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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) 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.