Things break down if not maintained

[Don]

A long time ago I saw this special on either the Learning Channel or the History channel about how if all human were to disappear from the face of the earth it'd take a relatively short time before all traces of civilization vanishes. Now I think one of these two channel might as well be the mother nature network anyway but what I just thought about the stuff they went over. For example they say your house will probably collapse on itself in 10 or so years if you just leave it alone, and a car sitting idle will probably be a heap of rust in 50 years. All the while there's this theme of 'human may think we are eternal but we're nothing before mother nature". But here's the thing, I'm trying to figure out how to get my car to not break down while trying to maintain it as best as I reasonably can, so it's not exactly news to be the this car will probably fall apart eventually if I just leave it out in the middle of nowhere for 50 years. I think even the most devoted humanist realizes that most of the stuff we take for granted in modern society breaks rather easily. I sure wish the stuff I use can give me the false illusion of never breaking.

[Anarky]

Chernobyl is a good example of this.

[Don]

Yeah Chernobyl was shown since that's one place you can see what happens when you just stop maintaining everything and obviously the houses collapse and whatnot.

But it should be obvious that since a very considerable amoutn of our effort goes into maintaining things that things indeed do break rather fast if you just stop upkeeping it.

At any rate I think the shows says most stuff eventually will get wiped away by a flood or an earthquake or some kind of natural disaster, which isn't exactly saying much if you ever look at what happens to a place getting hit hard by natural disaster.

[Eric]

Your subject title made me think of this.

[Don]

Actually that picture motivated me for this post. I mean you've a 'learning' special program tells you that if there's no one to put out say the fire things burn down, except it's pretty obvious things burn down even when we're trying to put out the fire.

Although that picture has some funky translation issues, it's not as crazy as it sounds because Shirou Emiya has like unkillability plus Absolute Existence which is a step above immortality, like you can go back in time and kill his father but he'll still exist despite creating a time paradox and of course he's totally unkillable although he wasn't aware of this at the time of that picture. Actually pretty much everyone important in the Fate universe has Absolute Existence to deal with the time traveling powers.

[Julius Seeker]

Some long dead civilizations have built things that stand the test of time:



Of course, given a geological time scale, a couple thousand years means very little. The real question is, will our civilization's buildings stand up to those of past civilizations?

[Don]

I think they pointed out the stuff that's most likely to survive without human upkeep would be stuff made out of stone or bronze because it's only corrosion you're dealing with, whereas almost all modern stuff pretty much falls apart without electricity and a whole mess of infrastructure. The show said Mt. Rushmore is most likely to survive the longest without any upkeep.

[Julius Seeker]

True, our structures are not made for longevity. If civilization were to end a thousand years from now, Roman roads would outlive almost all that we have built. The roads go over a meter deep, and have a bottom lair of rock; about 3 feet thick of gravel, and then other methods of drainage (I forget the details), and the top lair. These roads survive to this day, and some are in use today; our roads crumble very quickly - it's not that our engineers can't do it, it's just that the resources to do so would come a an immense cost compared to how we do things now; but if it is built to last, upkeep costs would certainly be lower.

[SineSwiper]

Your subject title made me think of this.

Funny. I had a similar thought.

Back on topic, there was a cool documentary series called "Life After People" that covered all of the things that would happen if humans just suddenly disappeared from Earth. It wasn't meant to speculate how it happened, just what happens to things, buildings, animals, plants, former pets, etc., after the humans are gone.

[SineSwiper]

True, our structures are not made for longevity. If civilization were to end a thousand years from now, Roman roads would outlive almost all that we have built.

Those roads depend on humans keeping things together around it. There's so much that could go wrong with even those roads in a 1000 years.