[HN Gopher] Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Human...
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Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humans on Earth?
Author : dnetesn
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-07-14 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| Scramblejams wrote:
| I enjoyed this comment on the subject from a few years ago,
| focusing on a search for carbon cenospheres as a sentinel for an
| earlier civilization:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837470
| coldcode wrote:
| At the risk of angering the HN crowd, there was about 65M years
| ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXpRWHVIPE
|
| It's pretty funny.
| xoa wrote:
| A civilization that got to "industrial" but didn't make it to the
| nuclear and particularly space age certainly seems like it could
| leave little trace over long periods depending on how the cards
| fell. However, if nothing else our civilization has made a habit
| of disposing of geosync satellites past their life time into
| super synchronous graveyard orbits that will last a _really_ long
| time. At the rate things are going there is also reasonable
| chance we 'll have a much more significant presence on the moon
| at least before any complete implosion seems probable (if we get
| eaten by AI that doesn't spell the end of development so doesn't
| count by itself, the AI would then have to also implode or leave
| no trace for new biological life to arise). Any sort of lunar
| base would also likely stick around a very long time at this
| point with the heavy solar bombardment no longer taking place.
| Granted, a new civilization would have to itself get quite a ways
| along to notice these artifacts and what they were if everything
| on Earth was gone.
| hoten wrote:
| If we weren't already tracking those decommissioned satellites,
| would we know they were there?
| api wrote:
| What I love about this line of thinking is that it highlights the
| fact that time is as vast as space. Things hundreds of millions
| or billions of years ago are as far away as distant stars, even
| if they happened here on our own planet.
| bsder wrote:
| Tyrannosaurus Rex existed closer in time to humans than it did
| to Stegosaurus.
|
| Time is _stupid big_.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| fucking hell, yeah it is.
| leafmeal wrote:
| Obviously this doesn't apply when speaking on the scale of
| millions of years, but I remember reading that there may not be
| enough easily accessible energy sources (ie fossil fuels) left to
| jump start another industrial civilization if our current one
| where to collapse.
| montagg wrote:
| Well, maybe in another 65 million years, whatever's around will
| just use us and the rest of this era's biomass as crude oil in
| the next cycle.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Well, "why did so much coal form during the Carboniferous
| period" is an interesting question. One theory is that plants
| started to produce lignin (wood) and other novel compounds
| during that time, while fungi and bacteria had not yet
| evolved the ability to break them down. So lots of organic
| matter was piling up on the ground and not being released
| back into the atmosphere. (Fun related note, the oxygen level
| in the atmosphere rose to very high levels during this time,
| which enabled gigantism in insects and amphibians - organisms
| that depend on simple diffusion of oxygen for their
| respiratory system). Eventually all that organic matter could
| be buried and fossilized.
|
| So anyway, since fungi and bacteria are more evolved today,
| it's unlikely that such massive buildup of organic matter
| would occur again. Any given burial event would trap less
| organic material, so the resulting fossil fuel deposits would
| be smaller and it would take much longer for a given amount
| of carbon to be buried.
|
| Of course this is just one theory and there are many other
| factors in fossil fuel formation as well.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| It's impossible to know with our current level of technology.
| It's likely to be impossible to know, ever. That's really
| beautiful.
| simmerup wrote:
| I hope I'm not the only one that read this as some sort of
| species hunting humans like the wraith from Stargate
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any
| headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word
| no."
| contact9879 wrote:
| I would argue that Betteridge's law breaks down when the point
| of the article is to invoke readers to ask themselves the
| question.
| blululu wrote:
| The arguments here feels like they would apply to pre-industrial
| civilization but I would suspect that the artifacts of modern
| civilization are pretty glaring in the fossil record. The layer
| of lead on the surface is not going to go away anytime soon. The
| same applies to a variety of other elements that we have blown
| into the atmosphere - to say nothing of the crazy amount of
| chicken bones and concentrations of strange metals that we have
| produced.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern
| humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils
| we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient
| nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast
| metal part.
