I’ve always loved this paper, for its particular combination of heterodoxy and emphasis on testable hypotheses. There are so many things we don’t know about past human civilizations that have left non-geological markers (who were the “Sea People,” the full story of Petra, tons of undeciphered ancient scripts, etc.) that it doesn’t seem terribly strange that an industrial civilization could have bloomed, died, left few traces, and what traces they did leave are the kind only a geochemist or paleoclimatologist might notice.
Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
21–30 of 181 posts
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#22Every time this pops up on HN, people post insisting that it won't all go away, that the skyscrapers will, somehow, still be there. No, they won't. Look at any place in the world where there are mesas. All of the land around the mesa used to be level with the top of the mesa. It has all eroded away, and in only a few million years. So, the metals will corrode, collapse, and wash away. The stone will erode away. The c…
Those people need to watch a few episodes of the TV series Life After People. Watching it, and realizing that everything around us would literally start to fail in a matter of days without us as its caretakers, really brought home the impermanence of everything. Skyscrapers are certainly not going to outlast ancient cave dwellings. In a matter of a couple hundred years, I would be surprised if a single skyscraper was still standing without us to keep it up. I’ve seen unmaintained buildings falling a part after a mere decade of disuse; a skyscraper lasting for a century or two would be extremely durable on the scale of modern buildings.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#23If we can detect traces of life (fossils) I am pretty sure we can detect traces of many of the artefacts produced by an industrial civilization.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in that people try and identify what’s there. No, in that it’s not expected to find evidence of a prior advanced civilization. The prior existence of oil as an easily recoverable resource is a strong indicator that nothing like our civilization existed in the last several million years.
That's true about the oil; coal too. If we're not completely wrong about how those resources are created (there are some alternate theories) then we're the first civilization to use them. However, most of what I've read about prehistoric advanced civilizations discussed them using crystals (quartz) and deriving energy from the earth. Some form of piezoelectricity. There are theories today connecting earth quakes, qua…
We sent humans to space and robots to Mars and other planets, we are extracting energy from nuclear fission, we will likely build an artificial star soon enough. It's extremely unlikely that we could have missed some mysterious quartz power source.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#25Every time this pops up on HN, people post insisting that it won't all go away, that the skyscrapers will, somehow, still be there. No, they won't. Look at any place in the world where there are mesas. All of the land around the mesa used to be level with the top of the mesa. It has all eroded away, and in only a few million years. So, the metals will corrode, collapse, and wash away. The stone will erode away. The c…
Those people need to watch a few episodes of the TV series Life After People . Watching it, and realizing that everything around us would literally start to fail in a matter of days without us as its caretakers, really brought home the impermanence of everything. Skyscrapers are certainly not going to outlast ancient cave dwellings. In a matter of a couple hundred years, I would be surprised if a single skyscraper wa…
Nobody is building for the super long term, we expect on some level that new will replace the old at some point.
This man is trying to build a clock to last 10k years. https://longnow.org/clock/
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#26What areas on the earth have already endured for 65 million, 100 million,200, 300, 400, 500 million years already without changes?
Obviously many areas have been subducted via plate tectonics and after volcanic transformation at depth would leave no artifacts. Would you find gold rings on dinosaur fingers? Gold watches? We know gold can endure, and if these prior saurian techies had adornments, they may end up in sediments that can endure. How to find them? Catscans and MRI imaging could show dense metallic residues in some cases. So far there have been scans done on a few fossils, but if they were not looking for residues of artifacts, such residues may not have attracted attention. Funerary buildings? Pyramids are only a few thousand years old and many millions would turn them to dust on the surface, and subducted ones = melted away.
There has been time for a 200 million year old race to be very very hard to find - except on the moon's surface? If there was a moon project 200 million years ago, would gradual meteoric impacts over this time period have buried them beyond finding? Direct impacts would have destroyed them utterly. Indirect impacts gradually bury the surface of the moon with impact scattered rock powder. We know the moon is deeply cratered and has a deep coating of impact dust. Metal landers would endure and gradually get some feet of accumulated dust, but various metal detectors would find them - but a huge area would need to be searched. I assume good dino-engineers would use aluminum and titanium instead of steel/iron, so ferrous metal detectors would not work. Even good detectors of conductors are good for only a few feet.
So we may never find evidence of the war between the warlike dinosaurs of earth versus the Insectoids of Ganymede - that was won so decisively by the insectoids 65 million years ago with their impactor...
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#27Excellent yt chan: vlad9vt, just pictures of artifacts and structures set to music https://youtu.be/EHFe10dp0L4
Evidence for ancient
machining technology : Saw cuts, tube drill holes etc https://youtu.be/6KUDu40BC5o?t=1197
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#28If we can detect traces of life (fossils) I am pretty sure we can detect traces of many of the artefacts produced by an industrial civilization.
I don’t know much about detecting traces of ancient civilisations, but I can definitely detect traces of someone who didn’t read the paper in your comment.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#29I admit I did not read the entire publication, but, at least at face value, this seems somewhat absurd to me. Within the past couple hundred years humans have built massive structures in cities that should last for many millions (hundreds of millions?) of years. I mean, Manhattan may be under water in 100 million years (or, much sooner), but all those gigantic steel, concrete, plastic and glass structures aren't just…
In periods of 100s of millions of years whole continents disappear or move around, new layers of rocks are formed and old layers are buried. The Rocky Mountains formed just 55 - 80 million years ago. Cities disappear completely. Concrete and glass becomes rock (again), steel is oxidized and is just layer of iron ore. Plastics degradate and breaks into nanoparticles. As the article speculates, most evidence would be l…
Some zircons have been dated back to the hadean era, when the earth was forming. Any information for building something that sticks around long term would be contained in them.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t glaciers grind them to dust?
I would guess that glaciers would encapsulate the skyscrapers and dislodge them from their foundation, and when they receded leaving a huge pile of steel and concrete. Even if that was later encapsulated by magma, future geologists would have to wonder about metal 'veins' that were so structured and why part of the rock was basalt and another part was an exceptionally hard and dense form of limestone. Note to self. D…
The oldest known iron artifacts, ca 3200BCE: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03054403130020...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031...