[HN Gopher] The Silurian Hypothesis
___________________________________________________________________
The Silurian Hypothesis
Author : gtsnexp
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-11-11 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pacificklaus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pacificklaus.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Related discussion about a year ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668884
|
| And some threads from 2, 4, 5 and 7 years ago (did a pre-
| civilization discuss the possibility of a pre-pre-civilization?)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34755970
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23654393
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840320
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899478
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological
| record? (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668884
| - Dec 2023 (187 comments)
|
| _Silurian Hypothesis_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34755970 - Feb 2023 (60
| comments)
|
| _Did Advanced Civilizations Exist Before Humans? Silurian
| Hypothesis [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837757 - Sept 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Silurian Hypothesis: Were There Civilizations on Earth Before
| Humans? (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23654393
| - June 2020 (138 comments)
|
| _The Silurian Hypothesis_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840320 - Dec 2019 (52
| comments)
|
| _Silurian hypothesis_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17899478 - Sept 2018 (7
| comments)
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I often think that a more interesting question would be that if
| there were another civilisation here on earth _right now_ , would
| we even recognise it as such?
|
| We are terribly preoccupied with tool use and physical artefacts
| as a defining factor of intelligence - anthropocentrism is of
| course pretty much inevitable, even when we talk of cephalopods.
| malfist wrote:
| Check out the book "Mountain in the Sea", it's based on that
| premise and is a nebula award winner
| world2vec wrote:
| It's an amazing book, highly recommend.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Sounds very much like my cup of tea, thanks! I've ordered it.
| necroforest wrote:
| yeah, and as far as I'm aware there isn't even a _definition_
| of "civilization" or "intelligence" that doesn't boil down to
| "sufficiently like me".
| empath75 wrote:
| I'm with you on intelligence, but the hallmark of
| civilization is right in the etymology -- the existence of
| cities.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, all right, do ants form cities? Yes, they do, at
| least of a kind.
|
| You could even argue that lichen is a city, inhabited by
| multiple species.
|
| I mean, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to argue than either
| of those really are a civilization. But if "city" is your
| sole criterion...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Or a beehive. Bees moved into the basement window of my
| house and watching them go in and out it seemed to me
| that this single beehive had more departures and arrivals
| than all the commercial airports in the world put
| together.
|
| If you look at the problem of "bee decline" from the
| viewpoint of the beekeeper where you are responsible for
| it you are responsible for a "city" of 50,000 insects
| that faces all kinds of threats from the inside and
| outside.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Ant nests and beehives aren't cities, they are
| households, consisting of a single family.
| krisoft wrote:
| > hallmark of civilization is right in the etymology -- the
| existence of cities.
|
| That is not really the etymology of "civilisation" though.
| City and civilisation share etymological roots, but city is
| not the etymological origin of the world civilisation.
|
| And of course then we just ask the question: what are
| cities? Do gopher, or prairie dog colonies count? (or are
| those just towns? :)) How about ant colonies or bee hives?
|
| Clearly all of the above share some similarities with some
| human settlements. They also have important differences of
| course. So if we want to decide if there are other
| "civilisations" on Earth parallel with us, we have to be
| more precise with our definitions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _city is not the etymological origin of the world
| civilisation_
|
| Civilisations are a subset of societies [1]. Urbanisation
| is commonly held as a divider between complex societies
| and full-blown civilisations.
|
| > _then we just ask the question: what are cities?_
|
| This is valid. I'd say the defining attribute is
| economies of scale. Ant colonies and bee hives
| demonstrate elements of this; the sum is greater than the
| whole.
|
| Whether ants and bees form complex societies is less
| debatable, unless we reduce the terms to mean intricate
| where we begin enveloping colonies of trees and every
| social animal, potentially even just multicellular life,
| which while poetically pleasing isn't useful.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization
| pvg wrote:
| _tool use and physical artefacts_
|
| Maybe but it's also because these things are evidence of
| cultural transmission - a thing for which there hasn't been
| strong evidence of in other species and people do look for it
| in other ways.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We are terribly preoccupied with tool use and physical
| artefacts as a defining factor of intelligence_
|
| In the context of civilisation, intelligence isn't enough.
| Nomadic tribes are sapient, intelligent and have rich cultures,
| but they aren't strictly civilisations.
|
| The urban distinction is important because of economies of
| scale: pastoral societies are energy constrained. That doesn't
| make them less interesting, again strictly speaking, personally
| it sort of does, but it does make them less powerful.
|
| Within the Silurian context, the urban distinction is almost
| demanding: if humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is
| a good chance all evidence of our tool use would have
| disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of
| years.
| pvg wrote:
| _Nomadic tribes are sapient, intelligent and have rich
| cultures, but they aren't strictly civilisations._
|
| Some pastoral societies have taken serious issue with this
| view
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire#/media/File:Mong.
| ..
