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
Related Stories
Signs of symbolic behavior emerged at the dawn of our species in Africa
More than 320,000 years ago in the Rift Valley of Africa, some early innovators adopted a new technology: They eschewed the clunky, palm-size stone hand axes that their ancestors had used for more than a million years in favor of a sleek new toolkit. Like new generations of cellphones today, their Middle Stone Age (MSA) blades and points were smaller and more precise than the old so-called Acheulean hand axes and scrapers.
These toolmakers in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya chose as raw materials shiny black obsidian and white and green chert, rocks they had to get from distant sources or through trade networks. In another first, they chiseled red and black rocks, probably to use as crayons to color their bodies or spears—an early sign of symbolic behavior. "This is indicative of a gear change in behavior, toolmaking, and material culture," says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who studies social networks.
A trio of papers released online in Science today documents this remarkable technological transition. Although other sites have yielded MSA tools, the new, securely dated chronology nudges the transition back by at least 20,000 years, matching when our species, Homo sapiens, is now thought to have emerged. By analyzing artifacts over time at one site, the papers also show that these behaviors developed as climate swings intensified, supporting the idea that environmental variability drove innovation.
Related:
Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2200) (DX)
Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2216) (DX)
Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2646) (DX)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:54PM (52 children)
That in the vastness of cosmological time, it's nearly impossible to identify remnants of civilization on our own planet. Unless there are long-lived artificial radioactives (e.g., plutonium) in the environment, all traces of a technological civilization are pretty much obliterated within a few million years.
Is it any wonder that the search for civilizations around other stars is so difficult?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:14PM (2 children)
We've barely started that search beyond our planet. It was only recently that we confirmed thousands of exoplanets, and even the James Webb Space Telescope isn't going to give us good direct imaging. Maybe a new instrument [soylentnews.org] and the upcoming 20-100 meter class telescopes [wikipedia.org] with adaptive optics and such could help, but our best views in this century could come from a gravitational lens telescope [soylentnews.org] over 550 AU away, and that probably won't be ready for decades.
Even the apparent lack of alien radio transmissions does not mean we are alone, since we can only detect strong, deliberate beacons - if they exist.
We don't even know what is happening in our own solar system. Many Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud objects remain undiscovered, along with Planet Nine if it exists, and there are millions of interstellar asteroids zipping in and out of our solar system... we only know of ONE [wikipedia.org], discovered just 6 months ago as of today. A thousand alien tourist spacecrafts could whizz around in the outskirts of our solar system and we would never know it with today's technology.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
Absolutely. We've learned a great deal about the universe in the past few hundred years, yet we're still quite ignorant of what goes on in our own backyard. I suspect that we'll (as we have done consistently) find ways to improve our ability to examine, identify, categorize and analyze photons from sources both within and outside our solar system.
We've only been at this in earnest for fifty years or so, and most of that time we've been listening for radio signals, with no way to even detect exoplanets. For the moment, our ability to identify the composition of such exoplanets is extremely limited.
That said, in the absence of "noisy neighbors," even identifying potentially habitable planets doesn't mean that we can identify civilizations from light years away -- which, given the vast time scales involved, are likely to be dead civilizations rather than extant ones.
I'm not claiming that it would be impossible to identify extra-solar civilizations, nor am I claiming that they don't exist. Rather, I find it telling that the difficulty in validating/invalidating the hypothesis that a technological civilization right here on earth existed in our pre-history doesn't bode well for identifying extra-solar civilizations, be they extant or dead.
I'm all for continuing to search and to enhance our abilities in identifying extra-solar planets, Kuiper belt/Oort cloud objects, and examining our own solar system as well as those around other stars to increase our knowledge and, potentially, identify other technological civilizations. It's just really, really hard.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:11PM
Absolutely, especially under the oceans - however... any "invisible technological society" on this planet within the last half-billion years or so would either have left traces that we would find today, or have been small enough that all their traces are confined to places on the planet that we don't go, like the current sea floor, under glaciers, etc.
If they covered the earth as thoroughly as we have, and if they carved rock and worked metal like we do, we'd have found something by now - maybe not 100 years ago, but by now...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:38PM (31 children)
Nonsense.
Things like stainless steel, concrete with re-rod, glass, aluminum, do not disappear without leaving a trace. Even over millions of years, there would be remnants in desert areas or ice-covered areas. Even deep in the seas, not everything gets dissolved over geologic time.
Mining rich metal deposits, mapping magnetic anomalies, oil exploration using explosive charges to generate earth penetrating waves, and Space Shuttle radar have all demonstrated the ability to find buried relics.
A few hundred foundation stones, or a couple hundred tons of steel ruins would not go un-noticed. Buried stuff often ceases to degrade in low-groundwater areas.
If you are talking about the earth prior to what ever event created the moon, fine. But otherwise I don't buy it.
They talk about 10s of Millions of years.
Overlooking the fact that 70 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Egg Fossils [sciencealert.com] have been found.
Even some nearly twice that old. [dailymail.co.uk]
Bones 197 million years [nature.com] old.
