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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Will our geostationary satellites still be there, say, 50 million years from now? The lunar landers probably will be, unless meteorites take out all the landing sites.

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They will be somewhere around Earth. But not on the orbits they are now. They won't be hard to spot.

I guess the most pressing evidence is that nobody used the fossil fuels before us (at least in large quantities), and a lot of it is from the time that plants first colonized the dry soil.

Maybe they found something better than fossil fuels and used it all up. Or were smarter about the impact to the climate would be if they burned it.

Or maybe there was a whole lot more fossil fuel in the past.

We have some very good explanations for the distribution of fossil fuels, with a lot of predictive power. They would all be trash of some thinking being decided to take some of it our.

But if some being had decided to take some of it, we could still have explanations that seemed good to us and that fit the distribution of what we found. And we would use the match between the theory and the actual distribution to confirm that the explanations were correct.

They would take the easy to extract fuels first. But it was still there, distributed the same way as the hard to extract stuff.

If somebody got it before us, they must have got very little of it.

My understanding is that I would expect there would be some left, albeit maybe more debris after their orbits slowly become more erratic (not as coordinated regarding other satellites) and collisions and failures occur.

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