Scientists have pieced together
a pretty clear picture
of what life was like on Earth
thousands, even millions of years ago.
But if you fast-forward
one million years from now,
would alien civilization be doing the same
to learn about us?
"Mom."
We're living in the Anthropocene epoch.
And in this historical period,
the human impact on the world around us
has been significant enough
to geologically alter it.
One hundred years from now,
it could be an era defined by ecological collapse
and mass extinction.
Big bummer, right?
Now, there’s no way for us to know how
or when our species may
take its final walk on our home planet.
A team of alien scientists
could find evidence of nuclear fallout,
climate change or maybe a massive asteroid that ended our existence.
Or maybe they’d even find us
already living on another planet.
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One million years from now,
you’d be an alien
on board a starship
that it's just entered into orbit around Earth.
"I can't tell if you're joking or not."
But, despite your best efforts to scan the planet below for intelligent life,
you’d find nothing.
Your trip down to the surface would be slightly delayed by
an ongoing supervolcanic eruption.
The planet would be blanketed in the darkness of ash.
You might even have to wait a few years for your alien crew
to clean it up before you could even land.
Finally, you'd get approval to visit Earth.
Down there you’d find everything to be barren and lifeless.
Storms, fires and earthquakes would have erased nearly
all signs of immediately visible life.
But your team of archaeologists and paleontologists would know that
if they wanted to find evidence of past civilizations,
they’d better start digging.
You’d be investigating what are called boundary layers.
These are geological signatures that
indicate a transition from one period to the next.
So you’d be looking for animal and plant fossils,
as well as changes in rock layers.
You could find a thin layer of clay
that marks the boundary to our Anthropocenic era.
The top layer would contain
not much more than small fossilized remains
of a few plant species.
The layer below would contain older rock.
But not only that,
there would be an abundance of diverse plant fossils.
This would be a breakthrough for your team
as they’d now confirm there was some form
of mass extinction period.
As you searched through this layer,
the nature of what happened to Earth over the past million years
would be revealed.
You’d discover an unnatural amount of carbon deposits
from fossil fuel emissions.
Evidence of global temperature changes.
And widespread chemical pollutants.
But the effects of climate change
may have reversed themselves
over the one million years humans have been absent.
If your team were to uncover the regions
where our coastal populations used to be,
you could excavate the remains of cities
relatively well-preserved in the sedimentary rock.
Imagine discovering the ancient subway tunnels
and sewers of New York.
But nothing you’d find would be in pristine condition.
Bricks would have gone from their characteristic red to gray.
And steel would have rusted and dissolved,
leaving only imprints in the soil.
Finally, you’d make the biggest discovery of all.
Fossilized human bones.
Just like the dinosaurs,
these too would most likely only be found encased in sedimentary rock.
Almost all the fossils of dinosaurs that we discover today
are from species that would have lived near lakes
or rivers that flooded.
Floods covered their remains in mud and silt very quickly.
And this prevented their bones from rotting.
The same would apply to Homo sapiens.
Your alien team would piece together the puzzle
that many of these human fossils
were the result
of catastrophic floods or tsunamis.
And based on how much these bones have fused with the rocks around them,
your team could start to assemble a timeline
of our unfortunate demise.
Usually, bones take decades to decompose.
If buried in a dry environment,
like a funeral casket,
they could last for one hundred years.
Mummified bones can survive thousands of years.
Finding any of these
would tell your team that the last humans to walk the Earth
weren’t all that far in the past.
But discovering only fossilized remains
would reveal our extinction point being
further back than you’d hoped.
There wouldn't be any samples of soft tissues,
like muscles.
Just rocks that used to be bones.
Oh, but you’d probably find fossilized plastic
in the layers of sedimentary rock too.
It’s not yet known how long
plastic waste needs
to decompose into organic matter.
It could take hundreds of years.
Maybe thousands.
Or as you and your crew could discover, millions.
What you’d keep your hopes up for would be
the real holy grail,
human DNA.
The oldest DNA samples found in our modern times
date back 800,000 years
and come from insects and plants.
But studies conclude that DNA
could take about 7 million years to disintegrate.
And eureka.
You’d find human DNA samples trapped in ice cores
in what was once Greenland.
Now, the big question would be,
what do you do with them?
Study human genetics for scientific purposes
or have a little fun?
One idea would be to clone these ancient humans.
You could even create some kind of Jurassic Park
filled with people.
Except it would be called Anthropocene Park.
And based on all that you’d put together about our tragic history,
there would be so many entertaining things to do
in this amusement park.
Maybe you could clone other animals
and play a game of mass extinction.
The winner would be the one who could
kill the most species in the shortest amount of time.
You could dig for hidden oil reserves.
Increase carbon emissions for fun
to watch icebergs melt.
Or how about a game of nuclear war?
Sadly though,
you and the other scientists
probably wouldn't be able to figure out
what life was like for humans
at the end of our civilization.
Unless you’d find some of our still-living descendants
that were born on the red planet next door.
But that’s a story for another WHAT IF.