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Image created by DALL-E: A futuristic geologist analyzing a soil core sample.
I found myself wondering—what if humans disappeared from Earth today? What if, a million years later, someone, maybe a geologist from another civilization or a future species 👽, visited and took a soil core sample? What would they find? How much of our existence would still be visible?
Would my clothes, my books, my phone—everything I’ve ever owned—leave a mark? Would the cities we built, the roads we paved, the billions of lives lived, still be detectable beneath layers of sediment? Or would time reduce us to nothing more than a faint chemical trace?
So, what would be my (our) material footprint? In 2017, high-income countries had the largest footprint at 27 tonnes per person, which was 60% higher than upper-middle-income countries (17 tonnes) and 13 times that of low-income countries (2 tonnes). High-income nations consume more materials than they extract, relying on 9.8 metric tons per person from other countries through international supply chains.
So how long does it take for anthropogenic materials to decay? Organic matter—food, wood, paper—decays quickly, vanishing within years or decades. Metals, like aluminum cans, take centuries. Plastics linger for thousands of years. And glass? It could remain for a million years, maybe longer.
But even the things that persist won’t stay as they are. Rust, erosion, compression—nature will reclaim everything. In a million year, if our hypothetical geologist drilled into what was once a city, they might find a thin, scattered layer of microplastics, traces of unusual chemicals, and maybe fragments of concrete or metal. Beyond that? Mostly dust. ⛏️
It’s humbling. The weight of a lifetime—of every choice, every object we accumulate—ultimately would crumble into near invisibility. And yet, in the short term, our choices matter immensely. The things we create, consume, and discard shape the world today, even if possibly time will eventually erase us.
So, what do we leave behind? And more importantly, what do we do while we’re here?
Here is the very amateur haiku I wrote after pondering on these matters. Don’t judge me hard.
life weighs on shoulders
yet, it crumbles, fades, lost, gone
yet, not meaningless
This blog post in BlueSky
I found myself wondering—what if humans disappeared from Earth today? What if, a million years later, someone, maybe a geologist from another civilization or a future species 👽, visited and took a soil core sample? What would they find? How much of our existence would still be visible? (1/3)
— nat-arslan.bsky.social (@nat-arslan.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 12:23 AM
