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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: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 20 2018, @01:19AM
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.
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