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Some pastoral societies have taken serious issue with
| this view_
|
| Where is the evidence the Mongols took issue with this
| view? They certainly seemed to recognise the value of
| cities.
|
| To my knowledge, the practice of falsely conflating
| intelligence and civilisation to be offended that not every
| society formed a civilisation is a modern occupation.
| pvg wrote:
| _Where is the evidence the Mongols took issue with this
| view?_
|
| I think if you eat all neighbouring civilizations in a
| few decades, you're definitely a civilization.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you eat all neighbouring civilizations in a few
| decades, you 're definitely a civilization_
|
| If you run the cities, yes. If you only raid them, no.
|
| (The Mongols built roads and founded a Chinese dynasty.
| They were a civilisation.)
| pvg wrote:
| This is a slightly silly discussion because the
| 'civilization' the Silurian hypothesis is concerned with
| is something like human civilization as a whole.
|
| Whether pastoralists are a 'civilization' (or even more
| fraught, 'civilized') seems like a completely arbitrary
| distinction to try to make, especially on the basis of
| something like 'cities'. The ability to organize, direct,
| coordinate, supply and project military power over great
| distances is a hallmark of plenty of things we think of
| as 'civilizations' and the Mongols were easily the world
| heavyweight champion of that, in their day. A great
| number of people found out the fact a stone wall is much
| harder to move than a yurt is not the tremendous
| civilizational advantage they thought it was.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _is a slightly silly discussion because the
| 'civilization' the Silurian hypothesis is concerned with
| is something like human civilization as a whole_
|
| Going back to the top comment: "Within the Silurian
| context, the urban distinction is almost demanding: if
| humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is a good
| chance all evidence of our tool use would have
| disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of
| years."
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I've done archaeological work in Mongolia. The oldest
| things I've found predate the last glacial maximum. Those
| rocks might not have survived a few million more years,
| but I can certainly think of lithics that would.
| digging wrote:
| Is bubonic plague a civilization? How about a stray gamma
| ray burst?
| pvg wrote:
| I don't think this is the rhetorical killshot you seem to
| believe it is.
| kijin wrote:
| Trust me, if there were another civilization anywhere near us,
| we'd be at war with it.
|
| No matter what the other civilization looks like, that's how
| we've always reacted. It's almost a defining characteristic of
| our civilization.
| bloak wrote:
| When talking about aliens people often use the word
| "civilisation" to mean just "intelligence" and perhaps that's
| what you're doing because you're thinking about something that
| doesn't resemble a human civilisation. I agree with you that an
| alien intelligence might be very different from a human
| civilisation. Also, an alien intelligence might not even
| qualify as a form of life (it might be an artificial
| intelligence).
| Liquix wrote:
| our senses are only equipped to experience small subsets of the
| whole - there's a huge range of sounds impercetible to human
| ears, our eyes can only perceive light in the visible spectrum,
| a dog's nose can detect orders of magnitude more information
| than a human's.
|
| if the five senses can only percieve a fraction of that which
| they have been honed for over millennia, it's not unreasonable
| to wonder if there is much more to the world/earth than meets
| the eye, inaccessible and unintelligible to physical ape life
| or existing in ways we aren't equipped to percieve.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| The author's hypothetical octopus "civilization" lacks most of
| the characteristics we associate with civilization. He seems to
| assume that agriculture, in the sense of pastoralism, is the only
| criterion. If this is the case, then ants have been running
| aphid-farming civilizations for millions of years. Leaf-cutter
| ants have run fungus farms as well.
|
| I wouldn't be at all surprised that octopi and many other animals
| have loose farming-like behaviors. This is a far cry from what we
| generally mean by civilization.
|
| In particular, I believe the domestication of fire is the
| dividing line between humans and animals. This tool provides
| access to an enormous new source of energy, which opened a myriad
| of possibilities unavailable to animals. The tool use and motor
| skills needed to build, maintain, and use fire probably was a
| significant stimulus to human brain development.
|
| Cephalopods, of course, would have no opportunity to master fire.
| ragebol wrote:
| Why fire? Why is that so different from other tools that
| require significant effort to create?
|
| Some animals use some tools, but mostly just sticks IIRC, with
| no effort to creating them, beyond breaking one off a tree.
| Maybe the criterion 'spend a lot of effort to create a tool' is
| the criterion, since having the time to spend on tool making
| requires someone else to get food for you etc. so is that
| getting towards a civilization?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Why fire? Because, as the GP said, it lets you use energy
| that isn't your own physical, biological energy. It lets you
| "level up" in a way that a muscle-powered tool doesn't.
