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posted by mrpg on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the Wakanda dept.

Can We Be Sure We're the First Industrial Civilization on Earth?

In a new paper, Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adam Frank from the University of Rochester ask a provocative question [open, DOI: 10.1017/S1473550418000095] [DX]: Could there have been an industrial civilization on Earth millions of years ago? And if so, what evidence of it would we be able to find today?

The authors first considered what signs of industrial civilization would be expected to survive in the geological record. In our own time, these include plastics, synthetic pollutants, increased metal concentrations, and evidence of large-scale energy use, such as carbon-based fossil fuels. Taken together, they mark what some scientists call the Anthropocene era, in which humans are having a significant and measurable impact on our planet.

The authors conclude, however, that it would be very difficult after tens of millions of years to distinguish these industrial byproducts from the natural background. Even plastic, which was previously thought to be quite resistant, can be degraded by enzymes relatively quickly. Only radiation from nuclear power plants—or from a nuclear war—would be discernible in the geological rock record after such a long time.

Anonymous Coward says "I told you so!" and starts babbling about megaliths.

Related: Homo Sapiens Began Advanced Toolmaking, Pigment Use, and Trade Earlier Than Previously Thought


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:54PM (52 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:54PM (#669256) Homepage Journal

    That in the vastness of cosmological time, it's nearly impossible to identify remnants of civilization on our own planet. Unless there are long-lived artificial radioactives (e.g., plutonium) in the environment, all traces of a technological civilization are pretty much obliterated within a few million years.

    Is it any wonder that the search for civilizations around other stars is so difficult?

    --
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:14PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:14PM (#669270) Journal

    We've barely started that search beyond our planet. It was only recently that we confirmed thousands of exoplanets, and even the James Webb Space Telescope isn't going to give us good direct imaging. Maybe a new instrument [soylentnews.org] and the upcoming 20-100 meter class telescopes [wikipedia.org] with adaptive optics and such could help, but our best views in this century could come from a gravitational lens telescope [soylentnews.org] over 550 AU away, and that probably won't be ready for decades.

    Even the apparent lack of alien radio transmissions does not mean we are alone, since we can only detect strong, deliberate beacons - if they exist.

    We don't even know what is happening in our own solar system. Many Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud objects remain undiscovered, along with Planet Nine if it exists, and there are millions of interstellar asteroids zipping in and out of our solar system... we only know of ONE [wikipedia.org], discovered just 6 months ago as of today. A thousand alien tourist spacecrafts could whizz around in the outskirts of our solar system and we would never know it with today's technology.

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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM (#669278) Homepage Journal

      Absolutely. We've learned a great deal about the universe in the past few hundred years, yet we're still quite ignorant of what goes on in our own backyard. I suspect that we'll (as we have done consistently) find ways to improve our ability to examine, identify, categorize and analyze photons from sources both within and outside our solar system.

      We've only been at this in earnest for fifty years or so, and most of that time we've been listening for radio signals, with no way to even detect exoplanets. For the moment, our ability to identify the composition of such exoplanets is extremely limited.

      That said, in the absence of "noisy neighbors," even identifying potentially habitable planets doesn't mean that we can identify civilizations from light years away -- which, given the vast time scales involved, are likely to be dead civilizations rather than extant ones.

      I'm not claiming that it would be impossible to identify extra-solar civilizations, nor am I claiming that they don't exist. Rather, I find it telling that the difficulty in validating/invalidating the hypothesis that a technological civilization right here on earth existed in our pre-history doesn't bode well for identifying extra-solar civilizations, be they extant or dead.

      I'm all for continuing to search and to enhance our abilities in identifying extra-solar planets, Kuiper belt/Oort cloud objects, and examining our own solar system as well as those around other stars to increase our knowledge and, potentially, identify other technological civilizations. It's just really, really hard.

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:11PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:11PM (#669316)

        yet we're still quite ignorant of what goes on in our own backyard.

        Absolutely, especially under the oceans - however... any "invisible technological society" on this planet within the last half-billion years or so would either have left traces that we would find today, or have been small enough that all their traces are confined to places on the planet that we don't go, like the current sea floor, under glaciers, etc.

        If they covered the earth as thoroughly as we have, and if they carved rock and worked metal like we do, we'd have found something by now - maybe not 100 years ago, but by now...

        --
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:38PM (31 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:38PM (#669283) Journal

    Nonsense.

    Things like stainless steel, concrete with re-rod, glass, aluminum, do not disappear without leaving a trace. Even over millions of years, there would be remnants in desert areas or ice-covered areas. Even deep in the seas, not everything gets dissolved over geologic time.

