That’s about it, see ya.
At least they didn’t leave us with microplastics and significant carbon emissions…
Nuclear waste will outlive everything in the present. Plastics and CO2 are pressing against deep time, but nuclear waste is already there. In as much time as has past in the Holocene, nuclear can laugh that off as a blink of an eye.
Uranium is already there, naturally. Nuclear waste is only uranium/plutonium/whatever, slowly decaying into lead. That’s gonna happen regardless.
The only catch is that humans have mined and purified the stuff into dangerous levels of concentration, and for whatever stupid reason, don’t seem to have any practical method of recycling the usable nuclear materials from the nuclear waste humans have already made.
Then again, I guess similar can be said about plastics. Why the hell is it that humans can purify raw rocks, dirt and oil into usable stuff, but can’t be bothered to recycle/re-process the already previously purified stuff we throw away?
Why can’t we just mine our landfills for minerals and materials?
We haven’t escaped the stone age yet. We are totally unsustainable in the very long term in everything humans do. The answer is everywhere around us. The ultimate technology is biology. Once we have a complete scientific understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, we will be able to engineer almost everything within the elemental cycles balance of the environment just like how nature and evolution find balance states. Humans still have only barely scratched the surface of biology and harnessing it as a technology. The era of biotech will make the waste and pollution of the industrial era look like the atrocity of which we are only beginning to awaken. Almost all industrial era resources have total available lifespans of less than 100k years. Nothing about present technology can exist beyond that. Once you move to space based infrastructure, cyclical balance of all life becomes critical.
It is one of our biggest cultural blind spots. We fail to see our place in the timeline and the enormous expanse and potential ahead, assuming we survive. The present is not some relevant end point or modernity. This is the stone age of silicon and not even a relevant blip at that.
To be fair, our evolutionary roots were pretty poor teachers. Nature is teeming with animals that will move from place to place, leaving litter and feces everywhere for some other life-form to clean it up. It just so happens that when this practice becomes unsustainable (e.g. due to shrinking habitats, competition, lack of resources or overpopulation), these populations die out or migrate elsewhere.
Depends on the scale. The ecosystems of today are much more complex than the age of the dinosaurs, so it is growing in complexity in deep time and not just a 1:1 replacement.
Shelley did it better.
