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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?

#251

Post by withinboredom »

inglor_cz wrote: post #244
withinboredom wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I’ve been in castles that are less than a thousand years old that are barely recognizable. Machu pichu is a good one as well.

Castles that stay above ground, yes, but there likely would be some buried structures, too. Pompeii looked remarkably fresh when dug out.

Pompeii was literally buried in a matter of hours, so that’s kind of a unique case. Any underground structures would be turned into a cave from water seeping in. Most people don’t dig into the side of caves, so it’s likely we’d never know. A great example is the millennium old water passages in Afghanistan. You can’t tell they are man made any more.

The point stands, most things don’t survive all that long (in the grand scheme of things). Occasionally, the conditions are exactly right to preserve something, but there is a limit.

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

#252

Post by datavirtue »

withinboredom wrote: post #208
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.

Man, I’ve been in castles that are less than a thousand years old that are barely recognizable. Machu pichu is a good one as well.

Sufficient sized meteorite impact would melt the entire surface of the planet.

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

#253

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

naasking wrote: post #123
melagonster wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but we have good prove of continental drift now. before we getting enough evidences, this theory just a joke.

You've missed the point, because these theories are basically compatible with the existing evidence, they just tell a different story.

I suppose a counter example would be a species found on multiple continents but during a time when they weren’t joined together. But you’re right that a natural overlap due to past plate tectonics could lead to false negatives with what I’m suggesting.

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

#254

Post by bmitc »

tiberious726 wrote: post #236
bmitc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

To be clear, I didn't say it was scientific.

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

#255

Post by Nasrudith »

greatfilter250 wrote: post #56
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figure that any industrialized civilization would have left indirect evidence of itself by mucking up the fossil record with introduced species. We intentionally and unintentionally introduce plants and animals far outside their natural range. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange You would see some species inexplicably take on a worldwide distribution, or see species suddenly turn up on far away landm…

> worldwide distribution Why does an industrial civilization need to be global? Our industrial civilization appeared extremely quickly, perhaps in the past 300 years, but it happened to appear within a preexisting global trade and travel network. An industrial civilization which existed for a few hundred years, outside the context of such a network, might not ever see the need for one.

Industrialization would increase demand for raw materials and heavily encourage expansion even if not required per se. Self-sufficiency of a single area becomes more difficult as technological complexity rises as well. Let alone demand for the "exotic" materials like rubber or even bronzemaking needing tin for their copper or visa versa. (The two seldom occur within different geologies seldom close to one another.)

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

#256

Post by andsoitis »

seszett wrote: post #238
andsoitis wrote: post #224

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. 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…

They can build craft to travel to Mars but not to another continent on Earth? That is an extraordinary claim!

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

#257

Post by jiggawatts »

datavirtue wrote: post #252
withinboredom wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I’ve been in castles that are less than a thousand years old that are barely recognizable. Machu pichu is a good one as well.

Sufficient sized meteorite impact would melt the entire surface of the planet.

That did happen — the Moon is theorised to have formed from the ejecta of a planet-sized impactor.

However, that happened very early in the history of the solar system, likely before life had a chance to start.

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

#258

Post by jiggawatts »

inglor_cz wrote: post #246
mrangle wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely metal and plastic decompose and break down, respectively.

Not all metal. Buried gold retrieved from ancient graves looks very "fresh".

Also most of the noble metals would remain pristine: platinum, iridium, etc…

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

#259

Post by naasking »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #253
naasking wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've missed the point, because these theories are basically compatible with the existing evidence, they just tell a different story.

I suppose a counter example would be a species found on multiple continents but during a time when they weren’t joined together. But you’re right that a natural overlap due to past plate tectonics could lead to false negatives with what I’m suggesting.

Right, but how could we know that they weren't joined together? We don't have DNA evidence for a lot of history so we build narratives from morphological evidence. If we find the same or similar species in two different places, we would typically just create a narrative around one of two possibilities, a) these two places were closer together at one point, or b) there was some great exodus from a common origin driven by factors unknown. The former is something like Pangaea, the latter describes human exodus from Africa.

Eventually there might be enough separate lines of evidence to refute these possibilities, but no one aside from those on the fringe would entertain the possibility that this was evidence of an advanced culture without overwhelming evidence.

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

#260

Post by zogrodea »

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.

It's sometimes thought that specific questions yield the most informative results rather than general ones. R. G. Collingwood talks about this again and again in his Autobiography (which is less about the man himself and more about his thinking - quite readable).

For example, when you are debugging code, you usually have an idea of where the error might be. So the process looks like: print at line 43, is everything as expected? yes, so print at line 48 and try inspecting values at the suspected code path in search of errors.

The same detective-like work (which he calls question and answer) is used by historians and archaeologists to reconstruct historical narratives. If you don't have specific questions in your head and a way to falsify them while trying to answer a question, you likely aren't going to learn as much.

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