|
| As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all
| of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some
| higher life forms from such an earlier civilization have been in
| the fossil record?
| getmeinrn wrote:
| Random thought, but if we extrapolate the path we're on in
| terms of biodegradability and sustainability, it's not
| ridiculous to assume that a very advanced version of us would
| have developed the technology and legislation to ensure that
| all products biodegrade safely within X years.
| blueflow wrote:
| This doesn't undo all the stuff that already is in the ground
| and rivers everywhere.
| FredPret wrote:
| After a long time hanging around, some organism might
| evolve that eats it though
| jboogey wrote:
| A great Atlantic article explaining how current human
| civilzation might appear in a fossil record in the distant
| future
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...
| [deleted]
| tarikjn wrote:
| Not pre-human but challenging the understood modern human
| timeline of industrialisation -- We have not found the tools,
| but we may have found the products; in the form of stone-based
| vases that archeologists attribute to the Early Egyptian Period
| but are believed to be from much earlier, and would have
| required tools that have not been discovered yet. The channel
| UnchartedX make a compelling argument about this hypothesis:
| https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| You were assuming that their industrial civilization would
| look anything like ours. Why do they need nuts and bolts? Why
| couldn't they have use some natural form of biodegradable
| materials?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| What a silly video. The argument he's making is called a
| unilinear teleology. History is not an arrow-line march from
| less advanced to more advanced, and it's _incredibly_ common
| for the apparent workmanship of artifacts to "regress" as
| styles and intentions change over time. Just look at all the
| people who complain about modern art because "classical takes
| more skill".
|
| Also, there's essentially nothing you can't do with stone
| given primitive tools, sand, and a shitload of talent/time.
| One thing about ancient people is that they had all of these
| in abundance. Making arguments from the position of "they
| couldn't have done this with the tools they had" is _almost
| always_ wrong because it 's coming from a modern perspective
| of how tedious and uneconomical it'd be to do it today.
| tarikjn wrote:
| As someone who works with manufacturing, I don't think it's
| silly. Precision is not just a function of time available,
| manpower and talent, but also tooling technology.
| Manufacturing a single replica with today's technology is
| believed to be challenging -- and has not been attempted
| yet -- but hopefully someone will take the challenge soon.
| There are no serious claims that these can be made with
| known ancient technology and time+manpower. Your response
| is often the response of people in archeology who do not
| understand precision manufacturing with hard materials, and
| shows how underrated these artifacts are.
| lumost wrote:
| Pre-history is tough. Outside of written accounts and a few
| major cities cited in particular environments - there isn't a
| lot of evidence about what humans were doing for 100k years
| before the Roman/Chinese empires formed. Even Egyptian
| history is pretty spotty.
|
| We know there were civilizations in North America such as the
| Mississippi River valley mound builders - but our knowledge
| tops out at "they existed". It would not surprise me if
| agrarian civilization rose and fell multiple times due to
| climate change.
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| Maybe we should look off planet, look to the Lagrange
| points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
|
| We might find some old equipment from an elder spacefaring
| species. If we don't find anything, maybe we should leave
| some human monuments out there so the next civilization can
| know about us.
| roseway4 wrote:
| As the Wikipedia article mentions, we've already done
| just this with the JWST...
| barelysapient wrote:
| I like to wonder what undiscovered fossils exist below the
| oceans that cover 70 percent of our planet.
| blueflow wrote:
| Look up about continental vs ocean crust, ocean crust is
| younger and has a shorter lifetime. You have better chances
| finding maritime fossils on land.
| JackFr wrote:
| One hundred million years is a long time for a screwdriver.
| hooande wrote:
| This assumes that their technology would be similar to ours.
| They could have used biological mechanical parts, made from
| plant or animal material. They could have had radically
| different theories of mechanics or construction that better fit
| the state of the planet at their time.
