do you ever wonder about the human species that's going to come after ours, what they're going to think about our ruins how they're going to react when they realise what all the satellite dishes were pointed at
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there's a kind of anthropic principle here: what are the odds that of all the intelligent civilisations to rule Earth, we were the first? not the tenth or hundredth?
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is it pure chance that we're the first, a one in a hundred chance? or is it that there is only ever one, at most
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do you ever worry that future centuries despise this one for what we took from them and left them with
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there is no intelligent life anywhere reachable across space from Earth. but across deep time, thousands of years away, there are people what is it like out there
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"1970-" is a four-chapter story set in a distant future on this timescale https://qntm.org/1970- it's a substory of my novel "Fine Structure" but it stands well alone
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Only one at most. We used up all the surface deposits of metals, useful minerals, and hydrocarbons. If we lose industrial society we won't be able to have another *bronze age*, let alone any of the developments past that. After the fall it's paleolithic forever.
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That's an interesting point, but most of those metals aren't lost — they're just transformed & moved around. A future society will mine our landfills for aluminum. But I don't know whether that society would be humans or corvids or something else 1 million years+ from now.
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We used all the fossil fuels. Nobody else gets to industrialize.
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