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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: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:19AM
Space is very big. Anything in an orbit high enough to survive for even a few thousand years is somewhere in a volume of space vastly bigger than the total space occupied by humans. It's also a volume of space that is littered with large numbers of objects, some of which have very high metal content. It's pretty unlikely that any of those are dead satellites launched by dinosaurs, but it's misleading to assume that we'd have spotted any that were.
Oh, and for something to remain in geostationary orbit over such a long period, it would need to have been under thrust for some of that time because it's in the middle of an unstable n-body system. Either it went up with enough propellant to last millions of years, the civilisation in question had a reactionless drive, or it's drifted off station.
sudo mod me up