[HN Gopher] Pushing It Back
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Pushing It Back
Author : mpweiher
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-12-31 09:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| nakedrobot2 wrote:
| I'm just finishing _Shaman_ by Kim Stanley Robinson. While he
| usually writes sci-fi, this one is about a group of very early
| humans. It is absolutely riveting, fascinating, and beautiful. I
| absolutely recommend this book for anyone who is curious about
| how early humans might have lived.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Stephen Baxter's "Manifold: Origin" novel also describes the
| potential lives of non-Sapiens hominins, including their inner
| thoughts. I'm not sure how well researched it was, and the
| whole thing definitely has a more science fiction than
| historical fiction background, but it was an interesting
| (albeit not a very happy+) read:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(Baxter_novel)
|
| + None of his books are. But they're still very good.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| This doesn't fit into the rest of the discussion above, but
| the Malazan series absolutely blew me away with a subplot
| (!!) about ancient hominids making epic sacrifices to allow
| modern humans to exist.
|
| This is (a) set in a fantasy world (b) has zero bearing in
| any real archeological or anthropological evidence and (c) is
| meant to be entertaining fiction more than an investigation
| into how early hominids might have lived. And yes, there are
| lots of magic and dragons involved.
|
| However, the creators of this world were field archaeologists
| and anthropologists and their instincts for telling stories
| spanning evolutionary time scales is absolutely unrivaled.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| One of my favorite scifi/fantasy series as a child was set
| in our world, but in which things like magic & Baba Yaga
| were real, historical entities. I forget how their eventual
| disappearance was justified, but I loved it as a kid.
|
| I _think_ it was this series here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisa_Selezneva
|
| One of the stories was turned into a great piece of
| animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the
| _Third_Plane...
|
| And apparently this movie is also set in the same
| continuity?:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guest_from_the_Future
| WallyFunk wrote:
| > One logical possibility would be written records of some sort,
| using a substrate that hasn't survived--prone to waterlogging or
| insects, modern paper would certainly not survive across tens of
| kiloyears
|
| Sometimes impermanence is a feature, not a bug. I was always told
| by my elders: 'The Internet is forever'. Once you put things on
| it, it's hard for them to be removed. A permanent record of
| sorts. But over the years I've found many sites just evaporate
| with entire Library of Alexandria events occurring daily on the
| web. Yes, we have Archive.org which has mirror copies, but it
| doesn't catch everything.
|
| And bit rot is useful too. After I die, I don't really want my
| precious data lingering around. Let it rot.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _There 's some evidence of worked beads and jewellery going
| back up to 70ky; there's no reason to suspect that fabric may not
| be similarly old, or even older--it's simply labour-intensive to
| manufacture (so scarce to begin with) and doesn't last much
| longer than a human lifetime._
|
| There's an interesting recent PBS video on this topic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opg6RO9cYnk
| flir wrote:
| There's an SF story I don't want to spoiler that includes a metal
| shipwreck getting buried in sediment and making it into
| sedimentary rock. Google suggests that over 20k ships were lost
| in WWII alone.
|
| Even reduced to little more than rust and concretions, that will
| make for some bloody funny fossils in the future. Cars might only
| last 15 years, but scrapyards last a hell of a lot longer than
| that.
|
| So for there to be _no possibility_ of artifact survival, I think
| you need complete turnover of the rocks in the Earth 's crust.
| The oldest rocks on Earth are found in the Acasta Gneiss in
| Canada, and are 3.58 to 4.031 billion years old.
|
| For ruling out a prehuman civilization, the question of the
| maximum theoretical "resolution" that we can observe the Earth at
| might be more important than the survival of the artifacts. I
| reckon _something_ always survives; the real question is can we
| find it? For example finding Otzi was dumb luck... how many Otzi
| 's have we missed? How many peat bog bodies ended up as John
| Innes No3?
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| What story? Or would that count as the spoiler?
| flir wrote:
| Shortened link to the novel's wiki page:
| https://shorturl.at/uP123 But yes, once you have that
| context, it's a spoiler.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| Thank you! Added to my list blindly so I'll forget all
| about it :)
| flir wrote:
| No problem. From what I remember (thirty years ago!) at
| that stage in his career he was trying to stake out as
| many successful futurist predictions as possible, so the
| novels from around that time feel like excuses to
| shoehorn in lots of near-future "...and then there was a
| peaceful revolution in South Africa" stabs in the dark.
| Honestly, I found it tiresome. YMMV.
