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Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

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Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#91

Post by bwood »

withinboredom wrote: post #66
jandrese wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one level yes, most everything built will disintegrate with time, but we have fossilized footprints from dinosaurs. An industrial society disappearing without a trace seems unlikely. Although the vast majority of the evidence would be lost there will always be traces left if you know what to look for.

The thing is, it’s probably unbelievable when you do find evidence. https://archaeology-world.com/200-million-year-old-shoe-prin...

Interesting article, but unfortunately none of it is verifiable. It cites creationism.org (!!!) as a source and concludes that the fossil shoeprint is regrettably lost.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#92

Post by ksdale »

timoth3y wrote: post #87

It more convincing to look at it the other way. It's not what such civilizations would have left, but what they would have taken. Our early civilizations found easily accessible deposits or tin, copper, gold, etc that would have been depleted if another advanced civilization had existed in the past 10 million years or so.

"Depleted" in this case would just mean mined, transported, and made into something. It doesn't seem farfetched to imagine that, say, an electronics factory would be reduced to an easily accessible deposit of copper or gold in a few million years.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#93

Post by ALittleLight »

cgriswald wrote: post #89
ALittleLight wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dinosaurs lived for a couple hundred million years. An industrialized society might last a few thousand.

You'd want to compare the total number of dinosaurs that ever lived against the number of fossil-izable and recognizable artifacts an industrialized society ever created.

True... Assuming that any individual has an equally likely chance of getting fossilized. It also brings up the idea of whether or not we would know if some fossilized specimen or footprint belonged to an animal or a civilized individual.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#94

Post by redisman »

Frost1x wrote: post #86
rbrbr wrote: post #57

Isn’t a much easier way to look around our planet and search for satellites of past civilizations? Or even on the moon where everything lasts much longer. Long after we and everything of us is gone from this planet moon vehicles and other devices which were left there will likely still be there unless a meteorite hit them.

I'd say the moon would be an obvious candidate to look at, though no guarantees.

That’s where you hide the first obelisk

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#95

Post by jccooper »

Yes, over geologic time, nearly anything has no chance of survival. And, yes, the lifetime of such a civilization may be a window that is, geologically, basically invisible.

But an industrial civilization makes a LOT of stuff, and much of that is quite durable and easily recognizable as artificial, and is likely to be scattered all over the planet.

Given that there are places that preserve tracks over 300 million years old, and fossils, well, up to 4 billion years old, I have a hard time imagining that a worldwide civilization that's producing and using aluminum and titanium and ceramics and all sorts of other stuff on a wide basis would not leave something recognizable in basically all the available fossilizing environments. We might not ever find fossils of the species, but are we really not going to find anything from the million refuse dumps and cities and industrial facilities and whatnot, or millions of miles of roads, or the multi-billions of accidental losses bound to be all over the world?

Not to mention objects in high orbit or on the lunar surface, which is a whole other thing.

You have to posit a really limited civilization before I believe it.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#96

Post by samatman »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #68
pmayrgundter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with this take. I've been working on a paper comparing the effects of the Anthropocene to mega catastrophes in the geologically recent past. In addition to the Younger Dryas Impact (12kya), there's the Oruani (26kya) and Mt Toba (77kya) eruptions. From my calculations, it seems the climate change from each of these dwarfs any actions humans are currently capable of, namely petrocarbon burning and als…

The earth is warming at a rate of four Hiroshima bombs per second [1] primarily because of human actions. I haven't read your document but it sounds like you're grossly underestimating our energy output. [1] https://archive.thinkprogress.org/earths-rate-of-global-warm...

Regarding Toba, Le Wik has this to say:

The erupted mass was, at the very least, 12 times greater than that of the largest volcanic eruption in recent history, the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which caused the 1816 "Year Without a Summer" in the Northern Hemisphere.[8] Toba's erupted mass deposited an ash layer of about 15 centimetres (5.9 in) thick over the whole of South Asia. A blanket of volcanic ash was also deposited over the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the South China Sea.[9] Deep-sea cores retrieved from the South China Sea have extended the known reach of the eruption, suggesting that the 2,800 km³ calculation of the erupted mass is a minimum value or even an underestimate.[10] Based on new methods (crystal concentration and exponential), the Lake Toba Caldera possibly erupted as much as 3,200 km³ of ignimbrite and co-ignimbrite.

I think its more likely your cursory dismissal which is failing to appreciate the magnitude of this event, than that the person who is actually crunching the numbers is getting it wrong. But what do I know?

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#97

Post by bufferoverflow »

ncmncm wrote: post #12

Every 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…

Some structures should survive millions of years in dry buried conditions. Like bank vaults made of thick stainless steel buried in Arizona.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#98

Post by samatman »

Animats wrote: post #41

The oldest hard-rock mountains are 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. Those include some heavily mined areas, such as the Appalachians, If a previous civilization had been into serious mining, we'd probably have seen evidence of that by now. There may be nothing left of the mine, but an area without the good stuff and the remains of a big rubble dump would be interesting. Conversely, a concentration of rusted meta…

That, and the real smoking gun: landfillite.

Some significant fraction of landfills are going to fossilize into a pretty distinctive sedimentary rock. I don't know what it would look like, but it would have, like, fossil Barbie dolls in it.

I don't think we'd have missed all of them if they existed. We could postulate an industrial civilization which just didn't make landfills? But we've only got ours to go on, and we really like burying trash. If our hypothetical forbearers were anything like us, we'd know about them.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#99

Post by tsomctl »

samatman wrote: post #98
Animats wrote: post #41

The oldest hard-rock mountains are 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. Those include some heavily mined areas, such as the Appalachians, If a previous civilization had been into serious mining, we'd probably have seen evidence of that by now. There may be nothing left of the mine, but an area without the good stuff and the remains of a big rubble dump would be interesting. Conversely, a concentration of rusted meta…

That, and the real smoking gun: landfillite. Some significant fraction of landfills are going to fossilize into a pretty distinctive sedimentary rock. I don't know what it would look like, but it would have, like, fossil Barbie dolls in it. I don't think we'd have missed all of them if they existed. We could postulate an industrial civilization which just didn't make landfills? But we've only got ours to go on, and w…

I don't think so. Landfills are a source of many important minerals and energy. I'm convinced that we'll be mining ours in the next couple of centuries.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#100

Post by theossuary »

Frost1x wrote: post #86
rbrbr wrote: post #57

Isn’t a much easier way to look around our planet and search for satellites of past civilizations? Or even on the moon where everything lasts much longer. Long after we and everything of us is gone from this planet moon vehicles and other devices which were left there will likely still be there unless a meteorite hit them.

I'd say the moon would be an obvious candidate to look at, though no guarantees.

Well, according to Mass Effect, we should really be looking at mars
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