Oh, I see. I think James Webb wouldn’t be a good target, either. The L2 point isn’t stable at all; once James Webb loses station-keeping ability it’ll just be a matter of years before it’s drifted off and fallen into a generic solar orbit. That’ll keep it quite far away from Earth, I doubt it’d be detectable to telescopes with our current technology.
No, you’re over-generalizing from a special case. The vast majority of the satellites we put up are orbiting close to Earth, the L2 point is only useful for a handful of scientific probes. Same with the L1 point, where Sun-observing satellites get placed.
The satellites orbiting in LEO and MEO will have their orbits decay due to atmospheric friction over the course of thousands or millions of years and will be gone. But HEO and GEO orbits won’t have meaningful amounts of atmospheric friction to deal with. Those are the ones that may still be around in a million years. They won’t be in the same orbits, though - they’re going to be perturbed by the other forces I mentioned. So nothing will really be GEO any more at that point.
Wait long enough and they’ll probably all end up scattered, their orbits will become elongated enough that either they’ll dip into the atmosphere or get far enough out for the Moon to give them a fling out into solar orbit. But a civilization at our level of capability will probably still be able to find a few of them orbiting Earth after a million years.
They may also be able to find a few things left on the Moon. It’ll be hard to spot them against the Lunar surface after a million years, everything will be eroded by micrometeors and covered in dust, but since they’ve been clued in to the existence of a prior civilization they’ll probably look harder for such things earlier on than we would. And if you want to give them a little boost to help things along, it’s not inconceivable that something with writing on it could last a million years on Earth if it gets buried in exactly the right way - a page from a children’s textbook would have all sorts of important Lunar sites marked on it. I’d look into how various “deep storage” companies around the world use old salt mines as places to store archives of data for customers, your future archaeologists could find one of those and it’d be an absolute jackpot.
Oh, I see. I think James Webb wouldn’t be a good target, either. The L2 point isn’t stable at all; once James Webb loses station-keeping ability it’ll just be a matter of years before it’s drifted off and fallen into a generic solar orbit. That’ll keep it quite far away from Earth, I doubt it’d be detectable to telescopes with our current technology.
that’s what I feared, so “space artefacts” wouldn’t be a thing for a future civilization. :(
One story I can’t write
No, you’re over-generalizing from a special case. The vast majority of the satellites we put up are orbiting close to Earth, the L2 point is only useful for a handful of scientific probes. Same with the L1 point, where Sun-observing satellites get placed.
The satellites orbiting in LEO and MEO will have their orbits decay due to atmospheric friction over the course of thousands or millions of years and will be gone. But HEO and GEO orbits won’t have meaningful amounts of atmospheric friction to deal with. Those are the ones that may still be around in a million years. They won’t be in the same orbits, though - they’re going to be perturbed by the other forces I mentioned. So nothing will really be GEO any more at that point.
Wait long enough and they’ll probably all end up scattered, their orbits will become elongated enough that either they’ll dip into the atmosphere or get far enough out for the Moon to give them a fling out into solar orbit. But a civilization at our level of capability will probably still be able to find a few of them orbiting Earth after a million years.
They may also be able to find a few things left on the Moon. It’ll be hard to spot them against the Lunar surface after a million years, everything will be eroded by micrometeors and covered in dust, but since they’ve been clued in to the existence of a prior civilization they’ll probably look harder for such things earlier on than we would. And if you want to give them a little boost to help things along, it’s not inconceivable that something with writing on it could last a million years on Earth if it gets buried in exactly the right way - a page from a children’s textbook would have all sorts of important Lunar sites marked on it. I’d look into how various “deep storage” companies around the world use old salt mines as places to store archives of data for customers, your future archaeologists could find one of those and it’d be an absolute jackpot.