[INTRO MUSIC] This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. [MUSIC] A curious group of explorers stumble upon
a planet. Their sensors pick up an interesting chemical profile.
Large amounts of water. Temperatures moderate enough to keep most
of it liquid. An atmosphere containing higher than expected
levels of oxygen. The land is oddly green.
It’s an abnormal place, worth investigating. This planet’s name… is Earth. These explorers will find an Earth teeming
with life, but in our story, Homo sapiens is not among them.
Maybe we’ve moved on. Maybe we’ve died out. But this planet is no longer ours.
The strange plants and animals, although our explorers wouldn’t call them that, can only
tell how this planet IS, not how it WAS But they have knowledge of geology, they understand
the strata of rocky planets. And where they examine layers of rock, stacked
one on top of another, they will be able to piece together our story. Consider what we know about the dinosaurs. They existed for more than a hundred million
years, yet we have only uncovered a few thousand complete remains.
Our species has been around just a fraction of that time.
But despite this relatively short existence, we’ve left a huge mark, and today, scientists
are more certain than ever: we’ve changed Earth to such an extent that geologists digging
in the distant future would classify this as a totally new epoch. The Anthropocene. But when would it begin?
What would they find there? The rise of farming, countless empires, most
of human history’s timespan in fact, would be almost invisible in the rock. But they’d
notice us. During the Industrial Revolution our species
numbered 1 billion for the first time, accelerating until around 1950, when population growth
and human consumption explode. The Great Acceleration. This era of unprecedented economic change
and consumption would be unmistakable in the rocks. Our waste contains materials never before
seen on Earth. I want to say one word to you. Just one word:
Plastics. Every year, we pump out a mass of plastic
equal to the weight of all humans on Earth. And not just plastics, also glass and bricks.
Although they’re made from raw minerals, they’re modified by heat into forms both
long-lasting and notably organized. Consider aluminum, it was essentially unknown
in its pure elemental form before the 19th century, yet since 1950 we’ve produced enough
for every human alive to make a stack of cans half a kilometer high. Enough concrete has been produced to pave
all of earth, and half of that since just 1995. All of this stuff would mark the most new
minerals created since oxygen first built up in our atmosphere, 2.4 billion years before
you are watching this video. And beyond these raw materials would be traces
of the things we’ve made with them. Our technofossils. From planes and phones to paper
clips and lost ballpoint pens, countless confusing traces of our time. And should these future explorers be versed
in chemistry, they’d find metals and rare-earth elements spread worldwide, and strangely missing
from the lower layers where we dug them up. A few, like platinum, rhodium, and palladium
would be strangely concentrated along strands of a strange web, ejected long ago by catalytic
converters… attached to cars on our roads. They’d see huge spikes in nitrogen and phosphorous
from fertilizer production. Were they to find ice on this future Earth,
ice cores would show sudden spikes in methane and carbon dioxide, like nothing seen in the
800,000 years previous. If they found fossils, they would see many
species go from local concentrations in older layers to sudden global spread, marks of our
domestic animals, plants, and invasive species. And like we have witnessed in our own time,
these future explorers would see a spike in the number of species that suddenly disappear
from the fossil record: A Mass Extinction Event. We’ve talked about this at length
in a previous video… and we don’t yet know how bad it will get. But as they decoded the dawn of the Anthropocene,
there would be one mark clearer than all the others, tracing back to a single day in Earth’s
history. July 16, 1945… the detonation of the first
atomic bomb. Rare radioactive elements like 239Pu and its decay products would leave a
chemical signature that our future explorers could not help but notice, although they might
not be able to explain its origins. It makes you wonder, what would they think
of us? What picture of our species, of our culture, would they connect from these dots?
Whoever it may be that one day examines the Anthropocene, the layer of Earth that will
represent us, remember that we control what it holds, and how much time it will represent. Stay curious.
It would be pretty cool if some humans left earth, found another suitable far away planet to live on, and advanced in science while the humans on Earth died out. After hundreds of thousands of years, the neo-humans find Earth again, not knowing it was their home long ago. It would also be pretty cool if two groups of humans were to separate and see each other again until hundreds of thousands of years. I wonder how that would go down. I don't even know if we'd still call each other human anymore because of evolution. Man, it sucks knowing I'm gonna die before I find any of this out.
Nonsense. Holy Terra and the rest of the galaxy have always, and will always, belong to humanity.
How thick would the goddamned concrete be if you paved the entire earth?
It hurts to live in the present.
we are just an elaborate parasite.
This is weird. When I got out of my Geology lab today and I was walking to my apartment I was wondering what people in the future would think when they saw our layer in the earth.
So us humans are basically just another mass extinction event? Different tactic but same outcome as a meteorite?
Made me think of this insight from George Carlin
squid people will learn from our mistakes.