Now Make something out of steel or titanium and manage to get it buried because the earth got hit with a few small meteors asteroids, and you STILL will find remnants with technology we have today, even if it was still buried.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (10 children)
Not so much. Regardless of anything we may or may not have found, we don't (and will likely never) know what materials and architecture such a civilization *may* have used.
I'd say that it was *unlikely* that there were previous technological civilizations on this planet, but to call it "nonsense," given the difficulty in proving such a negative seems a little much.
A lot can happen in millions of years, including the dissolution of metal alloys, destruction and/or warping of stone materials beyond recognition, as well as subduction of such evidence under many kilometers of crustal material. Consider that the Himalyas are only ~50 million years old. If there are remnants of a technological civilization beneath K2, we'd never find it.
What's more, the river deltas created by the Himalayas are buried in tens of kilometers of silt and debris. Again, we'd never find any remnants under that.
And this has been going on for billions of years. Given that we haven't found any long half-life artificial radioactives, we can fairly confidently infer only that there hasn't been a technological civilization that used such isotopes, but nothing more.
Do I think there have been such civilization(s)? Probably not. Is it possible that they existed? Definitely. But that (as well as your assertions) plus five dollars will get you a nice latte. Enjoy!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Funny) by Osamabobama on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:15PM
Also, they did just find the spaceship crash site off the coast of Japan, where all the rare earth metals diffused into the seabed. I suppose that doesn't imply a terrestrial civilization, and I'm not saying it was aliens, but it must have been aliens.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:01AM (6 children)
We know the laws of physics didn't change over the past few billion years. So it would be the same sort of materials and architecture (I'm not claiming that any civilization would need to ape human architecture, just that there would be similar needs for shelter, specialized industrial production, knowledge acquisition, and other such things with similar architecture to solve that need) that we have now along with vast periods of time in which to make and improve that civilization.
There's only one out - one of the several global-scale, extremely bad extinction events or perhaps a regional disaster completely wiped out said civilization before it had a chance to make a permanent geological record. One also would need to explain the absence of nearby very advanced species (for example, humans have hundreds of related primate species which would also show up in a fossil record and have a tens of millions of years record).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @04:06AM (5 children)
In any way that we can detect or comprehend, yet.
I'm constantly amused at the varying fate, origin, contents and extent of the universe, as explained over the last few decades.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:34AM (4 children)
Which is a pretty high threshold.
The majority of which is quite compatible with physical law as we know it. Plus, then you have to ask what the relevance is to some intelligent species living on Earth. There's not going to be a change in physical law which will radically change what materials exist on Earth or the needs of the species (food, shelter, etc).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @12:54PM (3 children)
Relative to what? Ourselves? We've made great progress in the last few years, but "complete" would not be in my description of our understanding of... almost anything.
The species themselves already vary enough to have varying needs for shelter, from essentially zero up through humans which seem to build the most complete shelters of all.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:25PM (2 children)
Relative? You're speaking of an absolute question of whether such civilizations exist not a relative one.
Industrial civilization implies the latter.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:32PM (1 child)
Oh, you're going semantic on me again. The question of "civilization" can only be framed relative to our concept of what is civilization, and Douglas Adams pretty much covered this with his bit about the dolphins.
Industrial civilization, as conceived by us, implies shelter. So, if we meet creatures who have harnessed physical properties of our universe that we don't yet understand - maybe we've observed them but explain them incompletely or incorrectly - and they manage to "do things" without requiring large-scale physical construction or anything we would recognize as shelter, how impressive would these things have to be to qualify as industrial civilization?
Low latency communication across half the ocean? How about combining that with deliberate shaping of fish species populations to make a more reliable and better tasting food source for themselves?
If we're just looking for creatures that do things more or less exactly how we do, we're going to miss most of what is really happening, not only in the geologic past, but even right here right now.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @06:02PM
We're not speaking of civilization, but of industrial civilization.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 20 2018, @01:56AM
Listen to yourself!!!!??
We live on the same planet as these putative prior industrial civilizations.
The used exactly what we have under our feet.
If they were a colony of advanced bumblebees they still had only what is on hand on the planet.
They had to eat. So worst case, they lived in the sea. But if they were industrial, you can bet they didn't
build everything in sand castles.
Same Planet. Same materials.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:57AM
There could have been a massive civilization among advanced field mice who built the majority of their structures out of grass, but also occasionally did metalworking and electrical power generation and distribution. They could have outsmarted all their predators and overwhelmed them with sheer numbers and clever preparation - this is starting to sound like a Pixar movie plot... until a virus knocked out 90% of their population (electric powered airships built from grass allowed it to spread globally within days...) and the predators got the upper hand and selectively ate all the smart ones.
