Um... what exactly stays with time we can discern?

[vonboy]

If you read any of Chronicler's/Karkovice's collaborative stories having to do with the Rainbowfaces. It basically boils down that the rainbowfaces actually had a human/like modern day society going about 10,000 years or so before the events of the LBT Movies and stuff.

They left the planet, for reasons you can read the stories for, but the main thing I'm getting at here is that in the fanfiction, there is little to NO evidence now of their being a modern day society in LBT, and this actually makes a lot of sense.

Really anything manmade breaks down pretty quickly, when you think about centuries and milleniea. Any kind of metel will pretty much turn into an unrecognizable pile of rusty dust.  (except like aluminum and a few other metal I think? How long do those last?) Plastics will EVENTUALLY break down, though I think it can take a similar amount of time. Anything made out of wood will basically waste away to nothing, unless it's preserved in just the right way.

Really, the things we have to look at human society from the order of magnitude of thousands of years ago is pottery, and marks left in stone, and skeletons and stuff. Things that survive longer survived in very dry areas, with little to no water to corrode things.

Also, when you really think about it, any kind of fossils that are old enough are really just rocks, with any substance that made up the bone, like calcium, replaced with other minerals and things. How far back can you even carbon date any kind of fossilized tissue?

even DNA itself has an experiation date. Even under the best circumstances, DNA will break down into something unrecognizable in a few million years. It's the reason any usable dinosaur DNA has never been found. It's pretty much all broken down by now beyond any useful way to recreate it in any way to make new dinosaurs.

So, I'm just asking this question, and maybe Pangaea or Chronicler could chime in, or anyone else with some knowledge in the subject. What exactly would remain after the dinosaurs, 60 million or so years ago?

If, for example, some dinosaur wearing a complete suit of metal armor died 60 million years ago, will anything remain of the metal to let us now that that fossile of the dinosaur actually wore a full metal suit? Would you like, have to examine the rock around the fossile for remnants of the oxidized form of the metal? How do you know that it used to be in the form of actual sheets of metal? Is this just a stupid question?

What would be left that's detectable?

I know this is a very... complicate subject, but it sounds like something interesting to discuss, hypothetically, of course.

[Ducky123]

That's a good question that cannot be aswered with just a "yes" or a "no"
I don't think that any species of dinosaurs had a human-like interligence.Even if it were so there won't be fossils of what they created(a suit of metal armor would have been useful 65Million years ago )I'm not sure what materials would survive such a long time.I've read a book,where an experiment failed, so there was a small strip of jungle(plus dinos ) beamed from the past to the present.This was going further and further until Las Vegas was completely beamed into past(and some people who can't be evacuated in time).Anyway a archeologist finds a message from the past conserved in Amber^^
Later he was beamed into past voluntary because someone whose family died from a dino attack beamed a bottle full of gas,which makes every species of dinosaurs infertile...
Anyway he solved his mission and BTW he stopped the beaming by destroying the machine used for the experiment and he died(the funny thing was that he writes the message himself )
So I'd say Amber would survive long periods of time
But as you say...very hypothetical

[DarkHououmon]

Palaeontologists do not rely so much on carbon dating fossils. Carbon dating is only good for...I think a few thousand years or so. For dinosaur fossils, they use argon dating instead, which is much more accurate. Carbon isn't even present in fossils that old I believe. Plus carbon dating can be very wrong too, resulting in a fossil maybe a thousand years old being millions. That's why palaeontologists don't really use it for dating fossils. Argon is more reliable and would still be present in fossils that old.

[vonboy]

I took a Geology class in college about a year ago, so I got to learn some things about that field that's quite interesting having to do with this.

Stuff like different ways rocks form, how they might originally form from magma deep under the earth that rises, and eventually cools enough. how rocks change, break down, mix, get changde when water goes through them, get's smushed back down to sedimentary rock. How all kinds of organic matter can be preserved in a way, where the carbon in them still stays intact, and gets smushed down in time into some kind of oil, or seeps into oil shale, like under the ocean

Also, basically, tons of stuff exposed to oxygen in a way always changes in some way. Oxygen just loves to react with tons of stuff under the sun in some way or another.

Theres a documentary or something I saw several years ago, Chronicler remembers seeing it too, though we might have seen two different documentaries, because they kinda covered some different stuff.