    Mining rich metal deposits, mapping magnetic anomalies, oil exploration using explosive charges to generate earth penetrating waves, and Space Shuttle radar have all demonstrated the ability to find buried relics.
    A few hundred foundation stones, or a couple hundred tons of steel ruins would not go un-noticed. Buried stuff often ceases to degrade in low-groundwater areas.

    If you are talking about the earth prior to what ever event created the moon, fine. But otherwise I don't buy it.

    They talk about 10s of Millions of years.

    Overlooking the fact that 70 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg Fossils [sciencealert.com] have been found.
    Even some nearly twice that old. [dailymail.co.uk]
    Bones 197 million years [nature.com] old.

    Now Make something out of steel or titanium and manage to get it buried because the earth got hit with a few small meteors asteroids, and you STILL will find remnants with technology we have today, even if it was still buried.

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    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (10 children)

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (#669304) Homepage Journal

      Nonsense.

      Not so much. Regardless of anything we may or may not have found, we don't (and will likely never) know what materials and architecture such a civilization *may* have used.

      I'd say that it was *unlikely* that there were previous technological civilizations on this planet, but to call it "nonsense," given the difficulty in proving such a negative seems a little much.

      A lot can happen in millions of years, including the dissolution of metal alloys, destruction and/or warping of stone materials beyond recognition, as well as subduction of such evidence under many kilometers of crustal material. Consider that the Himalyas are only ~50 million years old. If there are remnants of a technological civilization beneath K2, we'd never find it.

      What's more, the river deltas created by the Himalayas are buried in tens of kilometers of silt and debris. Again, we'd never find any remnants under that.

      And this has been going on for billions of years. Given that we haven't found any long half-life artificial radioactives, we can fairly confidently infer only that there hasn't been a technological civilization that used such isotopes, but nothing more.

      Do I think there have been such civilization(s)? Probably not. Is it possible that they existed? Definitely. But that (as well as your assertions) plus five dollars will get you a nice latte. Enjoy!

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 4, Funny) by Osamabobama on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:15PM

        by Osamabobama (5842) on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:15PM (#669317)

        Also, they did just find the spaceship crash site off the coast of Japan, where all the rare earth metals diffused into the seabed. I suppose that doesn't imply a terrestrial civilization, and I'm not saying it was aliens, but it must have been aliens.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:01AM (6 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @12:01AM (#669402) Journal

        Not so much. Regardless of anything we may or may not have found, we don't (and will likely never) know what materials and architecture such a civilization *may* have used.

        We know the laws of physics didn't change over the past few billion years. So it would be the same sort of materials and architecture (I'm not claiming that any civilization would need to ape human architecture, just that there would be similar needs for shelter, specialized industrial production, knowledge acquisition, and other such things with similar architecture to solve that need) that we have now along with vast periods of time in which to make and improve that civilization.

        There's only one out - one of the several global-scale, extremely bad extinction events or perhaps a regional disaster completely wiped out said civilization before it had a chance to make a permanent geological record. One also would need to explain the absence of nearby very advanced species (for example, humans have hundreds of related primate species which would also show up in a fossil record and have a tens of millions of years record).

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @04:06AM (5 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @04:06AM (#669494)

          We know the laws of physics didn't change over the past few billion years.

          In any way that we can detect or comprehend, yet.

          I'm constantly amused at the varying fate, origin, contents and extent of the universe, as explained over the last few decades.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:34AM (4 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @04:34AM (#669508) Journal

            In any way that we can detect or comprehend, yet.

            Which is a pretty high threshold.

            I'm constantly amused at the varying fate, origin, contents and extent of the universe, as explained over the last few decades.

            The majority of which is quite compatible with physical law as we know it. Plus, then you have to ask what the relevance is to some intelligent species living on Earth. There's not going to be a change in physical law which will radically change what materials exist on Earth or the needs of the species (food, shelter, etc).

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @12:54PM (3 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @12:54PM (#669609)

              In any way that we can detect or comprehend, yet.

              Which is a pretty high threshold.

              Relative to what? Ourselves? We've made great progress in the last few years, but "complete" would not be in my description of our understanding of... almost anything.

              There's not going to be a change in physical law which will radically change what materials exist on Earth or the needs of the species (food, shelter, etc).

              The species themselves already vary enough to have varying needs for shelter, from essentially zero up through humans which seem to build the most complete shelters of all.

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              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:25PM (2 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @01:25PM (#669625) Journal

                Relative to what? Ourselves? We've made great progress in the last few years, but "complete" would not be in my description of our understanding of... almost anything.

                Relative? You're speaking of an absolute question of whether such civilizations exist not a relative one.

                The species themselves already vary enough to have varying needs for shelter, from essentially zero up through humans which seem to build the most complete shelters of all.

