than that.
There’s still a lot of room to hide in that “almost”. Continental shields in Canada and Australia haven’t been recycled into the deep Earth and we can still find geological features there that are billions of years old.
We have fossils that are > 3 billion years old. While subduction does steadily erase the past, not everything subducts. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craton
Hmmm, assuming there were an extra retro reflector on the moon, have we pointed a laser at enough of the moon to find it? At what rate would it acquire dust without wind?
> What they were not doing was sitting in a classroom for 6-8 hours a day listening to someone talk and then going home and sitting indoors for the rest of the day […]
That is not a new occurrence, though. It has largely been like this for a 100 years now.
A lot has changed in school in 100 years. Less recess, less shop classes, and the average kid 100 years ago finished school after 6th or 8th grade, not after 12th or even "16th" (college) as today. They also probably got more other physical activity from doing chores that are now more automated, from possibly helping with a family farm or small urban household business, and from walking to and from school and other errands instead of being driven in an automobile.
A modern kid basically has to be put into sports or else they'll get about as little physical activity as an invalid in traction in the hospital nowadays.
> Oh cool, something that wasn't a problem in the past now has a solution that can be bought through a variety of products and services.
Plastic additives and softeners have been linked to ADHD – and plastic is virtually omnipresent nowadays. ADHD presents differently in boys and girls. I wonder if there could be a relation.
A life-time membership costs 12 - 23 times more than the monthly subscription fee depending which package you choose. I'm not sure that paying a huge lump sum for a subscription I don't want is a good alternative to taking a monthly subscription that I don't want.
Generally agree with this, though they do frequent sales that bring the lifetime price down substantially. For myself, I thought that the bundled sequencing plus lifetime membership ($400) was fair just for the sequencing itself, so I didn't mind too much.
Well, perhaps have some basic knowledge of the topic at hand before oversimplifying the matter by simply paraphrasing "cui bono", effectively hinting at heinous Jewish scheming being the crux of the matter.
Might be unrelated (or not), but cancer rates have been exploding the last decades. Example via Google-Fu:
> Cancer cases in under-50s worldwide up nearly 80% in three decades, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/05/cancer-cases...