Anything _is_ possible, probable? Maybe more probable than people with super-powers, but still less likely than wandering aliens coming to visit.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (2 children)
Human beings have unbounded capacity for ignoring an inconvenient reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-believer_syndrome [wikipedia.org]
Given that, we can expect any number of "unexplainable" archaeological finds to have no more effect on "scientific consensus", than the whole of paleontology and geology has on the belief system of young-earth creationists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:07AM
No, we don't "expect" that. You made an assertion and failed to back it up with evidence (which is a typical "ignoring an inconvenient reality" move). And what "unexplainable" archeology is there? Is this going to be yet another tall tale where slight cases of our ignorance of the past, such as the construction of the Göbekli Tepe [wikipedia.org] site, are going to be exaggerated into imaginary global civilizations which somehow never managed to do anything worthy of being called "global"?
You're too invested in your narrative. Come up with evidence first, then we'll have something to speak of.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 20 2018, @02:01AM
Except YOU of course, you figured out in the spacce of a minute and a half what the problem with human civilization was, and slapped it into a computer in a 7 line paragraph. Nobody in history has ever done that.
You must be VERY special. Your parents must have been brilliant.
Such hubris!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:52PM
Yes, we have a few samples of these creatures that covered the globe. But it takes very specific conditions to create a fossil that survives this long. You think some ancient civilization went around building their structures in tar pits? Probably not...
And we don't know even what they would be building out of. Consider plastics, for example, which we tend to make out of petroleum. Would they have had petroleum? I'm not sure...the stuff we're using is mostly from the dinosaurs, so if they were living at that time, I highly doubt they would have had the same easy access to such fuels as we do today. Without fossil fuels and the cheap and dense energy they provide our current technological society could not exist. Our industrial revolution may not have happened. So assuming any previous technological society would build the same kinds of structures as we do today seems somewhat baseless. They might not have had enough energy for that.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 20 2018, @12:04AM (10 children)
One thing to consider: if a civilization had free energy and alchemy, would they need industrial sites? What if their housing were a suitable genetically engineered tree? What if they had a health so strong they did not need housing?
One other thing to consider: 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.
There is a sign of an early civilization, megalithic structures around the world. The idea that different cultures all used unwieldy big stones to build their stuff with all the associated logistic problems implies one of these:
- people were different
- people had some antigravity tech
- people could come up with a society that was so abundant in manpower they could devote an unreasonable effort (by today standards) to build stuff for their pharaohs.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:15AM (9 children)
We need specialized industrial sites for our alchemy. And to harness the free energy of the Sun, we have harnessed somewhere around a ninth of the Earth's surface for agriculture. So it's not that big a leap.
We would need more True Scotsmen to have a civilization.
The obvious rebuttals are that unwieldy big stones are everywhere - so it is not a stretch to have independently incorporated these things and developed related technologies everywhere, that the tech for moving big stones around is just not that advanced, and the manpower needed is not that extreme.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 20 2018, @11:53AM (8 children)
"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.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:33PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:41AM (6 children)
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.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:20PM
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)
Humans do and it's just not that hard to see that.
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:
All that junk merely indicates the presence of civilization.
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
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)
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.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:21AM (2 children)
What was the ad hominem?
Which would apply to anyone else as well.
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)
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.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:43PM
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?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 20 2018, @01:19AM
That's not the real problem. The real problem is mines and dumps. The dumps would appear as high grade ores of almost every metal mixed together. The mines would be severe discontinuities, places where mountains had been eaten away by no explainable process.
There's also the problem of the distribution of gold, which would be far more regular than any natural process could explain. If we assume that it was a fossil fuel based civilization, there would be records in lots of places of a inexplicable spike in CO2, and there's also the question of why there were such readily accessible fossil fuels. We've been using stuff that was laid down before the dinosaurs walked the earth. It's true, however, that there is still a lot of coal around, and coal that's currently inaccessible could become accessible with a bit of continent building and erosion. The same isn't really true of oil.
So while the question isn't really silly, the answer is "It would need to be back during the time of the dinosaurs, or earlier.". A few million years isn't long enough.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:52AM
Certain forms of buried stuff also cease to degrade when buried below the water table.
During an exceptional drought, we dug a pit about 30' deep near a river, the bottom 4' of that pit were still under water, and in that water we pulled up an amazingly preserved tree trunk. It didn't last long after it hit the air, but that tree trunk had been buried in the sand for a long, long time - at least many thousands of years. It was covered by two undisturbed layers of phosphate (AFAIK from when the area, now 30' above sea level, was under the ocean), and also a top layer of "hardpan" (iron oxide from the seasonal top of the water table) several inches thick.
The same happens with old shipwrecks, the water preserves them, like this one: http://www.jacksonville.com/news/20180328/old-shipwreck-washes-ashore-in-ponte-vedra-beach [jacksonville.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:12AM (2 children)
Corrodes in acid. After periods of volcanic activity, stainless steel will be damaged. It's also subject to stress from weather and can be damaged by lightning strikes. Over a period of a few million years, don't expect it to be very obvious. It also takes a long time for a new civilisation to understand it. If there had been a giant stainless steel structure sitting anywhere where humans evolved, it would likely have been completely stripped by the iron age.
Concrete degrades noticeably after a hundred years and is unlikely to be visible at all after a couple of thousand. Re-bar steel is cheap crap that rusts very quickly when exposed to water (which will happen after the concrete is weathered away). Expect it to be completely undetectable after a million years.
