[dalacv]

I've often thought: "What if I bought a nice big piece of land somewhere, along with a digging machine and spent the rest of my days making a hole in the earth. That is my current thought on how to make the biggest, lasting impact on this earth.

[cr0sh]

Unfortunately, others have already done this - extracting great riches as they did so - and left their "mark" on the planet.

Of course, without looking it up, I couldn't tell you who they were, even though some of these "big holes" are right here in "my backyard" down in southern Arizona (about the best I can tell you is that they were mostly for copper mining and...yep).

Or - take this big hole; without looking it up, do you know who made it?

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/img/news/2017/08/06/30322996...

...got the owners a lot of diamonds, though.

Even so - they'll be just as forgotten.

[cableshaft]

Like the Cards Against Humanity people did a couple of years ago? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...

[adventured]

Dramatically overfill it with concrete - enough that it's wildly impractical to ever remove it - and put a giant stainless steel monolith in the middle.

Nature will rapidly disappear and or anonymize your earth hole, or someone will simply fill it in (just one person digging with industrial equipment will make a surprisingly modest dent in the earth in a lifetime). You need to make it obnoxiously unreasonable to bother getting rid of it.