|
| In general the statement "They couldn't have been civilized
| because they aren't exactly like us" limits what we look for
| and how we look for it.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I figure that any industrialized civilization would have left
| indirect evidence of itself by mucking up the fossil record
| with introduced species. We intentionally and unintentionally
| introduce plants and animals far outside their natural range.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
|
| You would see some species inexplicably take on a worldwide
| distribution, or see species suddenly turn up on far away
| landmasses with no good explanation.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorioactis
|
| The link above is fascinating, but I do not think it is
| evidence of any past civilization. This probably happened
| naturally, but it does seem exceedingly rare. If there were a
| past industrial civilization there would probably be tens of
| thousands of examples like this one.
| naasking wrote:
| How many introduced species are there as a percentage of all
| existing species? This seems like an important number to
| calculate the probability that we might have missed such an
| introduced species given the fossil record we have.
|
| It could also be that introduced species are less likely to
| be found in the fossil record for whatever reason.
|
| Then again, maybe we have found such a thing but haven't
| recognized it for what it is due to missing context.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| That's a good point, and I don't have an answer. In my mind
| I was thinking of more obvious examples, like camels being
| introduced to Australia. Or cichlids from Lake Victoria
| being introduced into isolated lakes in North America. The
| idea being that you would notice some very obvious out-of-
| place fossils.
|
| I also assume that these species, often invasive, would
| outlast the civilizations that introduced them. So you
| could probably also infer some of this by looking at
| descendant populations.
| naasking wrote:
| We would naturally just assume that the same species
| appearing in different places just implied that those
| places were closer together in the past + migration. And
| so we have Pangaea before continental drift.
|
| If we lacked progenitors of those species in some places,
| we would just call it a temporary gap in the fossil
| record, of which we have many.
|
| We're pretty good at inventing explanations. Eventually
| these gaps might start looking conspicuous, but I'm not
| sure if we're at that point yet.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Interesting thought. However, one of the ideas that the
| article brings up is the extreme undersampling problem of
| fossil records. Its conceivable that a 300 year
| blip->catastrophe would be missed entirely in the fossil
| record.
| redandblack wrote:
| Obligatory Pratchett reference -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| The article indicated that surface turnover could have removed
| that evidence.
| topspin wrote:
| And yet we have 3.4 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils.
| zen928 wrote:
| yep. these kind of thought experiments are cute but it's so
| easy to just immediately dismiss bad science that wants to
| ignore historical record to write paragraphs of fanfiction
|
| the main crux of these arguments always depends on how it's
| hard to prove something didn't happen without exact
| historical evidence for every single organism in every
| single recorded geologic period, which is a terminating
| thought to actually holding a rational conversation. OK,
| cool, then we also: live in a simulation, are observed by
| aliens or influenced by aliens, move to alternate realities
| every time we sleep, etc. wow, so "interesting"!!
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Various sci-fi has explored this idea, for example Mass
| Effect, but "Reaper" species could explain that.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| If that were the case, perhaps someday we will find evidence
| on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System that an earlier
| civilization achieved space flight before they were erased
| from Earth and unable to establish a permanent foothold
| elsewhere in our corner of the cosmos. The Moon and other
| celestial bodies in the Solar System of course have their own
| processes that erase the surface over time, but at least with
| the Moon, it does appear to be a far slower process.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jfk13 wrote:
| Surprised no-one has mentioned Betteridge's Law of Headlines yet.
| StackOverlord wrote:
| Evidence for a Large Anomalous Nuclear Explosions in Mars Past
| J.E. Brandenburg
|
| https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/eposter/2660.pdf
| rationalist wrote:
| That was interesting until the last slide which had pictures of
| "objects" imaged on mars. At least one of those images has been
| debunked (random elevations creating coincidentally-interesting
| shadows).
|
| If that slide was a joke, they should have made it obvious for
| those looking at the slides without context of a presentation.
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