All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilization ever lived here.
Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centered on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilization, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewelry.
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But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilization that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.
Like the other Guard models (E and G-Class rides are also available) the S-Guard is built on its own assembly line, which lets Mercedes armor up the car as part of the original production process. As a result, they're able to build in the protective features better than any aftermarket program and still tune the car so that it doesn't lose much (if anything) in terms of handling and comfort. The 517-horsepower V12 underhood is more than capable of providing adequate thrust.
If the vehicle comes under threat, it's B6/B7 armor level is enough to stop standard military-grade small-arms fire (such as 7.62mm and 5.56mm rounds), protect against grenade shrapnel and offer protection against other explosive devices. Run-flat tires, a self-sealing fuel-tank, and an integrated fire-extinguishing system round out the Guard package. Despite all the reinforcements, the S600 Guard is visually indistinguishable from the garden-variety V12 S-Class.
I've been invited here to witness the end-game of a police investigation that grew from 1,000 lines of computer code I wrote and executed some five months earlier. The automated script searched MySpace's 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders -- and soon found one that was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys.
That's something that MySpace has said it cannot do. Rather, it is seeking new laws that would make it easier to ban sex offenders from the site through an e-mail registry.