|
| What they didn't say: It also lets you smelt metals. That
| lets you build much better tools.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Also fire will be a great help in figuring out other
| chemistry.
|
| There's a hypothetical alternate path where you build the
| "head end" of civilization using advanced biotechnology,
| synthetic organism, fermentation, 3-d printing and such.
| It's an attractive path for human space colonists but how
| would you figure out the genetic code without metal, glass,
| computers and such?
| Teever wrote:
| I think that we're kind of biased about these sort of
| things due to the limitations that evolution has placed
| on most animals.
|
| We take for granted that we cannot regrow lost limbs or
| direct individual cells to grow into arbitrary organs as
| directed by our brains because we can't do it but there's
| no intrinsic biological reason why that must be so.
|
| In a hypothetical first contact situation with
| intelligent life as we know it they may find it absurd
| that we can't do those things and wonder how we reached
| the technological level that we have despite having to
| spend so many resources on hospitals, work place safety
| and mechanical R&D instead of just growing what we need
| what we need it.
|
| Our understanding of things like metal, glass, and
| computers would be totally different and far more
| implicit if we could simply grow organs or organisms that
| produce things for us on a molecular level if evolution
| had granted our brains the ability to control individual
| cells of our body.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If a species were committed to very long survival or
| space travel there is a good chance, I think, they would
| consider making changes to their own biology.
|
| For instance most of the places that are "habitable" in
| this universe are on water moons or outer solar
| system/interstellar bodies that have water inside because
| of pressure and tidal and geothermal heating. A motivated
| enough race could create some species (is this the right
| language?) that would represent itself to take advantage
| of these sorts of habitats.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Until the industrial age, I think fire was less about
| having more energy to work with and more about things that
| could never be done with any amount of mechanical power:
| heat, light, cooking and all its many benefits, repelling
| nocturnal predators, and transforming available materials
| in many useful ways (including smelting but also e.g. fire-
| hardened wood).
|
| It did also replaced mechanical energy in some ways, e.g.
| hollowing out bowls or canoes, primitive mining by using
| large fires to crack rock faces. But I feel like those are
| less transformative than the other effects.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > This tool provides access to an enormous new source of
| energy, which opened a myriad of possibilities unavailable to
| animals.
|
| I'm not going to stand by that reasoning personally, but it's
| a pretty distinct change in kind.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Because with a small amount of your own energy as input, you
| unlock vast amounts of potential chemical energy. No other
| tool used by other animals comes anywhere close in terms of
| efficiency. And no other animal is anywhere near as
| "civilized" (loaded term, I know) as humans are.
|
| It is clear there is _something_ different between humans and
| all other animals. And one obvious difference is mastery of
| fire.
|
| > Maybe the criterion 'spend a lot of effort to create a
| tool' is the criterion, since having the time to spend on
| tool making requires someone else to get food for you etc.
|
| Which would probably never have occurred in humans without
| mastery of fire. I think that mastery of fire is the common
| precursor of any trait you _could_ point to as the defining
| feature of civilization.
|
| Now it's possible we will find unambiguous traits of
| "civilization" among some other species that _hasn 't_
| mastered fire (whether here on Earth or elsewhere), but until
| then I do believe that it is a prerequisite.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I don't remember exactly where I read it (might have been
| here), but Margaret Mead is quoted as saying that the
| earliest sign of civilization, was a long-healed femoral
| fracture, in an ancient skeleton. In nature, that kind of
| injury is a death sentence. It meant that the injured
| person was taken care of, long enough to heal.
|
| Maybe we'll find fossils, with healed "death sentence"
| injuries.
|
| If anyone had ever read Lovecraft's _The Mountains of
| Madness,_ he posited a different theory about Cretaceous
| civilizations.
| troyvit wrote:
| I'd take this with a grain of Silurian Salt, but there is
| some fossil evidence that a Tyrannosaurus Rex or two
| healed from injuries significant enough that surviving
| them would almost require help from somebody.
|
| The fossil of Barbara[0] "shows a particularly bad break,
| which goes right through the site of the tendon
| attachment, so most probably the tendon would have been
| torn off the bone [...]" If you're a very large two-
| legged creature a break like that could be a death
| sentence, but the fossilized break shows signs of
| healing.
|
| Sue[1] is one of the most famous T. Rex fossils and she
| shows many healed injuries including broken bones and
| bacterial infections. It's highly possible that her
| species is just incredibly tough, but it's also possible
| that they took care of each other to some degree.
|
| [0] https://www.iflscience.com/meet-barbara-the-pregnant-
| t-rex-w...
