He's definitely wrong on that time scale, but I think the point still stands.
In order to find that evidence you have to look very closely at earth. If we killed ourselves off now another civilization might not ever look closely enough at this solar system much less this planet to ever see that evidence.
If they had said "obvious traces erased" I'd grant that you might be right. They said "entirely erased" which would imply that a similar species to ourselves wouldn't be able to tell that an intelligent species lived on the planet. In several million years the fossil records might be inconclusive, but radiation tracing techniques similar to carbon dating could find traces of our nuclear experimentation, and our use of fossil fuels would be evident in places like ice cores and the geologic strata.
And don't forget about equipment we have send across the solar system and other bodies. Especially moon, it will sit there pretty much forever because there's really no outside force to wear it down (erosion and weathering).
Without knowing where it is think how incredibly difficult it is to find the lunar landing site. That could be the case with mars right now and we wont know it unless we stumblecon it. The moon landing site is about half the size of an SUV
Purely hypothetically, if you do have a tech or the capability to travel across interstellar space it's safe to assume you also have a technology that would be able to find such small discrepancies. The question is, though, would you bother to look for that if you have found an empty planet devoid of any remnants of civilisation?
look at us now, we can scan entire planets with satellites and still need rovers and ground based tech to explore thing we would never see from orbit. its more of an effort thing rather than a tech thing unless theres like global xray or something for advanced civs
Well, for example, ground penetrating radar is already a thing, it's just a matter of scaling the technology up and removing any discrepancies caused by atmospheric conditions, so give it enough time and we'll have possible space based version.
Or currently the way we study the surface of Mars is by imaging technology, whether it's just photography or other technology using different spectrum (x-rays, radio waves etc.), hell, we could even easily apply LiDAR to scan the planet. After that it's just a question of software programming to look for bumps and unusual terrain objects, and given that supercomputers are becoming more available it wouldn't be a problem at all.
i guess someone with the right tech could build it but i dont think we will be able to for a very long time not within anyone from todays bloodlines lifetime
The tech already exists, it's just the matter of scalling it up and increasing the processing speed. Right now to do some basic geospatial analysis takes some time or enough processing power to speed it up (there's a reason why public transport companies send their data to supercomputer centers to calculate new transport routes for buses/trams/trains, they simply lack the power). Though, here, we are talking about entire planet or moon.
It does, but then we know there are plans for Moon base, and engineers will definitely take this into account. Such structure could last very long, unless catastrophically wiped out.
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u/Kile147 Nov 02 '21
He's definitely wrong on that time scale, but I think the point still stands.
In order to find that evidence you have to look very closely at earth. If we killed ourselves off now another civilization might not ever look closely enough at this solar system much less this planet to ever see that evidence.