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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: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (#669305)

    Well somebody made those megaliths, and made them better than we can figure out these days.
    We could build a stonehenge, that thing's crude, but the stuff in Peru is really amazing.
    Must have had a civilization advanced enough to have the time and motivation to build stuff big.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @02:24AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @02:24AM (#669458) Journal

    and made them better than we can figure out these days

    Only because it's not worth our bother to devote a lot of effort to figuring that out. Our technologies have for the most part gone away from large scale stonework. And at the present pace of human development, any construction that would take centuries to complete, would also be centuries obsolete.

    Finally, I think a lot of people just don't get the scale of projects humans do these days. For example, one of the more grand US civil engineering ideas was a plan [wikipedia.org] to divert water from Alaska and northwest Canada rivers to southern California. Among other things, it had six nuclear plants just for moving water around. Such a project would probably have taken around three decades to complete on an ambitious schedule. It was nixed because the plan was utterly impractical, imposing a substantial economic and environmental burden on a large portion of western North America (Canada, for example, had absolutely not natural incentive for going along on the project) just so Los Angeles could have more water. But it was far from impossible.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @04:23AM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @04:23AM (#669504)

      Those same six nuclear power plants could desalinate a whole lot of Pacific Ocean water...

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:30AM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @04:30AM (#669506) Journal

        Those same six nuclear power plants could desalinate a whole lot of Pacific Ocean water...

        It probably would have been somewhat more efficient delivery of fresh water, from Los Angeles' point of view.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @12:50PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 20 2018, @12:50PM (#669606)

          Somebody prompted me with the thought that, at the population density of New York, 7.6 billion people fit in the space of Texas. So, if you did that, how many nuclear power plants would it take to desalinate 760 billion gallons of water per day? I ran the numbers, desalination is surprisingly efficient, I think it came up to less than 1000 "big" nuclear power plants.

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