A great counter-example to this is Robert Courland's <i>Concrete Planet</i>, which I strongly recommend for everyone to read. There's a fundamental problem with reinforced concrete that limits its lifespan to a century, perhaps two if we're lucky (the tl;dr issue is the rusting reinforcement rods). One reason we're…

So how do we do that, if it's not beneficial for us to learn how to do so? Would any engineer trust a system that was supposed to last 1,000 years but had not yet demonstrated the capability? The Clock of the Long Now is a great example of people trying to engineer for the long term. Look at how different it…

Really? Let's talk about a mature nanotechnology system that is solar powered, works at room temperature, largely recycles itself, and evolves to meet new situations.

Actually, it's not just the radiation problem, although that's pretty serious.

I there are some more recent stories and movies that still play with this trope: The Mote in God's Eye and Ringworld both use the trope in the 1970s, and Thomas Harlan in the 1990s resurrected it in his "Time of the Sixth Sun" series. The idea also shows up in various forms in, oh the movies Prometheus and Alien, in…

Might want to check Yahoo Mail's facebook page before you puff up this new version. There were 350+ comments last time I looked, and not one of them was positive. As a long-time yahoo user, I'm definitely one of the haters of this new version, to the point where I'm looking for new services that look more like the…

From the perspective of the great diversity of Archaean life whose diverse metabolisms were (and are) poisoned by oxygen and which had, by that point, existed for several billion years before the Great Oxygenation Event, yes, cyanobacteria did poison the atmosphere. In this case, I framed the change from the…

Can we point out that the Great Oxygenation "Event" lasted rather longer than the history of vertebrates outside the ocean? By the definition of this absolutely misleading term, we're in the middle of the Great Animal Event.

I agree that our most lasting monuments will be the objects on the moon, at least for the next ten million years or so. The voyagers will, of course, last longer, but they're unlikely to ever be found.

Positively zingy with all that wonderful radiation. A positively scintillating experience.

Ah yes, how we become Atlantis.

There was a way yesterday, but my bookmarks from then only lead back to the main article. It appears that you now have to purchase the article to see the images. If this pisses you off, I'd suggest joining the open access movement and boycotting Nature. That also goes for IO9, incidentally.

Agreed. The other graphics are quite informative. In some ways, I wish the researchers had used different colors, because dark brown does not intuitively suggest high stability and high intactness, at least to me.

Let's try this again: here's the caption from the picture. Notice that "green" replaces "cream" as above. "Ecoregions that have high relative climate stability and high vegetation intactness are depicted as dark grey. Ecoregions that have relative high climate stability but low levels of vegetation intactness are…

I was thinking of those Egyptian cities, but yes, you could easily be right.

A better word is extirpated. Extinct means something is gone, period. Extirpated means it's been removed from a particular region. For example, native wild horses were extirpated from the US around 10,000 years ago, but mammoths went extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Well, now we know what Washington DC and New York City will look like in a few thousand years.

Aw, those wittle carnivores are soooo cute!

Powering all this crap will be the interesting part. So far, it looks like we won't have even the possibility of "break-even" fusion before 2030, or working reactors before 2050 (assuming that they actually get fusion to work, which is, as usual, highly doubtful). Meanwhile, peak oil is still trudging towards us…

Of course we're still evolving, probably even faster than we have in the past.