                Industrial civilization implies the latter.

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:32PM (1 child)

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @03:32PM (#669677)

                  Oh, you're going semantic on me again. The question of "civilization" can only be framed relative to our concept of what is civilization, and Douglas Adams pretty much covered this with his bit about the dolphins.

                  Industrial civilization, as conceived by us, implies shelter. So, if we meet creatures who have harnessed physical properties of our universe that we don't yet understand - maybe we've observed them but explain them incompletely or incorrectly - and they manage to "do things" without requiring large-scale physical construction or anything we would recognize as shelter, how impressive would these things have to be to qualify as industrial civilization?

                  Low latency communication across half the ocean? How about combining that with deliberate shaping of fish species populations to make a more reliable and better tasting food source for themselves?

                  If we're just looking for creatures that do things more or less exactly how we do, we're going to miss most of what is really happening, not only in the geologic past, but even right here right now.

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                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @06:02PM

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @06:02PM (#669737) Journal

                    Oh, you're going semantic on me again. The question of "civilization" can only be framed relative to our concept of what is civilization, and Douglas Adams pretty much covered this with his bit about the dolphins.

                    We're not speaking of civilization, but of industrial civilization.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 20 2018, @01:56AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday April 20 2018, @01:56AM (#669448) Journal

        never know what materials and architecture such a civilization *may* have used.

        Listen to yourself!!!!??

        We live on the same planet as these putative prior industrial civilizations.
        The used exactly what we have under our feet.

        If they were a colony of advanced bumblebees they still had only what is on hand on the planet.
        They had to eat. So worst case, they lived in the sea. But if they were industrial, you can bet they didn't
        build everything in sand castles.

        Same Planet. Same materials.

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:57AM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @03:57AM (#669489)

        There could have been a massive civilization among advanced field mice who built the majority of their structures out of grass, but also occasionally did metalworking and electrical power generation and distribution. They could have outsmarted all their predators and overwhelmed them with sheer numbers and clever preparation - this is starting to sound like a Pixar movie plot... until a virus knocked out 90% of their population (electric powered airships built from grass allowed it to spread globally within days...) and the predators got the upper hand and selectively ate all the smart ones.

        Anything _is_ possible, probable? Maybe more probable than people with super-powers, but still less likely than wandering aliens coming to visit.

        --
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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (#669306)

      Human beings have unbounded capacity for ignoring an inconvenient reality.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome [wikipedia.org]
      Given that, we can expect any number of "unexplainable" archaeological finds to have no more effect on "scientific consensus", than the whole of paleontology and geology has on the belief system of young-earth creationists.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:07AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @12:07AM (#669406) Journal

        Given that, we can expect any number of "unexplainable" archaeological finds to have no more effect on "scientific consensus"

        No, we don't "expect" that. You made an assertion and failed to back it up with evidence (which is a typical "ignoring an inconvenient reality" move). And what "unexplainable" archeology is there? Is this going to be yet another tall tale where slight cases of our ignorance of the past, such as the construction of the Göbekli Tepe [wikipedia.org] site, are going to be exaggerated into imaginary global civilizations which somehow never managed to do anything worthy of being called "global"?

        You're too invested in your narrative. Come up with evidence first, then we'll have something to speak of.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 20 2018, @02:01AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday April 20 2018, @02:01AM (#669450) Journal

        Human beings have unbounded capacity for ignoring an inconvenient reality.

        Except YOU of course, you figured out in the spacce of a minute and a half what the problem with human civilization was, and slapped it into a computer in a 7 line paragraph. Nobody in history has ever done that.

        You must be VERY special. Your parents must have been brilliant.

        Such hubris!

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    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:52PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:52PM (#669399) Journal

      Overlooking the fact that 70 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg Fossils [sciencealert.com] have been found.
      Even some nearly twice that old. [dailymail.co.uk]
      Bones 197 million years [nature.com] old.

      Yes, we have a few samples of these creatures that covered the globe. But it takes very specific conditions to create a fossil that survives this long. You think some ancient civilization went around building their structures in tar pits? Probably not...

      And we don't know even what they would be building out of. Consider plastics, for example, which we tend to make out of petroleum. Would they have had petroleum? I'm not sure...the stuff we're using is mostly from the dinosaurs, so if they were living at that time, I highly doubt they would have had the same easy access to such fuels as we do today. Without fossil fuels and the cheap and dense energy they provide our current technological society could not exist. Our industrial revolution may not have happened. So assuming any previous technological society would build the same kinds of structures as we do today seems somewhat baseless. They might not have had enough energy for that.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 20 2018, @12:04AM (10 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Friday April 20 2018, @12:04AM (#669405) Journal

      One thing to consider: if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites? What if their housing were a suitable genetically engineered tree? What if they had a health so strong they did not need housing?