Glass is fragile and smashes. Weather the pieces enough and you're left with sand.
You might be onto something there. It takes a lot of energy to refine aluminium, but once you have done it's pretty resistant to corrosion. That said, it does end up coated in a fine layer of aluminium oxide, which may be stripped by abrasion over a sufficiently long timescale and allow the next layer to be exposed.
Most of these are under a thousand years old.
Assuming a tectonically stable area, of course.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 20 2018, @02:22PM (1 child)
I was going to say the same thing. The premise is that over millions of years crust gets subducted and recycled, so it's tough to think of tells that would last that long. It's pretty darn recent that we found enough evidence to support the theory of plate tectonics (in the 1950's and 60's), and it's not that many sites that supplied it. Gros Morne National Park [emporia.edu] in Newfoundland was designated a geologic UNESCO World Heritage site because its strata helped clinch it (really cool place, BTW--highly recommend it).
So it doesn't seem that hard to accept the possibility that we could have missed evidence of earlier civilizations, even if they had left fissile products, if we were looking in the wrong places. Heck, it's only just now that archeologists are searching below the waves for evidence of human habitation in Doggerland [thevintagenews.com], in recognition that sea levels and shorelines (where early peoples tended to settle) changed dramatically after the last ice age.
When I read the article I thought perhaps someplace off the Earth like the Moon would be a better place to preserve evidence of previous terrestrial industrialized civilizations, but that would further assume that that civilization also made it to the Moon and that the evidence was not covered up by ejecta from impacts occurring over that long time span.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 21 2018, @12:07PM
The moon is a pretty harsh environment. Two weeks of direct (unfiltered by atmosphere) followed by two weeks of no sunlight gives a temperature variation of a couple of hundred degrees, which weakens most materials. Radiation and vacuum both weaken things more. Lack of atmosphere also means impacts from micrometeors (tiny ones will burn up in our atmosphere, but will abrade the surface of the moon). Anything buried would have a much better chance of surviving (no tectonics, no temperature changes once you're deep enough, but we'd also be unlikely to find anything buried deep enough to be safe.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:46PM (8 children)
Like kinks in the evolutionary history markers in DNA?
Like exploitation of the coal seams from the carboniferous period which ended 300M years ago?
If they're talking about a happy hundred thousand creatures on the sub-continent of Atlantis who never colonized the globe - yeah, maybe.
Consider that, by the invention of the steam engine, homo sapiens were numerous in everywhere that wasn't ocean, mountainside or glacier.
A lot of what we are doing is shallow and short-lived, but 300M years from now another civilization as numerous, advanced and widespread as we are should easily be able to find traces of us. https://www.quora.com/If-humanity-died-today-how-long-would-the-pyramids-of-Giza-last [quora.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:11PM (7 children)
Given that humans have only been extant for a couple hundred thousand years, any technological *human* civilization would most likely have remnants that are identifiable today.
That said, who's to say that other beings didn't create a technological civilization 100 million years ago or more? That we have no evidence for such a civilization doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Given that large-brained mammals evolved to create a technological civilization over the past 10-15 million years leaves plenty of time in the geological past for large-brained creatures to have done the same over the past 500 million years.
Did it happen? We don't know. We have no evidence that it did, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in uncontrolled systems.
If we can hypothesize that there are extraterrestrial civilizations, hypothesizing that pre-human terrestrial civilizations existed seems a no-brainer, given the time scales involved.
Were there "dinosaur" civilizations? Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better as you haven't imbibed any green crack [leafly.com].
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:16PM (3 children)
If the technological civilization had the drive to expand (which is pretty much inbred in all of our DNA, from algae through dinosaurs and up), they would have left a visible mark.
If they were mammals ~10M years ago, they would have abundant skeletal remains (unless they were fastiduous cremators...), and with technology come signs of medicine...
Now, if they're just a little clique with a hydro-electric dam and they never left the valley - yeah, we could be missing that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:30PM (2 children)
Sure. Everything you wrote is plausible. However, you have no evidence to support your assertions.
I don't have any evidence to disprove them either. But that doesn't make you correct. My assertion (in the absence of contrary evidence), that a pre-human civilization *could* have existed is just as plausible.
The most reasonable answer is that it's unlikely but possible. And that's probably the best answer we'll ever get unless some actual evidence of a terrestrial, pre-human technological civilization is found.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @09:09PM (1 child)
Nah man. The more extraordinary the claim, the more burden of proof there is. You have no proof I didn't eat meat/gunk from an green alien with huge eyes for breakfast. Just because I equally have no proof I did eat an alien, doesn't mean people are going to believe me.