|
| [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1393-sue-
| postmortem-r...
| tantalor wrote:
| Fire = automation
| bokoharambe wrote:
| It's not any particular technical development that separates
| humans from other animals, but the human relationship to
| technology as such. Humans only live by way of inserting
| external objects between themselves and nature, and they do
| this in an open-ended way. One could also talk about human
| self-domestication, and agriculture as a self-expanding
| ecosystem... Fire doesn't really capture the way humans
| actively modify their own conditions of life.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >In particular, I believe the domestication of fire is the
| dividing line between humans and animals.
|
| Must there be only 1 line? To me, language is another important
| one as it greatly increases the efficiency that one can
| communicate information generation to generation and it seems
| to have an impact on how we think. Children raised without
| exposure to language seem to suffer developmental issues,
| though this isn't well studied given the ethical issues
| involved in such a study.
|
| As to how much communication is needed to count as a language,
| that is much harder to draw a definite line given that other
| species do communicate, but we don't consider them to have a
| language.
| anentropic wrote:
| haven't read the paper, but how does "They conclude that no ruins
| of ancient football stadiums, highways or housing projects would
| survive geological time" square with the existence of fossils?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how does "They conclude that no ruins of ancient football
| stadiums, highways or housing projects would survive geological
| time" square with the existence of fossils?_
|
| Broadly speaking, fossils are rare and we site our cities on
| river deltas and such which have bad conditions for them.
| flir wrote:
| Wait, wait, I thought mud was great for preserving fossils?
| Eg that Albertan Nodosaur fossil that turned up recently. And
| if they're working stone, the evidence won't even need a
| preservation step, because it was never organic - just a
| mudslide or a storm.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| 0.00000001% of animals are fossilized.
|
| 99.9999% of animals are extinct.
|
| We had almost nothing, but a lot of it was inferrable.
| flir wrote:
| I feel like everyone's jumping over the worked stone.
|
| We're assuming a technological civilization here, but
| without accidental geoengineering or even surviving
| artifacts. Flaked flint and pottery get _everywhere_.
|
| It just doesn't seem likely to me. The arguments seem
| very "God of the gaps" in nature.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| >The arguments seem very "God of the gaps" in nature.
|
| It is an argument from ignorance, but the timescales of
| pottery (1-20k ya) dwarf the porcelain thrones and
| nitrous oxide disposables that will be the only remaining
| artifact of our existence in 10 million years.
|
| Which is still a brief moment in time, compared to the
| timescales of the epoch proceeding.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _thought mud was great for preserving fossils?_
|
| If rapidly and anoxically deposited. Undersea landslides
| and volcanoes do that. Dredging operations may, too.
| flir wrote:
| I really chewed up my original comment. "a mudslide or a
| storm" was supposed to bind to the bit about organic
| fossils, not the bit about inorganic artifacts.
|
| I think "rapid" might be a relative term (I'm thinking of
| the _Mary Rose_ and the _Vasa_ ). When you get to the
| more durable artifacts that come with a technological
| civilization we really should be thinking in decades,
| maybe centuries.
| pvg wrote:
| I haven't read the paper either but billions upon billions of
| organisms constantly have some tiny chance of ending up in the
| conditions where they fossilize and could later be found. A few
| thousand or million exposed structures over the few-thousand-
| year lifetime of a civilization is, in comparison, a
| microscopically smaller chance of preservation. Nature, in
| contrast, gets effectively infinite shots at this, the fossils
| record still has gaps that dwarf the lifespan of human
| civilization as it is.
| causal wrote:
| It's a numbers game. The stadiums, highways, etc. are very few
| and are being built during a blink of history, compared to
| fossils which typically come from animals that were around for
| tens or even hundreds of millions of years. The sheer number of
| creatures that lived and died means we've had a few lucky
| pieces preserved.
|
| Earth's surface isn't very static. On a geological timescale it
| is constantly moving and churning.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Perhaps it's down to scale? If a single relief of a single
| building block survives, is that still considered a ruin of a
| football stadium, or just an imprint of a building block? The
| Colosseum would certainly not be able to survive for 100
| million years. If some intelligent beings find a single
| building block while doing archaeology, they'll likely not be
| able to recognize it's purpose, if they even recognize the
| building block for what it is.
|
| The structural integrity of (comparatively) smaller fossils is
| much more likely to survive for 100s of millions of years. A
| large building will be eroded by roots, wind, acid rain, etc. A
| fist sized rock containing the imprint of a trilobite, buried
| in soil and safe from most elements, will easily survive for
| 100s of millions of years.
