Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 165 million years, but all that remains of them are bones and footprints. And we? Well, we humans, despite our brief stay in the Anthropocene, will leave a much more visible and lasting trace: “technofossils”. From smartphones to polyester bras, from wind turbines to underground subway systems. Objects that, if buried in the right place, could survive until the Sun engulfs the Earth.
It is the fascinating and disturbing thesis of Sarah Gabbott e Jan Zalasiewicz, two professors from the University of Leicester who have just published a book (“Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy”) about our involuntary geological legacy. A legacy that tells of our successes as much as our excesses.
The first lasting sign of the Anthropocene: technofossils tougher than wood
There are objects that we are creating in the Anthropocene that demonstrate a truly astonishing resistance to time. Let's take plastic-like polymers: some green algae create compounds nearly identical to polyethylene, and we find them in rocks that are 48 million years old and largely intact. A cell phone, if buried quickly in the right environment (such as a landfill with plastic liners), has a good chance of fossilizing.
It makes me smile to think that my old man Nokia could be studied by some paleontologist of the future as we study an ammonite today. With one substantial difference: while biological fossils tell stories of evolutionary adaptation, our technofossils of the Anthropocene They will tell a story of compulsive accumulation, of overproduction, of continuous replacement of objects not out of necessity but out of unbridled consumerism.
We are creating things that will be more durable than the stuff that biology produces. By this reasoning, they will probably last a long time.
The second sign: rectangular silicon puzzles
A particularly intriguing aspect of the Anthropocene will be the interpretation that future paleontologists will give to our objects. As Gabbott observes, our smartphones are essentially indecipherable rectangles: what will they make of them? The complexity of these objects is unparalleled in the biological world, and the digital data they contain will probably be impossible to decode.
More irony: the society that has produced the greatest amount of information in human history risks being the one that will leave the least in an understandable form. Our cloud storage, even if they physically survived, would represent impenetrable black boxes. It occurs to me that perhaps a printed book (perhaps the one by Gabbott and Zalasiewicz, which I recommend you read) could prove more useful for understanding who we were than any hard disk.
These devices are just rectangles. They will ask, what is this? I did not realize how ephemeral our digital data can be.
The Third Sign: Monumental Underground Wonders
The third great sign of the Anthropocene will be the giant and surreal structures. Zalasiewicz describes abandoned wind turbines, as long as football fields, cut into pieces and stacked next to each other. A pattern that, fossilized, will appear on some future cliff like an incomprehensible hieroglyph. And then there are the underground parts of our cities: subways, pipes, electrical cables. Imagine the underground profile of Amsterdam or New Orleans outlined on the wall of a canyon.
I find this almost Lovecraftian vision of fossilized futuristic ruins fascinating. Our greatest engineering feats reduced to curious fossils in rock strata, studied by civilizations that may never truly understand what they were. Yet, as Zalasiewicz rightly notes, there is a disturbing connection between this distant future and our troubled present: our landfills, our underground waste, do not magically disappear, but become potential toxic fossils that could return to the surface after tens of millions of years.
When you think about what parts of a city are going to be preserved, it's all the underground parts: the subway systems, the electricity, the sewers.
Anthropocene: What Will Be Left?
The conclusion I draw from this talk about the Anthropocene? We are creating a geological legacy unprecedented in the history of the planet, a footprint that will tell about us much longer than any of our cultural achievements. And what it will tell, as Gabbott admits, is the story of “a species that produced things in enormous numbers, consuming resources without knowing the downstream consequences.”
A “spoon river” of incredible complexity. A geological epitaph that perhaps should make us reflect more often on the crucial question: do we really need another pair of sunglasses? Or another cell phone? Because, contrary to what we think, these things will never really disappear. We do, they don’t.
