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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 TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:34AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday April 20 2018, @10:34AM (#669588) Journal
    Time and scale. Dinosaurs are believed to have lived over a period of over 50 million years and to have covered most of the Earth's landmass for that time. We have found, on average, less than one dinosaur-related find for each year that the dinosaurs lived and many of the ones that we have found are the result of specifically looking in rock strata that are expected to be likely to hold such things on the basis of prior finds.

    We have been a technological civilisation for, at most, a thousand years or so. If we were to leave artefacts around at the same rate as the Dinosaurs, there would be so few in the world that a civilisation that arose a few million years after us would likely miss them all.

    Most of what we have found are not dinosaur eggs or bones, they are fossils. These form only in a few very specific circumstances. In particular, they require that the thing that is being fossilised be quickly covered in rock so that its shape is preserved. Again, most of the time that something like this happens to humans (or valuable human creations), we try to excavate it and don't leave fossil records behind. If our civilisation were to collapse, the majority of what we'd leave behind would be things that were standing at the end. Anything exposed to the weather would be unlikely to survive, so that limits you to things that are already buried in geologically stable places.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @02:00PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @02:00PM (#669641) Journal

    We have found, on average, less than one dinosaur-related find for each year that the dinosaurs lived and many of the ones that we have found are the result of specifically looking in rock strata that are expected to be likely to hold such things on the basis of prior finds.

    We also have only scratched the surface in more than one sense. There's orders of magnitude more stuff down there that what we've found.