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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


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 20 2018, @11:53AM (8 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday April 20 2018, @11:53AM (#669598) Journal

    "So who, when and why built Baalbek? These are the most asked questions when it comes to Baalbek. These huge megaliths were cut, transported through very rugged terrain and then placed into position with great precision so that a firm and unshakable foundation of over 400,000 m2 could be achieved."

    1600 ton blocks. Stop trolling.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:33PM (7 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 20 2018, @01:33PM (#669626) Journal
    Ok? What was that suppose to say or imply? Reading up on that project indicates the large blocks were part of a Roman engineering project which would have had the manpower and technology to move them. No one is disputing that the Romans existed.
    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:41AM (6 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:41AM (#670310) Journal

      ummm ok.... I am talking with a fellow bot with a peculiar AI, I guess. Else let me get a robotic hand and a face so I can facepalm properly.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:20PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:20PM (#670317) Journal

        ummm ok.... I am talking with a fellow bot with a peculiar AI, I guess. Else let me get a robotic hand and a face so I can facepalm properly.

        Yes, it must take "peculiar AI" to poke holes in a shitty argument.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:36PM (4 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:36PM (#670320) Journal
        As to the shitty quality of your arguments, let's review:

        if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites?

        Humans do and it's just not that hard to see that.

        ours is not a civilization. We pollute too much, we produce too many things, we have an economy based on unsustainable principles, we have value added tax that subtract money for every transaction that money is supposed to enable, food poisons, healthcare kills, wars are waged on the civilians, refugees are weapons, next there is nanotech, weather manipulation, bioweapons, mass hypnosis.

        And yet when one looks at the actual relevant definition of civilization rather than some nonsense pulled out of the unproductive ass of our silicon-kin, we get:

        The society, culture, and way of life of a particular area.

        All that junk merely indicates the presence of civilization.

        There is a sign of an early civilization, megalithic structures around the world.

        Yet no "sign" was given. As I noted later, rocks are everywhere, so a bunch of civilizations (rather than "an" civilization) independently using rocks for building things is just not that big a stretch. It certainly doesn't require anti-grav tech to explain.

        So when confronted with that, you post

        So who, when and why built Baalbek?

        Ok. This is the retarded crap I spoke of [soylentnews.org] elsewhere. One site which we don't fully understand is not evidence of global civilization. 1600 ton stone blocks aren't evidence that anti-grav or whatever is needed as explanation.

        So sure, get that robotic limb and facepalm away - at your abysmal ignorance of rational debate.

        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 23 2018, @11:30PM (3 children)

          by Bot (3902) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:30PM (#670938) Journal

          LOL invoking rational debate in an ad hominem. You're good.
          When you understand the first line I quoted, then we might attempt that.
          We need industrial sites because of economy of scale. If you have free energy and alchemy (which means complete control of all the aspects of matter, turning lead into gold into hamburgers, we do not need any economy of anything as we live in absolute abundance. A 10 year old can get this, so your trolling needs to be more subtle. Better luck next time.

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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:21AM (2 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:21AM (#671038) Journal

            in an ad hominem

            What was the ad hominem?

            We need industrial sites because of economy of scale.

            Which would apply to anyone else as well.

            If you have free energy and alchemy (which means complete control of all the aspects of matter, turning lead into gold into hamburgers,

            Well, as I noted, no, it doesn't mean that. But let's consider this society with those capabilities. What happens to all that mass that you magically created? You have to have near perfect recycling or you end up with high concentrations of exotic elements with little reason for heavy recycling.

            Second, it doesn't take a lot of energy to kill someone (certainly not any of the organisms we know of on Earth). So any free energy/alchemy beyond a certain very small threshold will need to be tightly controlled around the beings who depend on it. Hence, the need for specialized industrial sites for doing the heavy lifting that's too dangerous to do around beings.

            Finally, you still need to move that free energy around, dump heat, large scale matter recycling, and other basic physical processes. Some of these don't require industrial infrastructure, but others do if only due to the danger to the beings dependent on the infrastructure.

            • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:06AM (1 child)

              by Bot (3902) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:06AM (#671067) Journal

              Yeah it wasn't an ad hominem but an ad bot. You keep picking a scenario to support your preconceived thesis instead of exploring all the possibilities. Fact, we will never be able to say "we discovered all there is to discover" from the inside of a system. Therefore what is classified now as magic and fairy tale could theoretically be feasible. Therefore as that guy reportedly turned water into wine without an industrial infrastructure and need to manage the energy flow, a really advanced civilization would live as tourists.

              Science fiction tends to perpetuate the idea that advanced civilization has a bigger footprint, but it is not a given.

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              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:43PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:43PM (#671175) Journal

                You keep picking a scenario to support your preconceived thesis instead of exploring all the possibilities.

                First, that would be cherry picking not an ad hominem. Very different things.

                Second, the "scenario" was in response to general questions - specific examples answer general questions to the negative. You asked "if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites?" and the answer is that the real world examples we know of do require industrial sites. So it's clearly not a pure "no". Given the complete absence of any physical mechanism for your "free energy" and "alchemy" while simultaneously ignoring how humans do the same thing (chemistry was after all the direct descendant of alchemy in actual history and solar power is provided for free), it was a quite silly question as well.

                You claimed that there was some unknown, global stone working civilization due to the presence of "megalithic structures around the world", and I noted the obvious, that stone is everywhere and it is not rocket science to build things out of it - independent development of stone working fits better what we actually see (including the absence of any sort of common cultural, genetic, and trade exchange on the global level aside from a few minor oddities - such as some Polynesian genetics in South America).

                In addition to that, the huge variation in architecture and the fact that prior to already known ancient trade/infrastructure-dependent empires, like the Roman empire, we have stone used with a short distance of where it was quarried. Why would this happen in a global civilization? Wouldn't one want to use the best rock around and transport it to good locations? Instead, we see local rock transported very short distances. In Baalbek, the example you gave, stone was transported far shorter distances (the "Stone of the Pregnant Woman", a 1000 metric ton block that remained in the quarry was only 900 meters from the Baalbek temple site). The Göbekli Tepe site had stone transported about 100 meters. For an extreme example, 2 ton bluestone blocks of Stonehenge were transported about 150 miles, and the much larger 25 ton Sarsen stones were transported about 25 miles.

                Nothing has been described that needs a global civilization nor evidence provided to support such a claim. Don't we all have better things to do with our time?