Just Finished Reading: Footprints – In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier (FP: 2020) [287pp] 

If the historical record (or the nightly news!) is anything to go by our present civilisation or even humanity itself will not last forever. But after we’re gone what, if anything, will we leave behind for far future investigators to discover or uncover? That’s the intriguing question poses in one of the most interesting books of the year (so far). 

One of the early interesting viewpoints is that of the distance of time itself. The author isn’t really interested in what our cities would look like in a hundred or even a thousand years after we vanish. His baseline is at least 100,000 years and BEYOND. On that kind of timescale, you’d be right that very, very little would remain. No books, no paper products at all, no fabric, no paintings. Our greatest cities would have been flattened and largely erased from the environment. But some things would have survived. Glass for one thing as well as buried concrete, tunnels, bore holes and the discovery of rock formations hundreds or thousands of miles from where they ‘should’ be. Mining on an industrial scale would be reasonably apparent even that far out as well as radical and local changes in the natural environment. But our footprint and our fingerprints would extend far beyond our built environment and far further into the future. Human activity, the author maintains, would still be detectable as much as 5 or 10 million years in the future – though not in the way I expected. 

Part of the echo from our time would be in the fossil record itself, both by absence and addition. It would be abundantly clear, looking backward, that the present is a period of Mass Extinction along with a strong indication that a recent arrival in the fossil record (that would be us) was significantly involved in the widespread demise of other species. Conversely the widespread super-abundance of chicken and cattle bones everywhere except Antarctica would also point to our influence. Likewise, the tell-tale signs of increased CO2 in the atmosphere (if by then we hadn’t done anything about it) plus the multiple residues of industrial processes captured in the planet's geology will show something dramatic happened in a vanishing short (in Geological terms) timescale. Other discoveries will show both our disregard and our thoughtfulness about future inhabitants of our world – in the guise of nuclear fallout residue from widespread ‘testing’ and stored nuclear waste in facilities designed to be secure for hundreds of generations and beyond. 

Without even attempting to do sufficient justice to this well written, thought provoking and intriguing work I can simply say that I was both impressed by the science and technology behind the ideas in this book and dismayed at what future (alien?) geologists and archaeologists will think of us and our treatment of the Homeworld. If you fancy a relatively easy introduction to ice cores, nuclear waste facilities and the problems of communicating danger to people (or non-humans!) 100,000 years from now, why jellyfish are blooming and much, much more besides this is definitely the book for you. Highly recommended – especially for all you science nerds out there.     

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