[GolfPopper]

From author and druid John Michael Greer's essay, "The Next Ten Billion Years"[1],

"One hundred million years from now:

The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.

A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon."

1. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...

[gtowey]

Funny, as I was reading the original article, I was thinking that anything left on the moon would survive being recycled by plate tectonics.

It seems like reaching the moon isn't such a stretch for any technological civilization, so the lack of preexisting artifacts counts as pretty definitive for me.

[saidnooneever]

point at a spot on the moon which was not hit by an object, its not easy. very big things have hit it too.

additionally radiation is much more so decay is accelerated a lot? (might be wrong but i think so?)

[gtowey]

Are you saying that things on the moon are less likely to survive because of meteor impacts and radiation?

If so I think you misunderstood a few things. The earth is hit by far more meteors than the moon because of its stronger gravity well. You see the moon covered in craters not because it's hot more often, but because there is no erosion or plate tectonics to erase them. You see basically all the craters over a billion years on display.

Also, radiation doesn't just randomly destroy things. It's harmful to biology for sure, but a chunk of metal on the moon isn't going to be much affected by the level of radiation present. Like the craters, we would expect it to remain for a very long time. Radiation can make metals brittle, but without atmosphere it's unlikely to turn to dust unless someone were to go touch it.

[xg15]

What an amazing read! (and only slightly depressing)

Though I'm kind of disappointed the last section did not end with fusion power, stellar migration and artificial intelligence...