Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 282 posts

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

#161

Post by ses1984 »

mrangle wrote: post #115
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…

Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago? Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it? For example. And we don't need to go nearly that far back to notice lack of ancient metal that had to exist, given what it accomplished. Metal disintegrates fast. Megalithic evidence, at minimum and across hi…

You’re looking for evidence of a specific thing, which is not the same as looking for evidence of anything.

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

#162

Post by radu_floricica »

Just for fun, a possibility is Antarctica.

Cold is a straightforward problem to solve - make a fire, throw a fur or a blanket on you. Even the most primitive emerging civilizations ca thrive in cold climates.

Heat on the other hand is a lot more complex to solve. You need fully industrial civilization to have air conditioning, and we still don't have anything portable enough. Even today's solution to 40C+ is "drink a lot of water and stay inside".

So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature. GPT was full of disclaimers, but suggested a typical heat wave in Late Cretaceous might exceed 50°C (122°F), while parts of Antarctica would be a very comfortable 20°C (68°F). One could easily imagine an intelligent species with poor thermal control that was very well adapted to Antarctica, but could never settle the rest of the world if once every 5-10 summers a heat wave would wipe them out. That was the time of Velociraptors btw, so not a bad stock to evolve intelligence from.

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

#163

Post by sigg3 »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #159
EdwardDiego wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, do we know that metal tools were used for those carvings? From what I recall, until iron/steel was invented, it was pretty much abrasion as bronze was not hard enough to chisel nearly every stone.

They were not. The primary stonework technique was almost certainly pecking [1], where you take a small "hammer" and whack it against the stone, pulverizing a bit at a time. This leaves a characteristic surface you can observe on the pillars today. However, the Gobekli Tepe builders were a bit smarter than just carving everything from scratch. They made use of the exposed limestone layers to quarry materials that wer…

People who shout about ancient aliens and hidden technology always completely ignore that the people in the past had access to the most advanced machinery available: humans.

Add time to that, so that your project can have a scope of generations, passing down knowledge gained from a lifetime of doing this particular thing, the results become unsurprising even.

Amazing, inspiring and ingenious but also unsurprising.

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

#164

Post by AlotOfReading »

mrangle wrote: post #131
AlotOfReading wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The stones to which you are referring, and larger that are found in and around other structures, are too large to have been cut with the method that you suggest.

I'm not sure which part you think is impossible, but it's absolutely possible to chisel a stone out of a quarry with stone tools. There were subsequent steps to work that rough shape down into the final product, of which abrasion was one of the last steps. None of them are especially sensitive to the size of the stone. We've found the rocks they used to do it littering known quarries, on obelisks and the like.

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

#165

Post by andsoitis »

radu_floricica wrote: post #162

Just for fun, a possibility is Antarctica. Cold is a straightforward problem to solve - make a fire, throw a fur or a blanket on you. Even the most primitive emerging civilizations ca thrive in cold climates. Heat on the other hand is a lot more complex to solve. You need fully industrial civilization to have air conditioning, and we still don't have anything portable enough. Even today's solution to 40C+ is "drink a…

> So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature.

Are you arguing that the chances of a large-scale Antarctic industrial civilization that reached Mars is higher than one that reached South America, Southern Africa, or Australia?

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

#167

Post by safety1st »

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…

I think the argument goes that if the civilization was sufficiently old and short-lived, no we probably wouldn't find any fossilized evidence. For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago. Humans have only been industrialized for around 200 years. If you imagine a dinosaur civilization that's industralized for 1,000 years before it kills itself off, they still hung on 5 times longer than we have so far and yet we probably wouldn't have found fossils of their wrenches. (Not to mention that our archaeology is concentrated on places where humans lived which have little correlation to whatever might have been a good site for a dino city 100 million years ago.)

The authors of the Silurian hypothesis paper believe it's unlikely that there was an ancient non-human industrialized civilization. But they think if there was we wouldn't find its fossils. We might need to look for other markers like climate variances, radioactive materials or artifacts on the moon. Maybe some civilization arose, got stuck in the bronze age or early industrial tech for a thousand years, didn't generate those signatures, then died out. If our fossil record isn't thorough enough to find them then that possibility seems hard to disprove.

Wikipedia has a bit more detail on the Silurian hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

And the actual paper is here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

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

#168

Post by andsoitis »

hooande wrote: post #38
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…

This assumes that their technology would be similar to ours. They could have used biological mechanical parts, made from plant or animal material. They could have had radically different theories of mechanics or construction that better fit the state of the planet at their time. In general the statement "They couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" limits what we look for and how we look for…

> biological mechanical parts

What’s that?

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

#170

Post by pkdpic »

ses1984 wrote: post #161
mrangle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago? Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it? For example. And we don't need to go nearly that far back to notice lack of ancient metal that had to exist, given what it accomplished. Metal disintegrates fast. Megalithic evidence, at minimum and across hi…

You’re looking for evidence of a specific thing, which is not the same as looking for evidence of anything.

I agree with both sentiments but the closer I get to primary-resource history / prehistory the more I appreciate the horrifying astronomical randomness of what is preserved / what we stumble across / what we use to cobble together our lumpy inconsistent historical narrative.

There is so much cosmic space that exists between any two historical artifacts. There's definitely room for a multitude of completely unpreserved civilizations.

On-the-nose reading that comes to mind, Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin... very anomalous book / quick entertaining read...

Post reply on HN