A million years from now, a collection of mysterious artifacts would remain to puzzle whatever alien beings might stumble upon them: the flooded tunnel under the English Channel; bank vaults full of mildewed money; obelisks warning of buried atomic waste (as current law requires) in seven long-obsolete human languages, with pictures. The faces on Mount Rushmore might provoke Ozymandian wonder for about 7.2 million more years. (Lincoln would probably fare better on the pre-1982 penny, cast in durable bronze.)
Reminds me of the mysterious disappearance of the Krell in Forbidden Planet (1956). To take another example, suppose there was a species of dinosaur that developed every capability that humans now have, and over an equivalent period of time. Suppose further that it was completely wiped out with the rest of the dinosaurs. If that was 64 to 66 million years ago, would there be any trace of their civilization to find today?
If not, that suggests so many alternative scenarios to the natural disaster hypotheses, at least for the movie version: dinosaur nuclear war; dinosaur nuclear war with Mars (the Martians got the worst of that one); dinosaur genetic engineering lab mishap; dinosaur global warming. But if there's nothing else to find, a Charlton Hestonosaur would have his epiphany at a museum of natural history, or maybe at a Sinclair station.
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