I don’t get what’s interesting here if I’m interpreting this correctly. Paraphrasing, I’m reading the Silurian Hypothesis to be: Geological activity would wipe out most evidence of prior industrial civilization, but we could find larger scale things such as geothermal taps or nuclear evidence.
Silurian Hypothesis
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Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#12A word of warning: a few years ago, the related page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact took me down one of the worst Wikipedia procrastination rabbit holes I've ever lost myself in.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#13They just found stone tools from 3M years ago in Kenya, so I assume they can also find fosilized artifacts from that long ago. But the Wikipedia article says that's not likely. The claim that it is unlikely seems to be inconsistent with the evidence.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#14If we can't detect previous advanced civilizations, I think it adds more evidence to the simulation hypothesis. Why would simulation designers include ancient nearly-undetectable advanced civilizations? Why don't video game designers fully model and texture areas of the world that aren't accessible?
If we were living in a simulation, I think it would be programmed in such a way that it would be emergent. A bit like a mandelbrot set, where the rules are simple but the complexity is infinite. No need to texture anything if the rules define what the texture would look like by a minimal fixed set of rules (laws of nature).
To me, it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#15I'm reminded of the Reptites from Chrono Trigger. They ruled the planet when humans were still primitive; the arrival of Lavos wiped them out and allowed humans to flourish. But as it turns out, Lavos was "farming" humans as food for itself and its children...
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#16It’s true that only very few individuals would be fossilised and fewer if they found. Nevertheless we do generally find multiple fossils of the same or closely related species. We also find fossils of multiple stages in the evolution of many species. So it seems unlikely to me that we would find zero fossils of a species advanced enough to colonise the entire planet, as we have, nor any of their ancestral species.
It also seems likely that technological artefacts would leave fossil-like impressions, or for mineral objects like ceramics simply straight up survive in strata. Such artefacts would massively exceed the number of individuals and trash has a tendency to get widely distributed so it seems extremely unlikely none would be found.
One idea is that they might have only lived in a small geographic region such as an island, and if that location happened to subduct and not reach the surface we’d never find them. Well yes, but the major advantage of technology is that it allows you to overcome geographic and climatic barriers, which is why us hairless tropical plains apes have colonised every region on the planet, and did so everywhere except Antarctica but including the arctic with Stone Age technology. An industrial society would also create demand for resources, prompting global expansion.
So it’s an interesting thought experiment, but I just don’t see how the hypothesis is really viable. Not impossible perhaps, but extremely low likelihood to the point of implausibility IMHO.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we were living in a simulation, I think it would be programmed in such a way that it would be emergent. A bit like a mandelbrot set, where the rules are simple but the complexity is infinite. No need to texture anything if the rules define what the texture would look like by a minimal fixed set of rules (laws of nature).
To me, it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study.
> it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study
The weakness, to me, in the simulation hypothesis is the ancestor simulation assumption. Most of our computing power concerns itself with the future. Not the unchangeable past. Hell, simulated universes with different physical constants would be far more interesting.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#18I'm pretty sure this was also in The Science of Discworld earlier than 2018, where a few civilizations exist before and after the dinosaurs.
I am surprised this is not mentioned in Wikipedia, but I don't have the book around to be able to cite it properly.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#19A word of warning: a few years ago, the related page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact took me down one of the worst Wikipedia procrastination rabbit holes I've ever lost myself in.
How kind of you to include a link to that very page with your post!
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study.
> it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study The weakness, to me, in the simulation hypothesis is the ancestor simulation assumption. Most of our computing power concerns itself with the future. Not the unchangeable past. Hell, simulated universes with different physical constants would be far more interesting.
I know folks doing climate modeling - there’s extensive simulating the past, because it’s the only way for us to validate our models.