Lots of stuff has been preserved from the long distant past of this planet. To say an intelligent civilization, which would likely be able to make more durable materials (like we can), left no trace is unlikely.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday April 20 2018, @10:24PM
Thanks for agreeing with me. As I said in the comment to which you replied:
Now what, exactly, was your point, other than to agree with my amazing analytical skills?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:17AM (2 children)
Depends on how hard you looked. Here, it's pretty damning since we've looked a lot. You not only have to hide fossils of the creatures of the civilization, but also any closely related species.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday April 20 2018, @12:32AM (1 child)
Perhaps some of these might be descendants of such an intelligent species?
https://www.thoughtco.com/smartest-dinosaurs-1091961 [thoughtco.com]
Or not. Likely not, in fact.
But proving that it's not is nearly impossible. And every piece of evidence we *don't* find doesn't make such a hypothesis less plausible. Contrariwise, just *one* piece of verified evidence of a pre-human civilization is all that's required to validate it.
As such, it's foolish to reject such a hypothesis out of hand.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:53AM
What is "proof" here? You can't prove mathematically, that the entire universe isn't a delusion imposed on you by an evil god.
We're at zero pieces of verified evidence.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:39PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 20 2018, @12:50AM (3 children)
We didn't launch a single satellite before 1957. If you consider the technology of 1956 "primitive," I don't know what to tell you. I, for one, would be blown away by evidence of prehistoric atom bombs.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday April 20 2018, @01:18AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 20 2018, @02:42AM (1 child)
Right, but atom bombs are just a particularly striking example. We were beginning to make mechanical computers thousands of years before spaceflight. Are we calling Newton primitive, now? Galileo? Leonardo? Archimedes? And what of our own aristarchus? A civilization on par with the ancient Greeks, but existing tens of thousands (or millions) of years earlier, could hardly be called "primitive."
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday April 20 2018, @03:33AM
(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
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 20 2018, @05:07AM
Actually we know more about space than about the deep sea. There could be a civilization of deep sea organisms at the ground of the ocean right now without us knowing.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:16PM
That can't be true. We have many fossils of animals going back about 500 million years. Machines and manufactured items would leave imprints comparable to these fossilized animals. Now it's possible if the civilization were short-lived, the chance of leaving fossils is reduced, but we probably would have found something by now for anything continent-wide.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:08PM
Well I guess there are/was the Eloi, the Morlocks, then all the lizard people, the flatearth-nazis, various other aliens we never heard off ... then US! So no? So what was this pre-us-industrialization? Was there Cave-book? Gotta have cave-book!
So now that I have ridiculed the idea what does "industrial" really mean here? Are we talking Industrial revolution? Steam engines etc or are we just talking about industry in general? There might have been large civilizations that did things on an industrial scale. But more high-tech then us? I guess we have found various, more or less weird, artifacts here and there but something to rival us or even be our equal? None comes to mind. Unless they sort of find evidence for Atlantis (or similar) I do believe they would be shit out of luck. Sure we might be uncertain as to how various things were done but that doesn't mean ALIENS or that they where more advanced then us. From the summary it seems when they say industrial they mean a high tech society since they are looking for plastics, synthetics, metal composites not found in nature and unnatural amounts of radiation. I doubt that it has existed but as noted it can't be ruled out.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:12PM (11 children)
An industrial civilization, say only 50,000 years ago would seem virtually impossible to hide. In fact, we would already know about it.
(at least according to James P. Hogan's fiction novel Inherit The Stars)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:33PM (8 children)
Even concrete and steel I-beams don't last that long. Maybe they look like naturally occurring iron deposits. And if you compare Frederic Brown's "Letter To A Phoenix", we have forgotten the weapon that turned the fifth planet into the asteroid belt.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:46PM (7 children)
But fragile dinosaur eggs do! ???
Rectilinear metal rich veins inside rectilinear carbonate rock structures sealed inside of eroding lava flows are going to be pretty easy to detect. Especially when people start mining those rich metallic ore bodies and notice the appear lattice shaped.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday April 20 2018, @12:02AM (6 children)
How many dinosaurs ever lived? Probably billions. How many eggs did they lay? Many, many billions certainly. How many of those have we found? Very few.
It takes a very specific set of circumstances for something like that to be fossilized. Tar pits are a common example, as something can fall into the tar and be buried and free from oxygen, scavengers, and bacteria. You think technological societies are building their structures on these tar pits? Probably not. They're going to look for stable, fertile land, which also happens to be places where decomposition tends to occur pretty quick.
Preservation can occasionally happen by accident...we've got human remains mummified by deserts, or frozen in ice, or embalmed by bogs...but it's pretty rare, and it generally occurs in the kinds of places that a technological creature would try to avoid...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:19AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday April 20 2018, @03:01AM (1 child)
The point of my post was that they wouldn't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:28AM
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.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:34AM (1 child)
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.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @02:00PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @03:28PM
You *almost* got it here, but then missed it completely...
We're talking about a possible *industrial* civilization. How many structures would they have built? How many screwdrivers would they have had? Screws? Arrowheads?
How many of those have we found? Zero.
Sure, anything can be destroyed by millions of years of erosion. But, not *everything*.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:50PM (1 child)
It's in the first line of the summary!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:11PM
Yep. That's why in my post, I was specific to say 50,000 years ago.
