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Silurian Hypothesis
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#32A 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.
If you enjoy that kind of thing then you might like Terry Pratchett's early SF work "Strata" that riffs heavily on this idea (on a less parochial scale) while also enjoyably sending up Niven's Ringworld and a few other tomes.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#33So no alien king's treasure room full of solid gold tributes?
No alien cartoonist's frozen head floating in a diamond jar protected inside a nuclear powered vault?
Not a single phallic sculpture in orbit that is visible to the naked eye from Earth?
Yeah, right.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#34A 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.
If you enjoy that kind of thing then you might like Terry Pratchett's early SF work "Strata" that riffs heavily on this idea (on a less parochial scale) while also enjoyably sending up Niven's Ringworld and a few other tomes.
There is also 2022 Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse", presenting a theory that there was a civilization (not industrial, but like Romans or Egyptians) living on the coastal areas during last ice age, but their traces have disappeared now that sea level is 120 meters higher than during ice age.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#35Have these people not seen how much garbage we leave lying around!? A lot of artificial materials last far longer than natural materials. Pure metals especially can last a very long time, like gold jewellery, or even just aluminium. Not to mention "forever chemicals", large scale concrete construction, mining, etc... We'll be finding evidence of our presence on Earth for a billion years or more, whether we like it or…
Most evidence would be gone after a few million years. Any metal that oxidizes would go first, aluminium included. Concrete would disappear with weathering, earth quakes, and even just by the action of plants. Huge open pit mines or mountain top removal would be weathered away and filled in with sediments. Plastics decompose and chemicals are diluted and dispersed or consumed by microbes. Gold jewelry may last a long time in the right conditions but if it's subject to any kind of motion it will deform and wear away since it is much softer than the grains of sand that would be rubbing against it. Everything would end up buried under layers of sediment or higher sea levels or even subducted into the mantle and melted.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#36I wrote a novel, I know, every asshole has. About this. My theory, that is, either ridiculous or correct, the Silurians are the ancestors of the dolphin. The dolphin, or OK, the Orca, have a larger cerebral cortex than humans. What if, they were on once land dwellers, could it be? There is some science behind that. And say, they burned a bunch of hydrocarbons and caused a global warming, melted all the ice and they h…
>place an odalisque with an inscription on it
Besides being cruel, odalisques aren't known to exist for more than a hundred or so years. Let alone millennia.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#37It’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…
A fun thought experiment is to imagine what we will do once we leave the cradle of Earth behind. Will we just leave all of our junk here? Make the homeworld a monument to our past? We would know that it wouldn't last, everything decays with time so some would argue it would be a crime not to preserve it and the only way you can be sure to preserve something is by regularly tending to it. I imagine many would argue that we take all of the most valuable artefacts with us, keeping them in pristine condition and on display. This sentiment might even extend to our dead, why leave them to be ground to dust by the uncaring aeons? Inter them in gigantic space crypts instead. Further, we may be determined to leave a pristine planet behind for the animals that still reside there and, eventually, for the next species to crawl its way up to sentience. Jeff Bezos has expressed a wish similar to this for our future. Move everything into space and keep the Earth as a giant nature reserve. Hundreds of years from now perhaps we will do that and after that maybe we will even leave the solar system behind us as we strike out into the universe. Now cast your mind back tens of millions of years and imagine some other intelligent species doing the same for us.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#38It’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…
So this article: https://www.science.org/content/article/most-species-disappe...
says that of modern threatened-but-not-extinct mammal species, we have recorded fossils for 9% of them. For non-threatened extant mammal species, we have recorded fossils for 20% of them. Assuming that's correct, it doesn't seem crazy to imagine that we might not have fossils for a species or it's say 5 ancestors species that existed let's say 10M years ago -- fossils are also subject to being broken or subducted and so we would expect recent species to leave a greater fossil record. And being an intelligent, cultural species may reduce the chance of fossils being formed for high populations, due to death practices.
We do find for example many different fossils for say triceratops. But that shouldn't be taken to mean that we find lots of different fossils for every, or even most, species extant at the time of the triceratops.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you enjoy that kind of thing then you might like Terry Pratchett's early SF work "Strata" that riffs heavily on this idea (on a less parochial scale) while also enjoyably sending up Niven's Ringworld and a few other tomes.
There is also 2022 Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse", presenting a theory that there was a civilization (not industrial, but like Romans or Egyptians) living on the coastal areas during last ice age, but their traces have disappeared now that sea level is 120 meters higher than during ice age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Apocalypse
I haven't seen the show, but I'm captivated by the idea that there are probably thousands of submerged sites like Cosquer Cave that hold traces of human history that are lost to both time and the sea. It's not on the same level as a city, but I am intrigued by it's existence nonetheless. It is also somber to think about how much artwork in that cave was washed away when it was flooded.
Re: Silurian Hypothesis
#40I wrote a novel, I know, every asshole has. About this. My theory, that is, either ridiculous or correct, the Silurians are the ancestors of the dolphin. The dolphin, or OK, the Orca, have a larger cerebral cortex than humans. What if, they were on once land dwellers, could it be? There is some science behind that. And say, they burned a bunch of hydrocarbons and caused a global warming, melted all the ice and they h…
> place an odalisque with an inscription on it
obelisk?