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posted by
janrinok
on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30AM
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
AnonTechie writes:
"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"
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Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All
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Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Open4D on Monday March 03 2014, @02:10PM
Even accepting that, how successful would these people be, starting out again? My theory is that modern day humankind has been lucky; we had easy access to the raw materials (fertilizers, metals, etc.) and energy that we needed to build ourselves into this fairly advanced civilisation. Those easily accessible materials are gone now (or dispersed & contaminated) - but that's okay because our fairly advanced civilisation is able to do things like extract oil from deep-sea wells (normally) and carry out aeroplane & satellite geological surveys to find new places to mine for all our raw materials.
But what if all that was lost? I think it would be so much harder for any future human society to boot itself up to our current 21st Century level, that I wouldn't be surprised if it just doesn't happen in the time available (i.e. while the planet remains habitable). It's one reason why we have to be careful not to risk the collapse of our current civilization. (We should make it sustainable, for starters.)
So to bring it back on topic, I can easily imagine that alien cvilizations could have existed in the past and now be (effectively) gone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 03 2014, @03:08PM
Don't need worldwide nuke exchange, even a substantial financial impact could be exciting.
The major domestic coal producers are all basically going bankrupt in the next decade for a bunch of financial and geological reasons. So bail them out for a little while, or just stop burning coal in the USA, or ... ?
This is reminiscent of the "can't build a saturn V" meme. No, we can't, probably ever again. We might be able to build something bigger and more powerful and more modern, but rolling back the clock is hard.
(Score: 1) by SuperCharlie on Monday March 03 2014, @05:46PM
So to bring it back on topic, I can easily imagine that alien cvilizations could have existed in the past and now be (effectively) gone.
Im thinking more along the lines of a billion years or more being enough time for a sun to consume a planet, galaxies colliding, planets colliding, etc.. catastrophes on the scale of complete obliteration well before we climbed out of the ooze.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by etherscythe on Monday March 03 2014, @06:12PM
Gun, Germs, and Steel [pbs.org] talked about this very kind of thing - particularly related to why (human) civilization took off in a technology sense in some places, but remains barely above subsistence farming in others. Without the critical availability of certain materials and time-saving techniques that allowed societies to develop specialization and economy of scale, modern chemistry, aerospace engineering, and the internet will never develop. You're back in pretty much the same place if these same resources are used up or destroyed in a major cataclysm.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:25PM
Iron is "the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust". Silicon (glass) is #2. And unlike aluminum, they're both easily extracted and processed into useful forms with the most primitive of technology (fire). With those two, alone, you could bootstrap electrical power generation in a few weeks, and be putting it to good labor-saving uses (pumping water, heating/cooling, transportation, etc.) in no-time. Iron (or steel) wires wouldn't be as efficient as copper (#26), but they'd still do the job well enough.
Portable energy for transportation is trickier, but excess electricity can make hydrogen from water, or charge simple batteries. A couple lead plates, or nickel and iron, both in acid, and you've got rechargeable golf-cart batteries after the apocalypse.
It's the technical knowledge we have now, that early humans lacked. And it's very hard to entirely get rid of such useful knowledge.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.