Clearly there is some gradient of detectability between the those two times.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snow on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:21PM
I remember seeing it in the early 90s.
Ahh! I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNR4hKbSH7I [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:21PM (5 children)
Humbug! [memegenerator.net]
Did this civilization have no ego? Did they create nothing as durable as a dinosaur bone? Sure, lots of things would vanish, but unless the civilization was vanishingly small, someone, somewhere in the thousands of chemical capable, power using, industrial denziens would have carved something out of granite, probably hundreds or even thousands of somethings (think: Rapa Nui).
The continents move, rise and fall, and in millions of years lots of things will disappear, but not everything. Even geneticists should be able to point to markers in present day DNA to the effects of an industrial civilization millions of years ago.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:22PM (4 children)
".. the current area of urbanization is 'less than' 1% of the Earth's surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drilling sites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface. Note that even for early human technology, complex objects are very rarely found. For instance, the Antikythera Mechanism (ca. 205 BCE) is a unique object until the Renaissance."
"Even geneticists should be able to point to markers in present day DNA to the effects of an industrial civilization millions of years ago."
I believe that you are making an erroneous assumption. What would an industrial civilization DNA marker look like, and what is there to say that we have successfully ruled them out?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @12:21AM
The actual land area used for human activities is far greater than that. You have about a third devoted to agriculture and pasture land. You have somewhere around 5% used for the road system.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @03:45AM (2 children)
Again, utterly deceptive twaddlespeak, says I.
Creation of artifacts and monuments is not limited to urban areas. Rushmore's big strokes may erode in a few million years, but the smaller evidence of stone working will linger longer, and some tourist's piece of stone imported from somewhere weird left on the ground will be another strong clue that "creatures that moved long distances, carried things, and carved stone" were there.
The distribution of asphalt and concrete of the modern road system will still leave signs across the developed world for millions of years - not as clear as Roman roads are today, but an 18" thick vein of asphalt on a uniform crushed rock base stretching in two tracks 40' wide for hundreds of miles? That's a bit more clue than Slartibadfast's Fjords.
Based on modern experience? Domestication of both animals and plants. Vast explosions of monocultures and a major extinction event. Sudden death to dangerous predators, megafauna and easy prey.
"Civilization" didn't really go industrial until after we had more or less conquered the globe anyway. The industrial revolution just sealed the deal. Could a species "go industrial" without first conquering the globe? Sure, anything is possible - but is it probable? Once h. sapiens had steam power, we quickly spread to every scrap of habitable land on the planet. The Mayans knew about the wheel but didn't use it much beyond toys... is a civilization truly industrial if they know how to harness chemical and electrical power, but fail to put it into mass use?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Saturday April 21 2018, @07:25PM (1 child)
I do not think the implication was that it is.
"Rushmore's big strokes may erode in a few million years"
Not only that, but like the head of the Sphinx, it is not even an indication of an Industrial civilization.
"distribution of asphalt and concrete of the modern road system will still leave signs across the developed world for millions of years"
Beside the fact that asphalt is expensive and typically recovered and re-mixed before it is applied again, I'm pretty sure that a 3 kilometer think grinding ice sheet would take care of that in a few thousand years, if it doesn't end up at the bottom of the ocean. Romans roads do not serve the point you are trying to illustrate as they are only a couple or few thousand years old. I suppose you have never observed how vegetation can take over and break down an unmaintained asphalt road over a few decades.
"Domestication of both animals and plants. Vast explosions of monocultures and a major extinction event. Sudden death to dangerous predators, megafauna and easy prey."
These are not really DNA markers, and a past civilized society wouldn't necessarily behave like some behave today.
Mayans... a discussion about how the steam Engine and how it was invented to pump water out of coal mines in England would be more on topic, but the real point was whether is is possible that an industrial civilization could have existed before without us having yet found proof of it.
Likely not, I think, but if there were, it wouldn't be as easy to find out as most people educating themselves watching television seem to think. Nevertheless, you obviously are satisfied with your conclusions.
Fine with me, and all the best.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 22 2018, @12:09AM
The Mount Rushmore dig 6 million years from now will reveal something quite different from the Sphinx. The Sphinx was a hand labor of a large number of people, Mount Rushmore had a tiny labor force using technology to amplify their efforts. The giant pile of chiseled scree, which will probably survive burial underwater still showing signs of itself, shows the kinds of tools and methods used to carve - not to mention the network of roads around it which will also leave some long lasting traces in the soil layers.
If it's not in a continental subduction zone, it will be carrying the post-industrial marks of humanity for a long long time.
Yes, but, like the Mayan pyramids, the vegetation will erode, disrupt and slightly displace a road, but it won't digest it, particularly the thick bed under the asphalt. Glacier scrub could be a pretty effective surface wipe, but the bottom of the ocean is a preservation zone, depositing layer upon layer of protective silt preserving the structure of what's underneath.
I would hope not, but what civilized society hasn't domesticated animals?
And you yours, also. All the best as well.
