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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?

#221

Post by StackOverlord »

giantrobot wrote: post #112
Pompidou wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" The new images of the Face at Cydonia Mensa confirm eyes, nose, mouth, helmet structure with additional detail of nostrils and helmet ornaments being clearly seen in new images with details at approximately 1/10 scale of the face. New imagery confirms the pyramid structure seen in Viking images of the The D&M pyramid and new high resolution images show evidence of collapsed brickwork. New images of a face found at…

That's some industrial grade apophenia, pareidolia, and good old fashioned cognitive dissonance. The MSSS imagery makes it very plane that the Cydonian face is just a hill. But no, they put some white arrows pointing to nothing and claim it's evidence of a made up thing.

Then let's make some industrial grade apophenia machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xOGeZt71sg

https://youtu.be/0Y8v3X6Oft4

I'd be really interested in generating on the fly numerical apophenia like those. In fact I dabbled into doing exactly that using GPT to code a python script. I ran L-BFGS-B on a unit pyramid to optimize its basic dimensions (height, base-length, set to 1 initially) so that it matches the pyramid equations [1]. As a result I get the pyramid's actual dimensions. My synthetic pyramid is slightly better than the actual pyramid when it comes to matching the "pyramid equations". I know this is tautological, yet when I observe the actual pyramid dimensions and where it fits on the gradient magnitude graph my script[2] provides, it falls right when the gradient becomes almost flat. That made me want to explore further, and I attempted to come up with my own crackpot equations using symbolic regression/genetic programming[3]. The ultimate goal: a VR app, let's call it the "conspiracy lens".

[1]https://tobeornottobe.org/the-great-pyramid-intro/math-const...

[2]https://pastebin.com/TsUtcWAa

[3]https://pastebin.com/9CEU76K6

There's a field studying this kind of stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory

And look what I found: https://journals.openedition.org/tipa/3068 – Louis de Saussure & Tim Wharton, 2019

Seems like the de Saussure family still has a very robust scientific tradition. The most famous of the de Saussure, Ferdinand, founder of synchronic linguistics, got trapped into an apophenia trap with his theory of "hypograms" underlying saturnian verses. More at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0158...

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

#222

Post by K0balt »

cubefox wrote: post #205
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…

> 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. Dinosaurs presumably fossilize very badly compared to many artificial artifacts, like buildings made out of machined stone.

On the timescale we are looking at coastal areas are completely destroyed or created and substantial destruction and renewal of crust occurs. No guarantee of anything being found at all.

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

#223

Post by K0balt »

fsloth wrote: post #190
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.

That’s basically a ”rapture” hypothesis. ”We can’t see them because of ancient technobabble sciencemagic lifted them to another realm”. In otherwords this is a supernatural, not natural hypothesis. In other words, that’s more of a religious rather than scientific hypothesis. It’s cool to have inspiration from where-ever, the whole point of religion and art is that they don’t need to be scientific. But one really shou…

TBF we are assuming that we universally know what toolness looks like. There easily could be other forms of or paths to technology that we are completely ignorant of, even to the point of being ignorant of our ignorance.

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

#224

Post by andsoitis »

seszett wrote: post #212
andsoitis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

The other continents on Earth are much more similar to Antarctica than Mars is to Antarctica.

We set up a presence on Antarctica and we haven’t yet on any other celestial body.

I juts don’t buy that there was an Antarctic industrial civilization that couldn’t find a way to also live on the other continents but somehow did on Mars but left zero evidence.

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

#225

Post by andsoitis »

swores wrote: post #178
andsoitis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> biological mechanical parts What’s that?

A wooden cog, a chain made not from metal but from plant fibres, etc etc.

And you’re thinking that the machines that produces these plant based parts at industrial scale were themselves made of plant material, rather than plastics and metals?

What do you postulate were the power sources such an industry would have used?

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

#226

Post by cubefox »

K0balt wrote: post #222
cubefox wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Dinosaurs presumably fossilize very badly compared to many artificial artifacts, like buildings made out of machined stone.

On the timescale we are looking at coastal areas are completely destroyed or created and substantial destruction and renewal of crust occurs. No guarantee of anything being found at all.

Dinosaur fossils also didn't have a guarantee of being found. It's all in the probability.

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

#227

Post by ethbr0 »

safety1st wrote: post #211
ethbr0 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cli…

Some glass decomposes.

It's chemically inert like aluminum (after oxidizing, e.g. foil), so the processes acting on it are mechanical and subject to probability.

Some amount is going to be abraded, buried, etc, but you only need a few pieces to remain. Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.

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

#228

Post by pragmatic »

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…

Read the article.

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

#229

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cubefox wrote: post #220
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts

I don't think they would fossilise. It's a process specific to the porosity of organic tissue. They might be preserved, but the Cambridge paper explains why it’s unlikely they would last for a hundred millennia or more.

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