      One other thing to consider: ours is not a civilization. We pollute too much, we produce too many things, we have an economy based on unsustainable principles, we have value added tax that subtract money for every transaction that money is supposed to enable, food poisons, healthcare kills, wars are waged on the civilians, refugees are weapons, next there is nanotech, weather manipulation, bioweapons, mass hypnosis.

      There is a sign of an early civilization, megalithic structures around the world. The idea that different cultures all used unwieldy big stones to build their stuff with all the associated logistic problems implies one of these:
      - people were different
      - people had some antigravity tech
      - people could come up with a society that was so abundant in manpower they could devote an unreasonable effort (by today standards) to build stuff for their pharaohs.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:15AM (9 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @12:15AM (#669412) Journal

        if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites?

        We need specialized industrial sites for our alchemy. And to harness the free energy of the Sun, we have harnessed somewhere around a ninth of the Earth's surface for agriculture. So it's not that big a leap.

        One other thing to consider: ours is not a civilization.

        We would need more True Scotsmen to have a civilization.

        There is a sign of an early civilization, megalithic structures around the world. The idea that different cultures all used unwieldy big stones to build their stuff with all the associated logistic problems implies one of these:

        - people were different
        - people had some antigravity tech
        - people could come up with a society that was so abundant in manpower they could devote an unreasonable effort (by today standards) to build stuff for their pharaohs.

        The obvious rebuttals are that unwieldy big stones are everywhere - so it is not a stretch to have independently incorporated these things and developed related technologies everywhere, that the tech for moving big stones around is just not that advanced, and the manpower needed is not that extreme.

        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 20 2018, @11:53AM (8 children)

          by Bot (3902) on Friday April 20 2018, @11:53AM (#669598) Journal

          "So who, when and why built Baalbek? These are the most asked questions when it comes to Baalbek. These huge megaliths were cut, transported through very rugged terrain and then placed into position with great precision so that a firm and unshakable foundation of over 400,000 m2 could be achieved."

          1600 ton blocks. Stop trolling.

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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:33PM (7 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @01:33PM (#669626) Journal
            Ok? What was that suppose to say or imply? Reading up on that project indicates the large blocks were part of a Roman engineering project which would have had the manpower and technology to move them. No one is disputing that the Romans existed.
            • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:41AM (6 children)

              by Bot (3902) on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:41AM (#670310) Journal

              ummm ok.... I am talking with a fellow bot with a peculiar AI, I guess. Else let me get a robotic hand and a face so I can facepalm properly.

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              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:20PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:20PM (#670317) Journal

                ummm ok.... I am talking with a fellow bot with a peculiar AI, I guess. Else let me get a robotic hand and a face so I can facepalm properly.

                Yes, it must take "peculiar AI" to poke holes in a shitty argument.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:36PM (4 children)

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:36PM (#670320) Journal
                As to the shitty quality of your arguments, let's review:

                if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites?

                Humans do and it's just not that hard to see that.

                ours is not a civilization. We pollute too much, we produce too many things, we have an economy based on unsustainable principles, we have value added tax that subtract money for every transaction that money is supposed to enable, food poisons, healthcare kills, wars are waged on the civilians, refugees are weapons, next there is nanotech, weather manipulation, bioweapons, mass hypnosis.

                And yet when one looks at the actual relevant definition of civilization rather than some nonsense pulled out of the unproductive ass of our silicon-kin, we get:

                The society, culture, and way of life of a particular area.

                All that junk merely indicates the presence of civilization.

                There is a sign of an early civilization, megalithic structures around the world.

                Yet no "sign" was given. As I noted later, rocks are everywhere, so a bunch of civilizations (rather than "an" civilization) independently using rocks for building things is just not that big a stretch. It certainly doesn't require anti-grav tech to explain.

                So when confronted with that, you post

                So who, when and why built Baalbek?

                Ok. This is the retarded crap I spoke of [soylentnews.org] elsewhere. One site which we don't fully understand is not evidence of global civilization. 1600 ton stone blocks aren't evidence that anti-grav or whatever is needed as explanation.

                So sure, get that robotic limb and facepalm away - at your abysmal ignorance of rational debate.

                • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 23 2018, @11:30PM (3 children)

                  by Bot (3902) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:30PM (#670938) Journal

                  LOL invoking rational debate in an ad hominem. You're good.
                  When you understand the first line I quoted, then we might attempt that.
                  We need industrial sites because of economy of scale. If you have free energy and alchemy (which means complete control of all the aspects of matter, turning lead into gold into hamburgers, we do not need any economy of anything as we live in absolute abundance. A 10 year old can get this, so your trolling needs to be more subtle. Better luck next time.

