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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @05:11AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @05:11AM (#669524)

    Where are the satellites going? You can't just make these things up. Ok, the orbits drift and won't stay geostationary. But the satellites won't fall to earth from so high. Nor are there strong enough forces to pull them out of the earth's gravitational well. There will be collisions, but big chunks of satellite would probably still be there after 100 million years and easy to see as bright spots that move differently from the stellar background.

    It seems to be a flaw in the Schmidt & Frank paper that satellites are not mentioned. By one account, EchoStar 16 [creativetime.org] contains a data disk and will orbit the earth for billions of years.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @05:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @05:29AM (#669528)

    The LAGEOS [nasa.gov] satellites with only 6000 km altitude are expected to last 8 million years.