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Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

nautil.us

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Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#101

Post by micah94 »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #59
gizajob wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever ground one to prove this?

I've polished things with sand before and used hammerstones, yes. I'm not a stonemason though, just somone who spent a lot of time as a kid playing with rocks. Most people will have some familiarity with emery cloth/sandpaper, which are basically the same principle. We don't even need to look at fancy egyptian statues. Carnelian beads were a common trade item across the Ancient near east and Egypt made this way. It's…

My issue has always been with the large megaton granite slabs inside the pyramids that you can't even see. They placed these things high up above chambers and rooms like lego pieces.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#103

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

saluki wrote: post #92

[flagged]

> Institute for Creation Research

Yeah, nope, not bothering to read that. It is ridiculous the lengths to which people will go to justify the balderdash in an old cracked book written two thousand years ago.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#104

Post by shrimp_emoji »

ceejayoz wrote: post #102
saluki wrote: post #92

[flagged]

Yeah, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Researc...

Lol, yeah, the agenda started to be revealed with:

```

However, there are plenty of documented, though not widely known, reasons why the methods used to date ancient earth materials are faulty.4 In fact, when "300 million year old" coal is examined for carbon, it routinely returns measurable radioactive carbon-14, which would have disappeared by radioactive decay in under 90,000 years.5

Also, the Bible's historical information documents a world that is only thousands of years old. In this context, deeply buried coal deposits were produced by the historical Flood of Noah.6 The people who were alive back then could have provided coal-embedded artifacts.

```

Oh, are we doing a fun thought experiment? Entertaining the idea that the coal was formed merely thousands of years ago? Like, in the time of the Ancient Egyptians? It's coal made of mammoths? I guess it's possible, but... :D

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#105

Post by Barrin92 »

MR4D wrote: post #74
DannyB2 wrote: post #4

If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast metal part. As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some higher life forms from…

If it were more than 65 million years ago there would be no evidence due to plate tectonics destroying all evidence. Still could be on the moon or another planet though.

There would be no evidence on the surface of the earth, but just as there's characteristic fossil layers in the ground there would be evidence in the sediment. Right now about 30 billion tons of concrete are used by our species every year. If there were industrial civilizations of that scale, you'd have a whole stratum of very obvious artificial origin between the rocks.

Also some leftovers of the nuclear industry. Enriched Uranium does not occur in nature but U235 has a half-life of about 700 million years. So remnants of our nuclear activity will be detectable for a long time.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#106

Post by agentgumshoe »

tarikjn wrote: post #67
AlotOfReading wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not modern precision manufacturing and metrology, it's abrasively grinding down rock that's been roughly shaped. It's tedious as all hell, but well within the toolbox for ancient Egyptians (not to mention many other societies). There are a lot of options to do the rough shaping. Egyptians are known to have used abrasive drills for some artifacts, but other cultures often used rocks of the same or greater hard…

The rough shaping is not at issue. The challenge is maintaining tolerances along all axis and constraints on your detail work while using high forces and pressures to work the hard material. Grinding is a good guess for the possible material removal process — and it is up there today for the smallest tolerances using a mechanical process —- watch a video of a jig grinder in action. But what tool is used to hold or in…

I assume back then they weren't too fussed about having 100 people work on a small rock should they desire.

I think we just don't comprehend, as mentioned above, how much time and effort could be allowed for back then. I'm sure 100 people could create a near perfect vase given 30 years to work on it (random example).

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#108

Post by giantrobot »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #66
DannyB2 wrote: post #4

If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast metal part. As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some higher life forms from…

To be fair, there are entire human civilizations we know have existed that we barely have archeological evidence to make sense of. We know they had language, culture, technology and we've found shells, bones and rubble. That, and the fact that we've found one antiktythera mechanism and nothing like it before or since raises questions. It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical comput…

> It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

A culture didn't create it. A person or team created it. The Antikythera mechanism was built before the ISO 9001 specification so its documentation may not have survived long past its creators lives. The high precision manufacturing required, in an era before high precision was all that precise, suggests the mechanism was likely a rare artifact. It was dumb luck it was found in the first place.

There's likely many complicated ancient devices lost to time because they weren't widely available or described in documents that have persisted. You literally run a search engine for marginalia that may not be popular or widely known. It wouldn't take much to knock a lot of that content off the web and be lost to history.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#109

Post by xwdv »

What seems chilling to me is that there is a sort of terrestrial Fermi Paradox where given the amount of time Earth has existed relative to how long humans have existed, you should expect there to have been sentient non-human civilizations existing prior to our emergence. If life and technology are so easy, living in a world where previous civilized species have once lived should be the norm. And yet, we have found no such evidence.

The probability is so low that we are the first true industrial civilization to have been on this planet’s 4.5 billion years, yet here we are.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#110

Post by wincy »

ianburrell wrote: post #60
leafmeal wrote: post #12

Obviously this doesn't apply when speaking on the scale of millions of years, but I remember reading that there may not be enough easily accessible energy sources (ie fossil fuels) left to jump start another industrial civilization if our current one where to collapse.

There are a lot of coal deposits left. A lot of them are near the surface, some exposed by mines. The downside is that they are far from current civilization since the closer ones have been mined. Wood was important in the US for industrialization. Unlike Europe, the US had lots of forests. Those might be enough for start. Also, we know how to make electricity from solar, wind, and hydro. They need electricity and go…

Russia has essentially an inexhaustible supply of trees in the taiga if people were determined enough. The scope of the number of trees is absurd, with estimates that 18 percent of the worlds biomass is in the taiga.
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