|
| Or perhaps the author meant that the vast majority of our
| buildings are not built to last. An asphalt highway - if
| unmaintained - will be unrecognizable in a hundred years. Roman
| roads survived for a few 1000 years because of their very crude
| nature: they are just a pile of rocks. But even such structures
| will fall prey to soil erosion and the relentless assault of
| nature. Unless said roads see foot traffic, they'd be also
| quickly overrun by trees and grasses.
| namaria wrote:
| The fossil record is incredibly fragmented and incomplete.
|
| There are weird structures that we discovered and haven't yet
| made sense of as well.
|
| The known unknowns in science vast outnumber the known knowns.
| jayrot wrote:
| > There are weird structures that we discovered and haven't
| yet made sense of as well.
|
| Do you mean biological structures? Or do you mean
| physical/geological/natural structures? If the latter, can
| you give some examples? Specifically of structures we haven't
| made sense of that could be "intelligent design", as you seem
| to be suggesting.
| pvg wrote:
| _Or do you mean physical /geological/natural structures?_
|
| There's a bunch of these, the bulk of which eventually get
| reasonable explanations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimini_Road
|
| I'm surprised there's no Wikipedia list of these.
| henjodottech wrote:
| Not a mention of Octopolis or Octlantis. Settlements of gloomy
| octopuses in Jervis Bay, Australia.
| Liquix wrote:
| to save any interested parties a search: groups of 10-15 octopi
| have been dubbed 'octlantis' and 'octopolis' after being
| discovered off the coast of Australia. this is remarkable
| because octopi (including gloomy octopi) were previously
| thought to be largely solitary creatures which only interact
| when mating. octlantis features social hierarchies, disputes,
| and dens fashioned out of the shells of their prey which the
| creatures have been recorded evicting each other from.
| interesting stuff
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
| edent wrote:
| Primates first appeared around 65 million years ago.
|
| The earliest dinosaurs arose over 200 million years ago.
|
| Therefore, it is possible that by about 130 million years ago,
| the dinosaurs would have reached our level of development. They
| could have detected the oncoming asteroid, built space ships, and
| left this planet. All while mammals were barely getting started.
|
| This extremely likely scientific theory is explored in Hibbett,
| MJ's "Dinosaur Planet"
|
| http://www.mjhibbett.co.uk/dinosaurplanet/nindex.php
| ajdude wrote:
| This is also pretty heavily explored in Voyager's Distant
| Origin episode.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin
| arethuza wrote:
| As a wise man once said, "Extraordinary claims require
| extraordinary evidence"...
| edent wrote:
| I think this is all the evidence you will need
| https://mjhibbett.bandcamp.com/track/the-theory-of-a-
| dinosau...
|
| The Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction event occurred, as far as
| we know,
|
| Sixty five point five million years ago
|
| But even the interval of error in that estimated date
|
| Is longer than it took us humans to evolve from apes
|
| And if in that time we mammals managed to conquer space
|
| I believe the Dinosaurs could have done the same
| dannyobrien wrote:
| And in Leonard Richardson's somewhat silly "Let Us Now Praise
| Awesome Dinosaurs" http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/let-us-
| now-praise-awesome...
| dark-star wrote:
| > extremely likely
|
| I think you misspelled "unlikely"...?
| edent wrote:
| Er? Do you _really_ think professional scientists would write
| an epic prog-rock musical about the dinosaur invasion of
| Norwich if they weren 't extremely certain of their
| hypothesis?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| There is also a cave painting somewhere. Frankly an
| irrefutable set of evidence.
| Borrible wrote:
| And in Cixin Liu's short story "Devourer" they even come back
| to earth for a last visit...
|
| Of course, this has a back-story/history, see "Of Ants and
| Dinosaurs".
| bumby wrote:
| The author didn't seem to address how cephalopods would be able
| to develop civilization without demonstrating a similar aptitude
| for highly coordinated complex social behavior or the
| transference of ideas (complex language). These both seem
| necessary for development of a complex civilization as ideas can
| improve and spread much faster than biological information. It's
| somewhat ironic, considering the opening salvo was related to an
| improbable language hypothesis.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| Memorized inherited tacit knowledge around campfires may had
| been our own specie's cultural medium, but other ways (with
| slower bitrate) can easily be entertained.
|
| Vocalizations and their evolution were banned from discussion
| in the Royal Society because they did not leave a fossil
| record, so even meta-science was harder back then.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| There is discussion in the article about cephalopod
| communication, and how they use complex patterning and physical
| movement to communicate with each other. Is their level of
| communication and their information transfer speed as high as
| language? I don't think we can know very well without asking a
| cephalopod.