The one I saw asked the question "What would happen to the world after we left it?" And basically went into how fast everything we've ever build will break down once we aren't around to upkeep them anymore. Concrete is **** at staying together for more than a few decades. It will always wear down into basically rock and sediment. Buildings will eventually just fall down from fundamentally breaking down, and just slowly break down into sediment, really.

Stuff will get covered up over the years by dead over growth of plants and trees that will basically take everything over. A city will basically turn into a real-life urban jungle after a few decades, buildings and everything slowly break down, and get covered by just dirt and organic material, which helps break it down even faster.

It's basically the idea that EVERYTHING basically turns to dust at some point.

Funnily enough, the last REMNANTS of humans will be things like the pyramids in Egypt. Sure, they will get covered up by sand, but since it's so dry there, with no water or really anything growing in the sands. Basically, the stone structures will stay intact for a hellova long time, just waiting for anything to dig them up and find them again.

I still don't know where this leaves me with the dinosaurs question though, there's so much we probably CAN'T ever find out about them, like Pangaea spoke of before, just because of how old their remains are, and whats actually left to study. If there's nothing much left to study, then, ugh.

[DarkHououmon]

True we might not learn everything about the prehistoric past, but that never really bothered me. We can still learn a lot based on what we can find. Plus, not knowing everything does invoke a sense of wonder and excitement, to try to learn new things or understand things we already know.

[jansenov]

What would remain of a dionsaur civilisation that existed 65 million years ago? It depends on how advanced they were. For anything below industrial level of development, almost nothing would remain. A pre-industrial civilisation uses mainly organic matter, earth and rock for its tools and buildings, and those can't be recognized after millions of years. The only hope in that case would be to stumble upon a perfectly preserved group of fossils showing an unusual age distribution (groups of animals raised for food die at different ages compared to groups of wild animals), or signs of butchering. Another chance would be to stumble upon a lump of metal oxides that sticks like a sore thumb from the rest of the area. That would indicate a former stash of metal tools. But like I said, the very nature of organic matter, and the tiny amounts of metal a pre-industrial civilisation uses don't offer any hope that such things could be ever be discovered.

Industrial civilisations are a wholly different matter. They have enormous amounts of energy available and they can produce enormous amounts of metals. An industrial civilisation would leave behind an unusual distribution of fossil fuel deposits as well as unusual distributions of metal compounds.  Specifically, ore deposits follow the Pareto distribution which describes a lot of phenomena, from the distribution of wealth in society to sizes of meteorites. An industrial civilisation will go after the easiest deposits (which are also usually the largest), and will concentrate billions of tons of metal in large cities, eliminating the giant deposits and creating artificial deposits (chemically altered remnants of buried megalopolises) of smaller size and greater number, not to mention with unusually high amounts of copper (wires), uranium (natural uranium that isn't used in powerplants and so is left lying in large dumps), thorium (in ash left after buring coal, which contains large amounts of it), neodymium (a very rare metal that is concentrated in wind turbines) and indium (a very rare metal that is concentrated in chips and solar panels),  completely skewing the Pareto distribution.

A mathematically litterate civilisation would easily discover an industrial civilisation that existed millions of years ago. A space-faring civilisation would leave even more spectacular remains, like satellites in stable orbits and equipment on the Moon and other celestial bodies, which would remain unaltered for millions or billions of years. However, it would take a new industrial civilisation to have the requisite tools to make discoveries of such small objects in space.

A civilisation that has transcended fossil fuels, and went completely solar and/or nuclear, would command such amounts of energy that would leave even greater marks on the Earth and in space, that even a more primitive civilisation would be able to discover it. However, in this case the problem would be to devise a type of disaster that would destroy such a powerful civilisation and yet spare the more primitive lifeforms on Earth from which the new civilisation would evolve.

[StrutEggStealer]

I remember reading something like this. The rainbowfaces were really like the crew of the USS Enterprise, or whatever the name of the Star Trek ship is you can proabbly tell I'm not a Trekkie...
but the story went on with the retelling of the Gang's ancestors, or, probably... I suppose, future denizens? It was confusing the way it was described, but what I gleaned from it was that each member of the Gang was related to an important saurian from various eras during history. The American Revolution was one, then the Civil War, with the slave train was another.