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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?

#211

Post by safety1st »

ethbr0 wrote: post #203
safety1st wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indus…

In order for a civilization to be undetectable, you'd essentially bound terms in a terrestrial version of the Drake Equation [0] You'd need a civilization that did not produce long-lived technological signatures (e.g. glass panes), that did not have a large number of individuals (i.e. produce remains), that did not substantially alter their environment (i.e. leave geographic markers), AND that did not consume easily…

After 100 million years, would any of those signatures be detectable? Glass decomposes, only takes a million years or so. The continents themselves have rearranged so any bets about structures that still remain are off. Depletion of easily available resources perhaps, but if a bunch of iron deposits were mined out that long ago, how would we know now?

This is the topic of the paper, I think the authors settled on climate markers and radiation from elements like plutonium-239 as among the very few pieces of evidence that might still be around on that time scale. They also observe that there has likely been enough exploitable energy in the form of oil, natural gas etc. to support an industrial civilization since about 250 million years ago.

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

#212

Post by seszett »

andsoitis wrote: post #165
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,…

We ourselves would likely try to colonise an exoplanet similar to Earth around a nearby star before we even think about settling on Mercury.

I think they have a point on heat management, too much heat can easily make a place totally uninhabitable while cold can practically always be managed.

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

#213

Post by DrSiemer »

mock-possum wrote: post #198
colordrops wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another argument goes that they transcending to technology and form beyond what we can comprehend, covered their tracks, and left us be because we aren't interesting or to avoid interfering in our development. Perhaps our perception through the 5 senses and an understanding of reality as a physical universe of spacetime is just a short phase between being an animal and being a multidimension being.

Yeah that’s more of a sci-fi plot than an argument.

Isn't it one of the more likely answers to the Fermi paradox? "Transcending" could also be "everyone got really into VR and stopped caring about actual reproduction".

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

#214

Post by csomar »

safety1st wrote: post #201
benj111 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't have any evidence for anything approaching civilisation, fair enough humans have been industrialised for 200 years, but they've been building to that point for 10s of 1000s of years.

If there was a stone age dinosaur civilization that lasted for 10,000 years, what evidence of it would survive? We only even have one fossil of a dinosaur per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. They key idea is how sparse our fossil record is compared to the vastness of life's history. Plus we are talking about 100,000,000 years ago - the chance a flint or metal tool, or a stone building would survive that long and be…

It's also not far fetched. The only "remains" of the dinosaurs era are birds. These are smart animals that actually build their homes. It's possible that dinosaurs had and built homes and maybe had a small civilization.

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

#215

Post by manfre »

dheera wrote: post #64
hooande wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe, but on a planet that's full of rocks one would think they would have at least organized a FEW of the rocks into structures of sorts.

Mountains can turn into a flat landscape in a geological timespan. It's also possible we've uncovered the signs of these type of ancient structures and didn't recognize them as such, used the materials to build something during our past, or pretended we didn't recognize it in modern times because that would have slowed/stopped a construction project.

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

#216

Post by blueflow »

ekianjo wrote: post #185
blueflow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which happened for all fossils already and they are still there.

Still all there compared to what quantity exactly? Ever hard of the gazillions of fossil fuels?

They still are there to detect them. The question was whether our fossil records would be detectable.

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

#217

Post by dr_dshiv »

jl6 wrote: post #193
dr_dshiv wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No benefit of scale or consumer society; without that, seems hard to get to chip fabs? But maybe writing and some machines?

They might have scale, but over time rather than distance.

But that doesn’t lead to the efficiency of mass production, specialized labor, Moore’s law, etc.

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

#218

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cubefox wrote: post #209
rini17 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stone does weather too. It either needs uninterrupted dry climate (not really possible for millions of years) or being placed inside a stable geological formation (we don't usually build that way).

I'd bet stone weathers many orders of magnitude less than dinosaur bones.

Fossils are stone. The porous bone that housed the minerals are long gone by the time we find them.

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

#219

Post by marginalia_nu »

giantrobot wrote: post #108
marginalia_nu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Well that's my point. Not that the greeks had some forgotten industrial revolution, but that archeological records are very limited, and we were a stroke of dumb luck away from never discovering the antikythera mechanism. It raises the question of if we almost missed this, what else did we miss. Not just in greece but elsewhere too.

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

#220

Post by cubefox »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #218
cubefox wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet stone weathers many orders of magnitude less than dinosaur bones.

Fossils are stone. The porous bone that housed the minerals are long gone by the time we find them.

We are talking about actual bones in living animals though, and those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts.
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