I’m laying awake, not able to figure this out.
If our civilization were to be left untouched for thousands of years then over time it’d get covered in dirt. Some future generation would have to “dig up” our civilization in the same way we dig up artifacts from the ancient past.
Where does that dirt come from? Is it floating around in the atmosphere? Or does it get created somehow (ie. organic matter decomposing)?
My understanding is that older artifacts are buried deeper, which may not be the correct understanding. But is there some relationship to dirt vs time?
So many questions.
In: 18
If your civilization isn’t being slowly buried, it’s being eroded. Wind and water work hard to break off bits of rocks and soil and manmade structures. That’s erosion, basically. So some places do get buried, but the rest will get eroded.
So why are all the sites where we dig up ancient civilizations the buried ones? Because the other ones got eroded away over time – they’re gone, scattered in a trillion little pieces downstream.
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