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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: 2) by urza9814 on Friday April 20 2018, @03:01AM (1 child)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Friday April 20 2018, @03:01AM (#669473) Journal

    The point of my post was that they wouldn't.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:28AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @04:28AM (#669505) Journal
    And you have yet to explain why that point is valid. For example, consider volcanoes. They're not stable in the geological sense, but they create very fertile lands. And supervolcanoes can bury things far away from the actual eruption. So even if a civilization is careful about avoiding unstable areas, it can still get buried by distant volcanic eruptions and such.

    Another example is our habit of placing cities in river deltas and estuaries. These are great places for burying artifacts and trash that falls into the river. The continental shelf which these rivers flow out to will be around for tens of millions of years.

    Finally, on that same subject, every city we have ever created buries stuff. A lot of it is merely tearing down what was there and building on top of the old. And these layers can get rather thick. There are a number of standard burying processes associated with civilization. It seems reasonable to expect those to hold for any pre-human industrial civilization as well.