What will they find in 200 years?

With our current usage of clad coins, pot metal buckles, throw away watches, and plastic pens.

Ancient writings of thousands of years ago are still there, with our electrons and plastic what will we leave to be found?

 

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They will NOT find zinc cents!

 

billions of plastic water bottles that will never biodegrade... hahaha!!!

 

Well I still see the old MC donalds styrofoam containers every ones in a while

I'd say slabbed coins will last some time


How would zinc cents fare over time?

 

maybe somethign like this

Great Pacific Garbage Patch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

 

Plastic degrades, very slowly, but surely. Chemicals leech out of the plastics over time - and years down the road I ponder that many coins will have suffered needlessly because of the sheer foolishness of slabbing coins.

 

You better believe they won't. Theres a spot in my town adjacent to a park where they dump the non trash street sweepings (dirt and sand) and spread them out. Well I walk down there often and I find zinc pennies no more than 5 years old and they are obliterated and look like they are 100 years old.

 

They'll find my corpse...beer bottle in one hand, gun in the other. Sitting on a strong box full of my coins.....

 

They seem better protected in slabs. No ?

 

+1

 

Doesn't anyone here watch "Life After People", I believe on Discovery? Our building won't last 100 years after we're gone, our cars reduce to rust in half that time. I believe our current money wouldn't last 2 years in the ground. Bury a clad coin and a silver coin in your back yard and dig them up in 2011. I bet you wont find anything but a rust stain next to a silver coin. On the plus, Matt might have something there....we need to record all of our valuable info onto plastic water bottles for posterity. They should outlast the pyramids!
Guy~

 

Maybe we need a Doomsday coin vault in Longyearbyen.

 

They may find a white crusty circle about the size of a zincoln. I think the clad coins would survive for a while. They would be very, very black if they were in the ground though.

 

Maybe short term, how about over a long period of time? Plastics in their present stage of development have only been around 50 years or so, any estimates on their long term viability are theory. People forget all the time, history is fraught with mistakes of the past where people thought they had the cure all for decay of art, metal, etc. Look no further an an art gallery with old masters to see the botched attempts at "long term" preservation.

 

Hi,

I also have seen the life after people episode on t.v. I beleive it was there that they were discussing what recording would last the longest, a c.d. lasts about 300 yrs. before degrading starts. My guess coins will last much longer than that.

Sam

 

Since most of the information about what is happening in our time is stored on film, disc and low quality paper it is very possible that people 200 years from now will know far less about us than we know about life in the year 1800. All that will be left will be stories and legends -- much of it wrong.

 

This hasn't been brought up yet... but to this day people are still finding hoards of roman coins buried in the ground in a viable, collectible condition. I suspect that older more sturdy (silver and gold) coins will last for quite some time.

 

t.v. documentory Jessie James' Gold, the treasure hunter had found etchings in stone on walls of know hideouts and deciphered them and found old broken mason jars with the lids almost eaton away, but found silver and gold coins in the broken glass in holes about a foot deep they rinsed them off and they were pristene, next segment
they are going to search for a safe the gang were suppose to have buried.

Sam

 

What channel & time is this show coming on?

 

Hi, Will look it up on direct t.v. and send you a pm on the time. I know that I would like to find out what type of metal detector they were using, but they never mentioned the name brand. The detector could distinguish between gold and silver and if something was worthless, they have come a long way since I had any dealings with them.
Sam