The London Times has put together an amazing chart of how long it will take for all traces of mankind to disappear from Earth when we all die off. Scientific American has a lengthy paper on the topic. I have often wondered about this. Basically, it’ll take 50,000 years for our memory to be reduced to potential archaeological finds. I read in “A Short History of Nearly Everything” that fossils are so fantastically rare that if everybody in the United States dropped dead at once, three quarters of a skeleton’s worth of bones would likely end up fossilized, scattered throughout the nation, the odds of anybody ever finding them being fantastically slim.
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Your observation about fossils is important in other areas. The creationist/ID crowd recycles an argument about gaps in the fossil record but never addresses the rarity of fossilization.
We must immediately install unfenced tarpits near every major population center in order to avoid this tragic outcome.