haven't read the paper, but how does "They conclude that no ruins of ancient football stadiums, highways or housing projects would survive geological time" square with the existence of fossils?
Broadly speaking, fossils are rare and we site our cities on river deltas and such which have bad conditions for them.
99.9999% of animals are extinct.
We had almost nothing, but a lot of it was inferrable.
We're assuming a technological civilization here, but without accidental geoengineering or even surviving artifacts. Flaked flint and pottery get everywhere.
It just doesn't seem likely to me. The arguments seem very "God of the gaps" in nature.
>The arguments seem very "God of the gaps" in nature.
Which is still a brief moment in time, compared to the timescales of the epoch proceeding.
If rapidly and anoxically deposited. Undersea landslides and volcanoes do that. Dredging operations may, too.
I think "rapid" might be a relative term (I'm thinking of the Mary Rose and the Vasa). When you get to the more durable artifacts that come with a technological civilization we really should be thinking in decades, maybe centuries.
The structural integrity of (comparatively) smaller fossils is much more likely to survive for 100s of millions of years. A large building will be eroded by roots, wind, acid rain, etc. A fist sized rock containing the imprint of a trilobite, buried in soil and safe from most elements, will easily survive for 100s of millions of years.
Or perhaps the author meant that the vast majority of our buildings are not built to last. An asphalt highway - if unmaintained - will be unrecognizable in a hundred years. Roman roads survived for a few 1000 years because of their very crude nature: they are just a pile of rocks. But even such structures will fall prey to soil erosion and the relentless assault of nature. Unless said roads see foot traffic, they'd be also quickly overrun by trees and grasses.
Earth's surface isn't very static. On a geological timescale it is constantly moving and churning.
The major part on a timescale seems to be over, though. When the Sun's increasing luminosity in 500-600 million years will evaporate the oceans, eventually plate tectonics will stop.[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
There are weird structures that we discovered and haven't yet made sense of as well.
The known unknowns in science vast outnumber the known knowns.
Do you mean biological structures? Or do you mean physical/geological/natural structures? If the latter, can you give some examples? Specifically of structures we haven’t made sense of that could be “intelligent design”, as you seem to be suggesting.
There's a bunch of these, the bulk of which eventually get reasonable explanations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimini_Road
I'm surprised there's no Wikipedia list of these.