It is wild that the longest living manmade structures have already been built. Satellites and space debris in stable orbits will be around for millions of years, way longer than anything could ever survive on earth
Yeah, but a change that drastic (like a minor planet collision) would basically remove the possibility of life on earth in any sense.
I'm speaking in like evolutionary epochs. Our satellites in deep orbit, like JWST, will remain in those orbits for hundreds of thousands to millions of years with little to no degradation (minus collisions with small debris).
So assuming that someone is the in millions of years and happens to look in those orbits, they'll find stuff we made millions of years before.
Before being able to park stuff in space, everything we made had to survive corrosive atmosphere, tectonic shifts, and corrosive rains. In space it can just kinda chill without ever having to deal with that.
They'd have to invent astro-archarology.
It is wild that the longest living manmade structures have already been built. Satellites and space debris in stable orbits will be around for millions of years, way longer than anything could ever survive on earth
The oldest known human footprints are 117,000 years old. The footprints on the moon from the Apollo missions should easily outlast that.
is that true though? couldn't something cause the earth's rotation to change and thus screw up orbits?
Yeah, but a change that drastic (like a minor planet collision) would basically remove the possibility of life on earth in any sense.
I'm speaking in like evolutionary epochs. Our satellites in deep orbit, like JWST, will remain in those orbits for hundreds of thousands to millions of years with little to no degradation (minus collisions with small debris).
So assuming that someone is the in millions of years and happens to look in those orbits, they'll find stuff we made millions of years before.
Before being able to park stuff in space, everything we made had to survive corrosive atmosphere, tectonic shifts, and corrosive rains. In space it can just kinda chill without ever having to deal with that.