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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?

#231

Post by Ekaros »

ETH_start wrote: post #139

It's implausible that a species would develop an industrial civilization and then get killed off in an event that doesn't wipe out every other species of vertebrate. A species with human-level technology could survive even the Chicxulub asteroid that killed off non-avian dinosaurs, given the huge population and vast range that industrial civilization enables that species to attain, as well as the diverse array of ene…

Similarly why climate change won't be existential crisis for human race. Civilization maybe, but for the race no.

Getting rid of every member of species that is adapted to wide range of environments and globally spread might be impossible. And likely they would at least leave some evidence somewhere. It is not like every surface of planet has gone through ice ages or other events grinding away the top soil.

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

#232

Post by Ekaros »

colordrops wrote: post #189
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…

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.

Big issue with this is would any species care to do that? To clean up planet used for years, decades or centuries by decent population would be massive undertaking. Probably magnitudes bigger than getting there in first place...

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

#233

Post by RecycledEle »

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 would not say there has never been a single ancient thing discovered. There are many anomalous findings in archeology.

Here are a few examples: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument * Parts of the Egyptian Pyramids seem to have been cut with circular saws. * Places in the ancient world seem to have been nuked, including the ancient city of Sodom. * Some ancient maps are amazingly accurate, when they should not have know the shapes of land masses.

I'm NOT saying any of this proves the Silurian Hypothesis. I looked into some of these claims, and realized how hard it is to be an archaeologist. The amount of stuff left behind is small, and you can never be sure who did what to it over the centuries.

Artifacts are not stored in hermetically sealed containers until archaeologists dig them up. Instead, artifacts mix with their environments for centuries. This mixes up the carbon and makes carbon dating iffy at best.

I classify archaeology as a pseudo-science.

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

#234

Post by cubefox »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #229
cubefox wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia.

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

#235

Post by colordrops »

colordrops wrote: post #189
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…

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.

Downvoters; I'm not arguing for this, just mentioning one of the arguments I've heard. I was going to be explicit about this and it looks like I should have been.

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

#236

Post by tiberious726 »

bmitc wrote: post #202
fsloth wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In other words, that’s more of a religious rather than scientific hypothesis. I get what you're getting at, but I don't think it's so clear cut. Religion is more about organizational beliefs than just beliefs. Many parts of science are pretty far fetched in terms of us only knowing a bit with a very tightly constrained perspective (humans sitting on Earth with limited technology in the Solar System in the Milky Way…

It's not falsifiable, therefore not scientific

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

#237

Post by WalterBright »

umlautae wrote: post #195
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall TV shows saying that the Egyptian pyramids could not have been constructed with Egyptian technology, so it must have been space aliens. The same for the closely fitting stones in Inca buildings. It doesn't take advanced technology to do either of those things. My favorite one was pi is there in the relationship between the pyramid base length and its height, and the Egyptians had no notion of pi. Again, spac…

Not sure if irony but cubit means a unit of length from an elbow to the end of the fingers. (BTW maybe that’s why people think giants were 100 cubits tall, when in fact the text said they were a group hundred hands strong)

It's a joke from a famous comedy routine where God tells Noah what the dimensions of the arc should be in cubits. At the end, Noah asks "what's a cubit?"

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

#238

Post by seszett »

andsoitis wrote: post #224
seszett wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

I think you're talking from a human point of view, but you know nothing of the similarity of Antarctica compared to the other continents for this hypothetical sentient species we're talking about.

If they can't bear positive temperatures then all other continents are totally out of bounds for them, while Mars isn't. That's different from the reverse, in that even if we can't naturally live in negative temperatures we can easily enough wear warm clothes and heat up the spaces we live in.

Same reason we find nearby Venus uninhabitable but faraway Europa seems almost colonisable.

Of course there wasn't actually an Antarctic industrial civilisation, but that's not really the point.

Also, any evidence would be found either under 2000 meters of ice or at the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, so we wouldn't know about it yet.

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

#239

Post by thrashh »

mrangle wrote: post #117
thrashh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s possible that they don’t have the same materials as us but they would have the same problems. Take plastic or metal. Their main draw is that they do not decompose or degrade. There are a billion problems that can be solved when you have a material that does not naturally degrade or decompose. So even if this civilization did not use plastic or metal, I find it hard to believe they didn’t come across a problem…

Absolutely metal and plastic decompose and break down, respectively.

Sure, but on very long timescales. And eventually once you make enough of it, it gets lodged in all sorts of places, some less susceptible to decomposition, such as humans in bogs or mammoths in glaciers.

I just find it hard to believe there to be not a single trace of anything.

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

#240

Post by tanuki »

RecycledEle wrote: post #233
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 would not say there has never been a single ancient thing discovered. There are many anomalous findings in archeology. Here are a few examples: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument * Parts of the Egyptian Pyramids seem to have been cut with circular saws. * Places in t…

Aren't there lots of testible hypotheses in archaeology though? I get that you're saying that a lot of explanations feel speculative, but it feels a bit far to say the field itself is incompatible with the scientific method.
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