| zoogeny wrote:
| There was a study funded by NASA on the topic which made the
| rounds back in the day. Here is the Scientific American take:
| [1], here is PBS Space Time YouTube: [2]
|
| The topic pops up now and again, most recently called the The
| Silurian Hypothesis. There are many articles in respectable
| sources on the subject, it goes beyond science fiction into
| literal science.
|
| For example, you might wonder how long it would take for some
| large portion of the surface of the earth to subduct. I believe
| the answer to that question is in the paper discussed in that
| article.
|
| 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-
| industri...
|
| 2.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyEWLhOfLgQ&ab_channel=PBSSp...
| Nzen wrote:
| Along the same lines as the pbs video, I enjoyed Kurzgesagt's
| video [0] about our ability to sense ancient aliens.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRvv0QdruMQ 12 minutes
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _and are 3.58 to 4.031 billion years old._
|
| To make the context explicit: age of earth is only ~4,5 billion
| years
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Designed lifespans like "2-6 years for a cell phone" are a red
| herring. The notched logs in Zambia weren't intended to last to
| the present day either. A cell phone might stop _functioning_ as
| a cell phone after 10 years or so, but it will be recognizable as
| an ex-cell phone for a long, long time after that.
| nabla9 wrote:
| While metal objects can completely rust away over time, they
| leave weird shapes of high metal content soil shaped like the
| object.
|
| If someone used rebar, you would detect strange lines of iron
| oxides in the soil. Those would be destroyed over large
| geological timescales.
| pixl97 wrote:
| What's more interesting than rebar is the question of "how much
| rebar", a large enough industrial production and you're going
| to start modifying entire geological strata with chemical
| changes that might be able to be detected, depending what it
| is.
| Podgajski wrote:
| Think about all the hominids that came before us that were
| intelligent enough to have tools and make structures to live in.
| They survived over 500,000 years and left barely a trace.
|
| And then look at the last 1000 years. And see how much we've
| destroyed and the plastic layer of garbage they'll be able to
| decode 400,000 years from now.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| This is called the Silurian Hypothesis.
| User23 wrote:
| I'm entirely agnostic on the existence of pre-ancient advanced
| civilizations. I do think however that, at least in the works
| that reach a general audience, archeologist, anthropologists, and
| so on might be getting a little too much mileage out of absence
| of evidence is evidence of absence.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "The World Without Us"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Us-Alan-Weisman-ebook/d...
|
| A very detailed look at how long things last.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| There's a great HN thread I saved a few years ago that delves
| into this topic:
|
| Was there a civilization on Earth before humans?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837120
|
| The top comment by peatmoss:
|
| > This is one of my all-time favorite "what if" questions. Some
| years ago a friend of mine coily posed this same question to me:
| What does humankind make that would survive 60 million years into
| the future, and if some other advanced industrial civilization
| had existed 60 million years ago, how would we know? It turns out
| my friend had put a LOT of thought into this exact question.
| Enough to do a masters in geology, his work ultimately making it
| into a high profile journal with writeups in places like the NY
| Times. He started talking to various geologists about what might
| survive as telltale markers of our civilization. Buildings or
| structures of any sort? Ha! Statues and monuments? Maybe we'd
| notice the odd deposit or two of minerals. After going through a
| long list of candidates, he settled on carbon cenospheres. These
| are little balls of carbon almost exclusively made in internal
| combustion engines as the result of aerosolizing fossil fuels.
| Sixty million years ago, our love of the ICE will show up in the
| fossil record as a light dusting of cenospheres covering the
| earth--contemporaneous with massive numbers of species going
| extinct due to mankind's other influence. And as my friend was
| telling me his story, this is where my hair stood on end. Sixty
| million years ago we see a massive species extinction... and a
| light dusting of carbon cenospheres covering the globe. But we
| also see unnatural levels of iridium at the same point. And,
| while it's hypothetically possible some industrial civilization
| was mining iridium and blanketing the globe with it, it's more
| probable that the iridium was delivered by an asteroid. But how
| would you know? So my friend, as part of his research, went
| taking samples of his cenospheres from around the globe. What he
| found was interesting: namely, the further one gets from the
| Yucatan (where scientists had already validated there was an
| asteroid strike), the cenospheres get smaller. The big heavy ones
| precipitated out of the air closest to the Yucatan asteroid
| strike. Hardly likely to be coincidence. So much for ancient
| civilization this time around. However, his work rewrote a
| critical understanding of the KT asteroid extinction event.
| Namely, we previously thought most of the carbon at the KT
| boundary was the result of giant forest fires ignited by the
| strike. However we now know that the strike must have aerosolized
| massive oil fields under the Yucatan at that time and set them
| ablaze. Not a bad contribution to science starting from a sci-fi
| premise!
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