|
| Now, that whole section is talking about modern cuttlefish, so
| I would agree with you regarding the author's hypothetical
| nautilus civilization.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > s their level of communication and their information
| transfer speed as high as language?
|
| First, spoken language isn't extraordinarily fast. Most of us
| here have experienced points in our lives where speech has
| seemed laboriously slow. Second, we have through much of
| recorded history, relied upon correspondence and the written
| word, where communicating a few sentences worth of ideas took
| weeks.
|
| It is not outlandish to think that complicated, colorful
| shapes on the cuttlefish's back (pictures in the link, if you
| need a reminder) could convey an entire sentence' worth of
| information. With a refresh rate of what, 5 seconds? More
| than enough for human-speech-level speed.
|
| Whatever other challenges they face, communication just isn't
| one of those.
| bumby wrote:
| I guess the part that I could've been more explicit about is
| that I am thinking both complex language and complex language
| skills being necessary together to push civilization forward.
| The takeaway I had from the articles communication discussion
| was that their communication, while unique, is focused
| directly on mating, and predation (or avoiding predation).
| Those goals seem to be the norm in the animal kingdom. While
| I think the argument could be made that the human
| demonstrations can be to the same ends, they are many more
| layers of abstraction in between which is what ends up
| creating complex civilization.
|
| (Eg, status is a form of mating, but we humans have so many
| tangential levels of displaying status that technology like a
| Lamborghini can become a mating signal, rather than using
| pure dominance. The combination of complex social behaviors
| and communication are necessary before the technology
| develops)
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| I think we can very easily tell when they are communicating
| about mating or predation. We can read those signals in
| virtually any animal, there seem to be near-universal
| signals which we can easily talk about in research. Maybe
| when they are just having a chat, it might not look like
| anything to us, and we can only really tell what they're
| saying when they're "shouting".
|
| Or maybe we are missing lots of nuanced details being
| conveyed in the message. We think the tiger stripe
| aggressive pattern just means "back off", but maybe he's
| really "reading off" a detailed list of his feats of
| bravery to intimidate his opponent or spitting the
| cephalopod equivalent of a diss track!
| chubot wrote:
| I read somewhere that cephalopods are kind of like "individual
| flashes of genius".
|
| They develop large brains very rapidly, with lots of skills,
| BUT they don't pass on their skills, in part because they die
| quickly!
|
| This article mentions that:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/octopuses-...
|
| _Despite being mollusks, like clams and oysters, these animals
| have very large brains and exhibit a curious, enigmatic
| intelligence._
|
| _I followed them through the sea, and also began reading about
| them, and one of the first things I learned came as a shock:
| They have extremely short lives -- just one or two years._
|
| Other discussion - https://tonmo.com/threads/why-dont-octopus-
| and-other-cephlap...
|
| ---
|
| Humans do seem to have some the longest life spans on the
| planet, and that's an important adaptation -- "grandmother
| hypothesis" and all that. I can see that generational knowledge
| is big deal, even in my own family, and in my coworkers'
| families.
|
| Or you can look at the family of (ironically) Charles Darwin,
| with Francis Galton, and so forth
|
| The outliers among primates move the civilization forward. So
| just having a few people with big brains, who absorb knowledge
| from their predecessors, is a big deal.
|
| Though of course there could be some cephalopod species that
| evolved to live 100 years ... and then for some reason they
| disappeared, or lost that adaptation
| ddalex wrote:
| > for some reason they disappeared
|
| Octopodi be tasty.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Not only short lifespan (some live four years), but all
| species die after laying eggs or after the eggs hatch so
| there can only be genetic transfer of information like the
| social insects, ants and termites. There would need to be
| some evolutionary leap to have them survive longer than
| required now or extraordinary genetic engineering ala
| Children of Time.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Not necessarily. You could, in principle, have the
| information transfer happen via octopuses in their
| community that aren't laying eggs yet.
| sholladay wrote:
| Would you count group hunting as "highly complex social
| behavior"? It's not just a numbers thing, they communicate and
| coordinate with the group.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/09/23/nx-s1-5120912/octopuses-and-f...
|
| Octopuses also build colonies, using coconut shells and other
| tools.
|
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18281-octopuses-use-c...