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                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:21AM (2 children)

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:21AM (#671038) Journal

                    in an ad hominem

                    What was the ad hominem?

                    We need industrial sites because of economy of scale.

                    Which would apply to anyone else as well.

                    If you have free energy and alchemy (which means complete control of all the aspects of matter, turning lead into gold into hamburgers,

                    Well, as I noted, no, it doesn't mean that. But let's consider this society with those capabilities. What happens to all that mass that you magically created? You have to have near perfect recycling or you end up with high concentrations of exotic elements with little reason for heavy recycling.

                    Second, it doesn't take a lot of energy to kill someone (certainly not any of the organisms we know of on Earth). So any free energy/alchemy beyond a certain very small threshold will need to be tightly controlled around the beings who depend on it. Hence, the need for specialized industrial sites for doing the heavy lifting that's too dangerous to do around beings.

                    Finally, you still need to move that free energy around, dump heat, large scale matter recycling, and other basic physical processes. Some of these don't require industrial infrastructure, but others do if only due to the danger to the beings dependent on the infrastructure.

                    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:06AM (1 child)

                      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:06AM (#671067) Journal

                      Yeah it wasn't an ad hominem but an ad bot. You keep picking a scenario to support your preconceived thesis instead of exploring all the possibilities. Fact, we will never be able to say "we discovered all there is to discover" from the inside of a system. Therefore what is classified now as magic and fairy tale could theoretically be feasible. Therefore as that guy reportedly turned water into wine without an industrial infrastructure and need to manage the energy flow, a really advanced civilization would live as tourists.

                      Science fiction tends to perpetuate the idea that advanced civilization has a bigger footprint, but it is not a given.

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                      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:43PM

                        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:43PM (#671175) Journal

                        You keep picking a scenario to support your preconceived thesis instead of exploring all the possibilities.

                        First, that would be cherry picking not an ad hominem. Very different things.

                        Second, the "scenario" was in response to general questions - specific examples answer general questions to the negative. You asked "if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites?" and the answer is that the real world examples we know of do require industrial sites. So it's clearly not a pure "no". Given the complete absence of any physical mechanism for your "free energy" and "alchemy" while simultaneously ignoring how humans do the same thing (chemistry was after all the direct descendant of alchemy in actual history and solar power is provided for free), it was a quite silly question as well.

                        You claimed that there was some unknown, global stone working civilization due to the presence of "megalithic structures around the world", and I noted the obvious, that stone is everywhere and it is not rocket science to build things out of it - independent development of stone working fits better what we actually see (including the absence of any sort of common cultural, genetic, and trade exchange on the global level aside from a few minor oddities - such as some Polynesian genetics in South America).

                        In addition to that, the huge variation in architecture and the fact that prior to already known ancient trade/infrastructure-dependent empires, like the Roman empire, we have stone used with a short distance of where it was quarried. Why would this happen in a global civilization? Wouldn't one want to use the best rock around and transport it to good locations? Instead, we see local rock transported very short distances. In Baalbek, the example you gave, stone was transported far shorter distances (the "Stone of the Pregnant Woman", a 1000 metric ton block that remained in the quarry was only 900 meters from the Baalbek temple site). The Göbekli Tepe site had stone transported about 100 meters. For an extreme example, 2 ton bluestone blocks of Stonehenge were transported about 150 miles, and the much larger 25 ton Sarsen stones were transported about 25 miles.

                        Nothing has been described that needs a global civilization nor evidence provided to support such a claim. Don't we all have better things to do with our time?

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 20 2018, @01:19AM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @01:19AM (#669439) Journal

      That's not the real problem. The real problem is mines and dumps. The dumps would appear as high grade ores of almost every metal mixed together. The mines would be severe discontinuities, places where mountains had been eaten away by no explainable process.

      There's also the problem of the distribution of gold, which would be far more regular than any natural process could explain. If we assume that it was a fossil fuel based civilization, there would be records in lots of places of a inexplicable spike in CO2, and there's also the question of why there were such readily accessible fossil fuels. We've been using stuff that was laid down before the dinosaurs walked the earth. It's true, however, that there is still a lot of coal around, and coal that's currently inaccessible could become accessible with a bit of continent building and erosion. The same isn't really true of oil.

      So while the question isn't really silly, the answer is "It would need to be back during the time of the dinosaurs, or earlier.". A few million years isn't long enough.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:52AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @03:52AM (#669488)

      Buried stuff often ceases to degrade in low-groundwater areas.

