Monday evenings are pretty laid back in my house. The day is predictably nuts, but we don’t have any regularly scheduled activities after work, so my wife and I spend a respectable chunk of the night in front of the tube. That is, until I remember that I haven’t finished the laundry from the weekend. (Does it ever surprise you how many socks you can wear in a week?)

I usually end up taking the laundry – socks and all – to the TV to do my sorting and folding in front of whatever nerdy program I’ve flipped to. Tonight was no exception. This evening’s choice was a two-hour special on the History Channel called Life After People. It’s been hyped-up in promos for a couple weeks, and I decided it was worth watching the premier. The entire show was based on what the earth would look like if every person on earth suddenly disappeared. Pretty entertaining really. It’s bizarre, but the idea of watching our civilization crumble is somehow fascinating.

It turns out that it really won’t take long for everything man-made to crumble away. According to the civil engineers interviewed for the program, even our big monuments – the Brooklyn Bridge and the Sears Tower, for instance – are pretty much gone within 200 years. After 1,000 years, the scientists said almost everything will have deteriorated. Even Manhattan Island will look mostly like it did when Henry Hudson first sailed around it in 1609, covered with deciduous forests and babbling brooks.

Huge stone structures like the Pyramids and the Great Wall will stick around for a while, but they’ll eventually be swallowed up. The producers of the show are apparently pretty enamored with the Hoover Dam, because they dedicated a lot of time showing how it would outlast almost everything else. Of course, at the end of the two hours, you get to see it consumed by nature, too, in a spectacular rush of computer-generated flood waters and collapsing cliffs.

At this point, I figured the show was over. The narrator was already going on about how everything is pretty much toast within 10,000 years. Then one of the scientists popped on and had this to say:

“There are a few exceptions. I would have to say that Mount Rushmore, carved out of solid granite in an ecologically stable place, the only enemy it has is wind-driven pellets of rain. I think that Mount Rushmore may be around 100,000 years, possibly 200,000. Possibly even in time to be looked at in awe by the earliest of our replacements.”

As he’s talking, we see a shot of the mountain memorial – mostly in-tact, with only a president or two missing a nose – being pelted by a small storm. It reminded me of Borgulm’s oft-cited quote: “Until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.” Do you suppose the sculptor had any idea that his creation could be one of the longest-enduring man-made objects on the planet? Or how long that would really mean?

A hundred thousand years is a little beyond my comprehension. But to think that Mount Rushmore will last longer than anything modern society has yet to come up with – plastics, steels, alloys, concrete – is an impressive idea. Give it some thought the next time you’re standing in front of the memorial.