I think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.

It’d need to be really ancient in this case. To the point only mineral traces and no structure would remain.

They’ll last thousands of years, but not millions.

From their individual perspectives, it has been there since the beginning of time and will remain there long after they are gone.

It all depends on how long. Eventually all the current surface will be sucked under tectonic plates and come out after passing some time in the mantle. We can plan for that by planting evidence in places that aren’t likely to go through that, but, give enough time, most of the crust will be recycled.

In a couple million years, what you’ll see are the mineral deposits where dumpsters are today, with all the materials that are not economically viable to recycle, but that will remain as they were for very long times - metal alloys, rocks that shouldn’t have formed at that time and place, oil deposits where plastics were that appear much older than the adjacent substrate in carbon dating, and so on.

The shape is erased, but the chemical composition mostly remains.

One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits.

It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

Q: What was the hardest debugging problem you had?

A: I had a very slow network connection to the computer, and it was 23 light-hours away from me.

Learning new and weird things builds brain elasticity and vocabulary for you to express new ideas. I always recommend people to learn FORTH, or Lisp, or APL. Learn to think with different paradigms.

Well… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.

You could work on the Voyager project.