Television and movies actually went on a kick about what the earth would look like after mankind dies off, around the time of that Will Smith epidemic movie. They got into all the various things that erode, and don't. They didn't get into geologic time, but of the fairly numerous things that last tens of thousands of years, some of those (not all) will be ending up in places not scrubbed by glaciers, subducted into the mantle, obliterated by asteroid strike, etc.
My basic conclusion is this: if something (that we recognize) as industrial society both existed and covered the globe (which I would consider more or less inevitable for an industrial society that we recognize as such), then, by now, we would have noticed. It wouldn't be Tomb Raider caches of Antikythera mechanisms, it would be patterns in the sediments, anomalies in the layers, a global strata of mixed up weirdness. For God's sake, they're confirming layers from impact events and small-ish volcanoes millions of years ago by their similarity around the world, if a civilization even only ran for 100 years before flaming out, that's a pretty heavy layer around the globe compared to the Arizona Crater fallout.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DutchUncle on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:29PM
This has been discussed in SF before: "Forever" (in human terms) is a very long time. We believe that we have evidence that the dinosaurs died out within pretty short time because of an extinction event, so it is reasonable to think there could have been other extinction events. We believe that we have evidence of continental drift and dramatically changing land masses, so it is reasonable to accept that we have very limited knowledge of the 3/4 of Earth that is currently underwater (we find Roman Empire - era things in the busy Mediterranean every now and then, having misplaced them for 2000 years; how much more might there be in deeper waters?) and similarly limited knowledge of sections of Earth that are currently very hard rock (Alps, Himalayas, Rockies, Andes, etc.). Our civilizations have clustered around coastlines; a little bit of sinking, or a little bit of continental plate collision, and the entire coastline becomes unavailable for research.
(Score: 2) by idiot_king on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:36PM (10 children)
How do we know that other animals would have constructed a "society" in any way that would be recognizable to us?
The various African tribes have had extraordinarily advanced social structures in their societies for presumably thousands upon years while not constructing things out of stone.
If other animal so-called "societies" existed, they wouldn't even have to reflect anything remotely resembling ours. Once again, we're anthropomorphizing things we don't even understand nor have the right tools to analyze or really even ask the right question.
It's very similar to when the Europeans showed up to the West and thought "Wow, look at these absolute savages." They had no idea how complex Native societies were despite being non-metal-users.
Other animals don't even have thumbs - take dolphins or orcas for example. Both are extremely intelligent yet neither could manipulate things with the dexterity we do. Whose to say they don't have their own kings and queens and courts? They clearly have language that we don't understand, they clearly communicate - it's not unreasonable that there was some undersea "society" millions of years ago that perhaps died out due to glaciers or whatever. Not to mention dinosaurs and the asteroid that presumably clobbered them outta existence.
My point is that if they're looking for other human-like societies that produced "industry," then obviously they're kind of begging the question. But that's always the hubris of science, it has to bumble around before it finds any sort of ethical way to ask a question. Like, "are races a biological or social construct or [etc]?" Well duh. They are purely social constructs, and we know that now. But even the big brain of Kant couldn't answer that on his own. So it's more likely we are just asking the wrong type of question out of ignorance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:49PM (1 child)
Did you miss the part in the title where the words "Industrial Civilization" were used?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:49PM
Porn is an industry: is that what they mean?
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:53PM (4 children)
If we really want ideas of what non-human development would be like, why don't we work on elevating species already on earth?
Teach chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, etc how to use fire, build rudimentary tools and structures, find who are the smartest among them and separate them into semi-isolated and isolated groups to develop their intellect further. Given time we might even find other animals that could be elevated. Dolphins and whales are already considered relatively smart, but would require de-evolving their bodies to regain arms and legs, which might have other effects due to the change in diet and physiology. Certain species of dogs and cats may be smart enough and close enough to articulatable paws to be selectively bred to use human-like tolls and technology, eventually being able to learn more fully from us. Various other mammalian species have hands of sufficient dexterity but not intellect, which might over another challenge, cultivating intellect in animals whose intellect is multiple eras away from our own.
Each of these could help gain new insight into our own development, while simultaneously providing insights into potential differences in alien species, as the evolving species act in ways we never expected or made provisions for. As an added bonus we might be able to convince them to do the same for other lesser evolved species, eventually raising intellect across the planet.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:16PM (1 child)
That seems like a huge waste of time compared to just genetically engineering them. If you don't want to use the cheat codes by just plopping human intelligence-related genes into the mix, you could also sequence thousands of animals and search for genes that seem to associated with greater intelligence, and then synthesize an embryo with those genes. Same story with regrowing arms and legs: gene expression in embryos (which look similar to one another at early stages) is already an active area of research and a targeted genetic engineering rather than breeding program could created legged whales relatively quickly. We could also work backwards to resurrect the now vestigial features, possibly using DNA from fossils to help (DNA has been recovered from older and older specimens over the years).
Ok, so if we "cheated" as described above, it wouldn't give us the insights we are looking for. In that case we might want to look at other approaches, such as increasing mouse intelligence as much as possible, and then releasing some into the wild to compete against their dumber counterparts and see if they can evolve further. Or creating somewhat random but still guided mutations using a computer. Or finding a way to fully simulate a life form on a computer so we can create an infinite number of accurate virtual species without needing to put all of them into production.
