Other species will have a really hard time following us, because our own playbook is no longer available.
Extraction of resources out of the ground is getting harder and harder. We’ve exhausted the easily extracted ore for iron/tin/copper mining, and modern mining of those materials requires much more sophisticated technology. So a Bronze Age and Iron Age can’t really come up from the ground up.
And without easily extracted fossil fuels providing cheap and abundant energy, industrialization would be a pretty difficult hurdle to overcome.
The best hopes of a post-human civilization will come from whatever species learns to recycle and reuse human waste.
And maybe the leftovers of human agriculture (any plant species that efficiently produce lots of biomass that don’t require active planting/tilling/irrigation/fertilization, whatever domesticated animals can survive as feral colonies) will have lasting effects, too.
We have left a lot of the metal we have mined easily accessible
Following intelligences would probably have trouble with energy. Our infrastructure will have failed, and we have used all the easy to get coal and oil
There may be enough left to teach them how to make a spinning generator and synchronous motor. I wonder how long the magnets will stay magnetic in permanent magnet motors
Other species will have a really hard time following us, because our own playbook is no longer available.
Extraction of resources out of the ground is getting harder and harder. We’ve exhausted the easily extracted ore for iron/tin/copper mining, and modern mining of those materials requires much more sophisticated technology. So a Bronze Age and Iron Age can’t really come up from the ground up.
And without easily extracted fossil fuels providing cheap and abundant energy, industrialization would be a pretty difficult hurdle to overcome.
The best hopes of a post-human civilization will come from whatever species learns to recycle and reuse human waste.
And maybe the leftovers of human agriculture (any plant species that efficiently produce lots of biomass that don’t require active planting/tilling/irrigation/fertilization, whatever domesticated animals can survive as feral colonies) will have lasting effects, too.
Landfills are the mining boom of the future.
All really good stuff is going to be in China.
Why would they need to mine ore when we just left all of it laying around?
We have left a lot of the metal we have mined easily accessible
Following intelligences would probably have trouble with energy. Our infrastructure will have failed, and we have used all the easy to get coal and oil
There may be enough left to teach them how to make a spinning generator and synchronous motor. I wonder how long the magnets will stay magnetic in permanent magnet motors