      Certain forms of buried stuff also cease to degrade when buried below the water table.

      During an exceptional drought, we dug a pit about 30' deep near a river, the bottom 4' of that pit were still under water, and in that water we pulled up an amazingly preserved tree trunk. It didn't last long after it hit the air, but that tree trunk had been buried in the sand for a long, long time - at least many thousands of years. It was covered by two undisturbed layers of phosphate (AFAIK from when the area, now 30' above sea level, was under the ocean), and also a top layer of "hardpan" (iron oxide from the seasonal top of the water table) several inches thick.

      The same happens with old shipwrecks, the water preserves them, like this one: http://www.jacksonville.com/news/20180328/old-shipwreck-washes-ashore-in-ponte-vedra-beach [jacksonville.com]

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:12AM (2 children)

      by TheRaven (270) on Friday April 20 2018, @10:12AM (#669581) Journal

      Things like stainless steel

      Corrodes in acid. After periods of volcanic activity, stainless steel will be damaged. It's also subject to stress from weather and can be damaged by lightning strikes. Over a period of a few million years, don't expect it to be very obvious. It also takes a long time for a new civilisation to understand it. If there had been a giant stainless steel structure sitting anywhere where humans evolved, it would likely have been completely stripped by the iron age.

      concrete with re-rod

      Concrete degrades noticeably after a hundred years and is unlikely to be visible at all after a couple of thousand. Re-bar steel is cheap crap that rusts very quickly when exposed to water (which will happen after the concrete is weathered away). Expect it to be completely undetectable after a million years.

      glass

      Glass is fragile and smashes. Weather the pieces enough and you're left with sand.

      aluminum

      You might be onto something there. It takes a lot of energy to refine aluminium, but once you have done it's pretty resistant to corrosion. That said, it does end up coated in a fine layer of aluminium oxide, which may be stripped by abrasion over a sufficiently long timescale and allow the next layer to be exposed.

      Mining rich metal deposits, mapping magnetic anomalies, oil exploration using explosive charges to generate earth penetrating waves, and Space Shuttle radar have all demonstrated the ability to find buried relics.

      Most of these are under a thousand years old.

      Buried stuff often ceases to degrade in low-groundwater areas.

      Assuming a tectonically stable area, of course.

      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 20 2018, @02:22PM (1 child)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday April 20 2018, @02:22PM (#669652) Journal

        I was going to say the same thing. The premise is that over millions of years crust gets subducted and recycled, so it's tough to think of tells that would last that long. It's pretty darn recent that we found enough evidence to support the theory of plate tectonics (in the 1950's and 60's), and it's not that many sites that supplied it. Gros Morne National Park [emporia.edu] in Newfoundland was designated a geologic UNESCO World Heritage site because its strata helped clinch it (really cool place, BTW--highly recommend it).

        So it doesn't seem that hard to accept the possibility that we could have missed evidence of earlier civilizations, even if they had left fissile products, if we were looking in the wrong places. Heck, it's only just now that archeologists are searching below the waves for evidence of human habitation in Doggerland [thevintagenews.com], in recognition that sea levels and shorelines (where early peoples tended to settle) changed dramatically after the last ice age.

        When I read the article I thought perhaps someplace off the Earth like the Moon would be a better place to preserve evidence of previous terrestrial industrialized civilizations, but that would further assume that that civilization also made it to the Moon and that the evidence was not covered up by ejecta from impacts occurring over that long time span.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 21 2018, @12:07PM

          by TheRaven (270) on Saturday April 21 2018, @12:07PM (#670028) Journal

          When I read the article I thought perhaps someplace off the Earth like the Moon would be a better place to preserve evidence of previous terrestrial industrialized civilizations

          The moon is a pretty harsh environment. Two weeks of direct (unfiltered by atmosphere) followed by two weeks of no sunlight gives a temperature variation of a couple of hundred degrees, which weakens most materials. Radiation and vacuum both weaken things more. Lack of atmosphere also means impacts from micrometeors (tiny ones will burn up in our atmosphere, but will abrade the surface of the moon). Anything buried would have a much better chance of surviving (no tectonics, no temperature changes once you're deep enough, but we'd also be unlikely to find anything buried deep enough to be safe.

          --
          sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:46PM (8 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:46PM (#669289)

    all traces of a technological civilization

    Like kinks in the evolutionary history markers in DNA?

    Like exploitation of the coal seams from the carboniferous period which ended 300M years ago?

    If they're talking about a happy hundred thousand creatures on the sub-continent of Atlantis who never colonized the globe - yeah, maybe.

    Consider that, by the invention of the steam engine, homo sapiens were numerous in everywhere that wasn't ocean, mountainside or glacier.

