on py8765
Iron corrodes, concrete crumbles, wood and paper decay. Still, some of what man built on earth remains. The most colossal of our stone structures like the Great Wall of China had aged like mountains, subject to erosion, but at such slow time scales, they will still be recognizable in some form/s/ for *. The great pyramid Giza is so massive that it lasts long enough to be swallowed up by the desert sands. The Hover Dam built to be as tough as the canyon walls around it, is the one of last man-made structures still standing. But now, thousands of years in the future, earth is about to be visited by the last of the great collapses.
It’s the environment that eventually wins. Earthquakes, sand storms, rain. But there are a few exceptions; I would have to say the Mount Rushmore, carved out of solid granite in an ecologically stable place. The only enemy it has is wind-driven plaids of rain. I think that not Rushmore, maybe around a hundred thousand years, possibly two hundred , possibly even in time to be looked at in all, by the earliest of our replacements.
And who or what might those replacements be. Perhaps chimpanzees might somehow make the leap.
But we have to consider this, some scientists believe that it is easy for nature to bring animals up to a cleverer level, where they might use tools, they might become the master of their environment. But the leap to being able to stare at the sky and imagine, a cosmoses, to be able to contemplate yourself, to be able to contemplate your own grow in the earth. This maybe a leap that was a sheer accident for humanity. In which case, you’re not talking about a complete recovering; you’re talking about the planet that may continue, but nobody to talk about it, nobody to think about it.
If earth’s four and a half billion years of existence will condense into twenty four hours, the passage of ten thousand years will be a fraction of a second. Man’s time on the planet so far, would be about half a minute long. So like an abandoned village on a global scale, the earth will move on without us. There was life before people; there will be life after people.