Alternatively, if we crack life extension, an individual scientist could conceivably pursue the intellect cultivation project over a period of centuries, using slower methods.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:58PM
Fnnaaarkle!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @11:43PM
> Teach chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, etc how to use fire, build rudimentary tools and structures, find who are the smartest among them and separate them into semi-isolated and isolated groups to develop their intellect further.
whatcouldgowrong [imdb.com]
(Score: 2) by leftover on Friday April 20 2018, @01:00AM
Considered insightfully in David Brin's "Uplift Wars" series.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @01:56AM (2 children)
Except of course for the various African tribes that did construct [wikipedia.org] things out of stone.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @04:04AM (1 child)
Right, and would you call those extraordinarily socially advanced cultures industrial, when they're not even constructing things of stone - much less using electricity or advanced metallurgy?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:15AM
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:44PM (10 children)
An unstated assumption that underpins the thinking that we must be the first on Earth is that surely, civilization would last a very, very long time, and likely would still exist today.
However, if a civilized species arose and nevertheless went extinct, the big question would be why are they gone?
Possible that they got so bored of life they deliberately committed suicide. Seems extremely unlikely that millions of individuals would all feel that way at the same time, but perhaps they did it by not having offspring anymore, then partied until they all dropped from a combination of old age and the stress of partying too hard.
They probably had the power to destroy their environment. They could have screwed up and done it unwittingly, and sealed their doom. Could have had a nuclear war. All the ways we've seen of ending ourselves, they could have also done.
A third possibility is that they were caught in a global scale disaster. In all of our own history, it is only very recently that we might be able to stop a big, dinosaur killing asteroid strike.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:49PM (6 children)
If the Mayans died out and nobody replaced them, a couple of thousand years of jungle action would hide their civilization well, but not so well that it wouldn't be found eventually.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)
Imagine if all those precious metals we were mining out of the earth in atomic or oxidized states were in fact the remains of past civilizations. Perhaps even the easy to access metals from tens of thousands of years in the past were originally monuments to past civilizations, but not being sufficiently intelligent, educated, scientifically curious they were melted down and made into new precious items for the following civilizations.
Lots of possible ways that remnants of past civilizations were destroyed. Just think about how much of that has gone on thanks to redevelopment efforts in the modern world, and with less enlightened civilizations sometimes discovered artifacts would be intentionally destroyed because the record of their existence was considered a threat to the status quo.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @02:02AM
The problem is that we're a lot better at finding such artifacts than those primitive cultures would be.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday April 20 2018, @10:38AM (3 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @01:04PM (2 children)
Isn't that basically what the whole field of anthropology is about?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 21 2018, @12:09PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 21 2018, @02:26PM
Anthropology: We extrapolate a lot, full stop.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:51PM
And of course that would leave no trace what so ever, right?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:56PM (1 child)
It wasnt boredom. They were much more psychic back then (thoughts were basically transmitted over unencrypted wifi), then in a time of global war the side about to lose concentrated all thier power simulataneously on suicidal thoughts. Every being except the least psi sensitive died, we are descended from the survivors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:19PM
Until G'Quan and the last of the mind-walkers drove the invaders out and were killed for their trouble.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:52PM
lick it and stick it
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:57PM (4 children)
Well somebody made those megaliths, and made them better than we can figure out these days.
We could build a stonehenge, that thing's crude, but the stuff in Peru is really amazing.
Must have had a civilization advanced enough to have the time and motivation to build stuff big.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @02:24AM (3 children)
Only because it's not worth our bother to devote a lot of effort to figuring that out. Our technologies have for the most part gone away from large scale stonework. And at the present pace of human development, any construction that would take centuries to complete, would also be centuries obsolete.
Finally, I think a lot of people just don't get the scale of projects humans do these days. For example, one of the more grand US civil engineering ideas was a plan [wikipedia.org] to divert water from Alaska and northwest Canada rivers to southern California. Among other things, it had six nuclear plants just for moving water around. Such a project would probably have taken around three decades to complete on an ambitious schedule. It was nixed because the plan was utterly impractical, imposing a substantial economic and environmental burden on a large portion of western North America (Canada, for example, had absolutely not natural incentive for going along on the project) just so Los Angeles could have more water. But it was far from impossible.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @04:23AM (2 children)
Those same six nuclear power plants could desalinate a whole lot of Pacific Ocean water...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 20 2018, @04:30AM (1 child)
It probably would have been somewhat more efficient delivery of fresh water, from Los Angeles' point of view.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 20 2018, @12:50PM
Somebody prompted me with the thought that, at the population density of New York, 7.6 billion people fit in the space of Texas. So, if you did that, how many nuclear power plants would it take to desalinate 760 billion gallons of water per day? I ran the numbers, desalination is surprisingly efficient, I think it came up to less than 1000 "big" nuclear power plants.
🌻🌻 [google.com]