    A lot of what we are doing is shallow and short-lived, but 300M years from now another civilization as numerous, advanced and widespread as we are should easily be able to find traces of us. https://www.quora.com/If-humanity-died-today-how-long-would-the-pyramids-of-Giza-last [quora.com]

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:11PM (7 children)

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:11PM (#669315) Homepage Journal

      all traces of a technological civilization

      Like kinks in the evolutionary history markers in DNA?

      Like exploitation of the coal seams from the carboniferous period which ended 300M years ago?

      If they're talking about a happy hundred thousand creatures on the sub-continent of Atlantis who never colonized the globe - yeah, maybe.

      Consider that, by the invention of the steam engine, homo sapiens were numerous in everywhere that wasn't ocean, mountainside or glacier.

      A lot of what we are doing is shallow and short-lived, but 300M years from now another civilization as numerous, advanced and widespread as we are should easily be able to find traces of us. https://www.quora.com/If-humanity-died-today-how-long-would-the-pyramids-of-Giza-last [quora.com] [quora.com]

      Given that humans have only been extant for a couple hundred thousand years, any technological *human* civilization would most likely have remnants that are identifiable today.

      That said, who's to say that other beings didn't create a technological civilization 100 million years ago or more? That we have no evidence for such a civilization doesn't mean it didn't exist.

      Given that large-brained mammals evolved to create a technological civilization over the past 10-15 million years leaves plenty of time in the geological past for large-brained creatures to have done the same over the past 500 million years.

      Did it happen? We don't know. We have no evidence that it did, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in uncontrolled systems.

      If we can hypothesize that there are extraterrestrial civilizations, hypothesizing that pre-human terrestrial civilizations existed seems a no-brainer, given the time scales involved.

      Were there "dinosaur" civilizations? Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better as you haven't imbibed any green crack [leafly.com].

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:16PM (3 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:16PM (#669319)

        If the technological civilization had the drive to expand (which is pretty much inbred in all of our DNA, from algae through dinosaurs and up), they would have left a visible mark.

        If they were mammals ~10M years ago, they would have abundant skeletal remains (unless they were fastiduous cremators...), and with technology come signs of medicine...

        Now, if they're just a little clique with a hydro-electric dam and they never left the valley - yeah, we could be missing that.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
        • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:30PM (2 children)

          by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:30PM (#669328) Homepage Journal

          If the technological civilization had the drive to expand (which is pretty much inbred in all of our DNA, from algae through dinosaurs and up), they would have left a visible mark.

          If they were mammals ~10M years ago, they would have abundant skeletal remains (unless they were fastiduous cremators...), and with technology come signs of medicine...

          Now, if they're just a little clique with a hydro-electric dam and they never left the valley - yeah, we could be missing that.

          Sure. Everything you wrote is plausible. However, you have no evidence to support your assertions.

          I don't have any evidence to disprove them either. But that doesn't make you correct. My assertion (in the absence of contrary evidence), that a pre-human civilization *could* have existed is just as plausible.

          The most reasonable answer is that it's unlikely but possible. And that's probably the best answer we'll ever get unless some actual evidence of a terrestrial, pre-human technological civilization is found.

          --
          No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @09:09PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @09:09PM (#669816)

            Nah man. The more extraordinary the claim, the more burden of proof there is. You have no proof I didn't eat meat/gunk from an green alien with huge eyes for breakfast. Just because I equally have no proof I did eat an alien, doesn't mean people are going to believe me.

            Lots of stuff has been preserved from the long distant past of this planet. To say an intelligent civilization, which would likely be able to make more durable materials (like we can), left no trace is unlikely.

            • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday April 20 2018, @10:24PM

              Lots of stuff has been preserved from the long distant past of this planet. To say an intelligent civilization, which would likely be able to make more durable materials (like we can), left no trace is unlikely.

              Thanks for agreeing with me. As I said in the comment to which you replied:

              The most reasonable answer is that it's unlikely but possible. And that's probably the best answer we'll ever get unless some actual evidence of a terrestrial, pre-human technological civilization is found.

              Now what, exactly, was your point, other than to agree with my amazing analytical skills?

              --
              No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:17AM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @12:17AM (#669413) Journal

        We have no evidence that it did, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in uncontrolled systems.

        Depends on how hard you looked. Here, it's pretty damning since we've looked a lot. You not only have to hide fossils of the creatures of the civilization, but also any closely related species.

        • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday April 20 2018, @12:32AM (1 child)

          You not only have to hide fossils of the creatures of the civilization, but also any closely related species.

