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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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:14PM (2 children)
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
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
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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