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-discover-...
|
| https://mashable.com/article/octopus-garden-colony-deep-sea-...
|
| They can also solve human made puzzles.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
|
| As for knowledge transfer, we know that they can teach other
| how to perform certain tasks. But beyond that, there seems to
| be a lack of research. Do they have complex language and can
| they transfer abstract "ideas"? My guess would be yes, but they
| communicate through color changes in ways that we have a hard
| time understanding. It seems likely that birds and whales have
| complex language, but we haven't cracked the code on that even
| though their communication is much more like ours. Hopefully we
| find out some day.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-oc...
|
| https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-evolution-of-stupidity-and...
| bumby wrote:
| My guess is that abstract ideas is an outgrowth of language
| and also necessary for the development of the complex
| societies the article is positing. I would also be careful
| not to conflate complex language (for example, dialects in
| whales) with the development of complex abstract ideas (for
| example, mathematics). It seems to me the latter is necessary
| for the complexity discussed, but unclear if the extent to
| which it exists in other species. But I agree, hopefully we
| can learn more someday on the way they are both similar and
| dissimilar to human cognition.
|
| (I should add that there are some like Stephen Meyer who
| think certain abstract cognition is more magical and unable
| to come from basic evolution, but this has a theistic bent)
| dboreham wrote:
| > but this has a theistic bent
|
| Aka is obviously wrong.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm not inclined to believe his hypothesis, but
| counterclaim have not been proven true to my knowledge
| either. If we haven't proven why humans are uniquely able
| to communicate complex ideas of past/future for example,
| I'm much more humble about claiming anything is obvious.
| The irony is that strong positions in the absence of
| evidence are making similar errors.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| One point to note is that humans evolved from apes at a quick
| pace. I've heard claims that longer life-span, the ability to
| engage in complex vocalizations, opposable thumbs, upright
| stance, binocular vision and so-forth are all pretty recent
| innovation over evolutionary short period, with large brain
| size turning out to be last addition.
|
| The human package might be not much more complex than "start
| with a rock-throwing mob and features providing benefits"
|
| So, on the surface, you could have a species that sprinted to
| all the features required for civilization - and then destroyed
| itself in a blaze of less-than-glory as we seem on a trajectory
| to do.
|
| Edit: Note, I should add that I'd actually doubt this scenario
| could happen only because the evolution of human seems part of
| the general acceleration of evolution that can be seen
| throughout geological history.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Before bony fish ascended to their current dominance, there were
| plenty of other fast predators in the sea. If lack of predators
| is a requirement for cephalopod civilization, the window probably
| closes much earlier than the Cretaceous.
|
| An alternative, possibly more optimistic (?) hypothesis: the
| first step of their civilization would be collective defense from
| large predators. Population concentrations would then make
| farming very advantageous. Yes, I'm more a scifi writer than
| biologist.
| openrisk wrote:
| > the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different
| from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological
| civilization on this planet
|
| An interesting special version of this hypothesis is that if a
| species has achieved truly high intelligence and advanced
| technology, it may _by design_ not have left any traces. Not
| because of modesty but because long-term sustainable existence
| actually required being light on environmental impact.
|
| Changing your environment at planetary scale and breakneck speed
| is not necessarily the pinnacle of intelligence, certainly not if
| you have manifestly not yet understood all its intricacies,
| interdependence etc. A lack of understanding coupled with
| aggressive random interventions may even affect the very survival
| of a species.
|
| The downside of the deep-sea tree-huger cephalopod scenario is
| that it is even harder to falsify...
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Of course, we do have tree hugging octopus today: Save the
| Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!
| https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ (j/k)
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > Changing your environment at planetary scale and breakneck
| speed is not necessarily the pinnacle of intelligence,
| certainly not if you have manifestly not yet understood all its
| intricacies, interdependence etc. A lack of understanding
| coupled with aggressive random interventions may even affect
| the very survival of a species.
|
| Well apparently their strategy to ensure survival didn't do too
| well since we're discussing an extinct civilization here.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| South Park subtitle:
|
| "This is what de-growthers actually believe."
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| That's the exact opposite of what de-growthers believe
| (though my experience has been that most 'de-growthers' are
| in fact imaginary straw men since I've only met people
| decrying them, none truly espousing these beliefs as a
| strategy).
|
| The believes described the parent are basically the defacto
| beliefs of everyone who believes the climate crisis can be
| solved through some form of accelerationism.
|
| I don't think there's even a question that the only proven
| method of reducing emissions and slowing climate change is
| to leave fossil fuels in the ground (which is by definition
| de-growth in practice). But there has never been any
| remotely serious will for actions of this nature.
| digging wrote:
| A strategy for avoiding one particular death is not a
| strategy to ensure survival.
|
| There are >1 ways for a civilization to become extinct.
| Byamarro wrote:
| That's actually a factor that diseases aim for. Mortal diseases
| don't spread as much as the ones that don't damage the host as
| much. Because of this, severe diseases sometimes evolve into
| mild ones.
| colordrops wrote:
| And taking it even further, maybe they still exist, but have
| advanced so far they are undetectable to our simple minds and
| senses, similar to how an ant or bacteria has no idea about our
| existence. Maybe there are millions of advanced species that we
| can't detect, considering that there are millions of species we
| are aware of, and statistically it's unlikely that we would be
| the most advanced.