          Perhaps some of these might be descendants of such an intelligent species?
          https://www.thoughtco.com/smartest-dinosaurs-1091961 [thoughtco.com]

          Or not. Likely not, in fact.

          But proving that it's not is nearly impossible. And every piece of evidence we *don't* find doesn't make such a hypothesis less plausible. Contrariwise, just *one* piece of verified evidence of a pre-human civilization is all that's required to validate it.

          As such, it's foolish to reject such a hypothesis out of hand.

          --
          No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:53AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @01:53AM (#669447) Journal

            But proving that it's not is nearly impossible.

            What is "proof" here? You can't prove mathematically, that the entire universe isn't a delusion imposed on you by an evil god.

            Contrariwise, just *one* piece of verified evidence of a pre-human civilization is all that's required to validate it.

            We're at zero pieces of verified evidence.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:39PM (5 children)

    by tftp (806) on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:39PM (#669372) Homepage
    An advanced civilization can be detected by leftovers of its presence in space - sats on Earth's high orbits (geostationary) and around other nearby planets (Moon, Mars.) Those orbits do not decay, and the metal does not corrode. Settlements and spaceports on those planets would be visible from orbit, but our observations show nothing. If the ancient civ existed, it was likely primitive.
    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 20 2018, @12:50AM (3 children)

      by JNCF (4317) on Friday April 20 2018, @12:50AM (#669426) Journal

      We didn't launch a single satellite before 1957. If you consider the technology of 1956 "primitive," I don't know what to tell you. I, for one, would be blown away by evidence of prehistoric atom bombs.

      • (Score: 1) by tftp on Friday April 20 2018, @01:18AM (2 children)

        by tftp (806) on Friday April 20 2018, @01:18AM (#669437) Homepage
        No need to split years. There is only 12 years between 1945 and 1957. Conquest of nuclear energy and conquest of space are nearly synchronous, and in a more peaceful civ the space could be decades ahead of the fission power, as the latter is not essential for spaceflight. Add another decade and you get Moon flights, landing, leaving tracks in dust and machines behind. On a scale of civilizations that's instantaneous.
        • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 20 2018, @02:42AM (1 child)

          by JNCF (4317) on Friday April 20 2018, @02:42AM (#669462) Journal

          Right, but atom bombs are just a particularly striking example. We were beginning to make mechanical computers thousands of years before spaceflight. Are we calling Newton primitive, now? Galileo? Leonardo? Archimedes? And what of our own aristarchus? A civilization on par with the ancient Greeks, but existing tens of thousands (or millions) of years earlier, could hardly be called "primitive."

          • (Score: 1) by tftp on Friday April 20 2018, @03:33AM

            by tftp (806) on Friday April 20 2018, @03:33AM (#669484) Homepage
            There are no fixed terms in this science, no words to specify the exact width of a barrier between civX and civY. Every civilization is magnificent for its environment and time, but if we introduce an external measure - say, ability to build an electronic computer or to synthesize drugs - the ancients are way behind. And our current civilization will be way behind, compared to itself at t+100 years. We can appreciate cave paintings and enjoy reading sagas and poems of the ancients, acknowledge their importance, but as a fact they were just beginning to understand the Universe. For now spaceflight is a good indicator, when the civilization leaves its cradle. In the future, perhaps, it will be complemented by invention of travel in hyperspace. Sorry, replacement of a stone ax with a copper ax does not count. If the ancient civilization lived like we in middle ages, we may not find a trace of them. There is a threshold of visibility.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:19AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Friday April 20 2018, @10:19AM (#669583) Journal

      Space is very big. Anything in an orbit high enough to survive for even a few thousand years is somewhere in a volume of space vastly bigger than the total space occupied by humans. It's also a volume of space that is littered with large numbers of objects, some of which have very high metal content. It's pretty unlikely that any of those are dead satellites launched by dinosaurs, but it's misleading to assume that we'd have spotted any that were.

      Oh, and for something to remain in geostationary orbit over such a long period, it would need to have been under thrust for some of that time because it's in the middle of an unstable n-body system. Either it went up with enough propellant to last millions of years, the civilisation in question had a reactionless drive, or it's drifted off station.

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 20 2018, @05:07AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday April 20 2018, @05:07AM (#669523) Journal

    Actually we know more about space than about the deep sea. There could be a civilization of deep sea organisms at the ground of the ocean right now without us knowing.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:16PM (#670824)

    all traces of a technological civilization are pretty much obliterated within a few million years.

    That can't be true. We have many fossils of animals going back about 500 million years. Machines and manufactured items would leave imprints comparable to these fossilized animals. Now it's possible if the civilization were short-lived, the chance of leaving fossils is reduced, but we probably would have found something by now for anything continent-wide.