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by psychoslave 116 days ago
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
2 comments
throwup238 116 days ago
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth

The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?

Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production (the fossils are ancient but we produce nearly a million tons a year in diatomaceous earth).

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TurdF3rguson 116 days ago
> is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil

No, but a fossil of a shark tooth counts as a fossil..

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throwup238 115 days ago
What does that mean though? Shark teeth are already mineralized (fluorapatite) so you can find two million year old Megalodon teeth at the Earnst Quarry in Bakersfield that exist just as they did in the mouth of the shark without any extra “fossilization”
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TurdF3rguson 113 days ago
Hmm, my understanding is that fossil refers to the impression of the original object not the object itself.
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hnlmorg 116 days ago
If you have a fossil, and break it in half, then do you now have two fossils?
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bubblewand 116 days ago
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)

Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.

It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.

The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).

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