| dvh wrote:
| If maximal compute power is limited by available energy and
| (most) animals obtain energy by burning oxygen, how much compute
| power do cephalopods (or other marine animal, excluding cetaceans
| because they are cheating by breathing air) have available
| relative to humans (or any other air breathing animal)?
| margalabargala wrote:
| Let's do the math.
|
| An adult human at rest breathes about 500mL air per breath, at
| about 12 breaths per minute. The inhaled air is about 21% O2,
| and the exhaled air is about 16% O2.
|
| The density of air is 1.225 kg/m3, which is 1.225 g/liter. So
| 5% of a half-liter breath is, ballpark, 0.03 grams oxygen per
| breath, which at one breath per five seconds is 0.006 grams
| oxygen per second.
|
| Dissolved oxygen in ocean water is about 0.008 g/liter. Fish
| are very efficient at extracting this, up to 80%. Squids and
| octopi are much less efficient, with octopi hanging out more in
| the 40% range, and squids much lower.
|
| So this means that for every liter of water processed, an
| example octopus receives 0.003 grams oxygen, and if such an
| octopus were able to process two liters of water per second
| across their gills, they would receive as much O2 as a human.
|
| This is not such an incredibly high number that it rules out
| cephalopod intelligence, especially when considering size
| differences.
| regnull wrote:
| I wonder for how long the satellites in the Earth's orbit would
| stay in orbit and be detectable as artificial entities.
| hollerith wrote:
| The ones in high orbits would probably remain a very long time.
|
| I wonder if NORAD would have detected it if a satellite
| remained from the previous civilization.
| askvictor wrote:
| Like, "in the order of a billion years" very long time?
| hollerith wrote:
| I don't know.
| somethingsome wrote:
| >Back then the conference organizers gave away funny, tongue-in-
| cheek awards (this would be inconceivable by now - humor!), and
| one of these awards was for the "most interesting hypothesis most
| likely to be false". I thought this was a great award, honoring
| science which was daring, and which had just missed the mark by a
| bit.
|
| I find this so sad, there is less and less place for humor in
| society to not offend anyone
| monkeydreams wrote:
| We are in a golden age of comedy. There is literally more
| comedy in wider and deeper streams available for your
| consumption than ever before.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| I just want to show my support for this statement by a fellow
| monkey
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Just leaving this here in case anyone does a search for the name:
| Graham Hancock.
| dhosek wrote:
| It's occurred to me on occasion that the deposits of crude oil
| are the result of ancient garbage dumps filled with plastic which
| eventually broke down into the hydrocarbons that we're
| burning/turning back into plastic.
| dboreham wrote:
| Actually it's the shoe layer.
| mncharity wrote:
| _The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an
| industrial civilization in the geological record?_ (2019)
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Surprised the article didn't mention the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal
| Maximum (PETM) [0] and it's interesting relation to "a species
| different from ours had achieved high intelligence and
| technological civilization on this planet."
|
| For those unaware, the PETM was a rapid increasing in global
| temperature (and CO2 concentrations) around between 60-50 million
| years ago. This lead to a minor (on a geological time scale,
| major for those creatures living through it) climate crisis.
|
| The cause for the rapid increase in temperatures at this time is
| still the subject of deep debate and largely unknown. However how
| very "out there" hypothesis, not even mentioned on the wikipedia
| page, is that this _could_ have been when a civilization such as
| our experience an event more-or-less identical to our own current
| climate crisis caused by the rapid use of hydro-carbons.
|
| Of course, the biggest challenge with this hypothesis is, as
| pointed out in the article, a civilization like this would not
| leave a trace on the geological record. So there's really no
| reasonable way to have much evidence in favor of this possible
| explanation.
|
| But since here about this I've been fascinated by the problem of
| _sending messages_ to the future. Suppose we come to realize that
| rapid use of hydrocarbons does most certainly lead to the
| destruction of any civilization foolish enough to tread this
| path. The most reasonable focus of scientific effort that would
| be to figure a way to warn the next advanced civilization on this
| planet in hopes they might not meet the same fate. But presuming
| that civilization is 50 million years in the future, how could
| this be done?
|
| 0.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
| l3x4ur1n wrote:
| Send it to space. To multiple places. Next guys should be able
| to find it sooner or later.
| mncharity wrote:
| > experimental chemistry and physics would be harder to pull off
| underwater
|
| Amphibious octopuses?[1] In the widespread and connected shallow
| seas of a supercontinent world?
|
| [1] BBC Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebeNeQFUMa0
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