261–270 of 282 posts
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But surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia.
> surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia Why? The Cambridge paper gives a scientist’s reasons for that not being the case being supposition.
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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 gr…
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Absolutely metal and plastic decompose and break down, respectively.
Not all metal. Buried gold retrieved from ancient graves looks very "fresh".
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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.
If my hypothesis is that pottery will look like this after being buried for 2,000 years, how do I test that? I don't have 2,000 years before I need to publish.
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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.
Metal is too precious to be just abandoned. Metal is usually recycled, even in our civilization. Whatever metal objects from ancient civilizations we know, are either grave goods (swords of warriors etc.), or were found in shipwrecks etc., or were found in destroyed settlements, plus a few accidentally lost (fell into a well etc.). But most metal objects get recycled.
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…
Well if you go back to the dawn of Homo Sapiens that's quite a ways back, but then you could rearrange that concept to say "they couldn't have been that uncivilized because they were exactly like us."
Oh, wait a minute . . .
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> surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia Why? The Cambridge paper gives a scientist’s reasons for that not being the case being supposition.
Because processed stones are much more massive than bones, which mostly rot away quite quickly.
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Even if it is a single creator, does it seem realistic that this was the first and only machine they built?
I’ve heard it argued by historians that there were likely to have been multiple prototypes of the antykythera mechanism, but each one was recycled to produce the next.
This could lend itself to the idea that one person made it, and if nothing whatsoever like it had ever come before you have to figure it took an awfully long time for one person to create something this complicated single-handedly.
Could be a number of years between iterations in a continuous improvement process that adds up to something like a life's work.
Maybe also could be passed down to a subsequent individual like a very specialized craft, and build technology across generations.
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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…
The statement "they couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" is a straw man though The actual question the article posits is "Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humankind?", and so it seems logical to take evidence of industry as a starting point to answer that question. A mere couple of hundred years of human industry has moved vast quantities of matter about, created many new ty…
neurons, however, fossilize very poorly indeed; after death they typically liquefy within days, losing all of the structure that could betray how they functioned
the particular shape of our industrial civilization is based on mass production in centralized facilities of durable goods that are identical to high precision (deep submicron precision in the case of this cpu). clearly this is not the only possible way to produce massive abundance; the rain forest or even the corn field does not work this way, but produces much more detail than tsmc does
much of the durability and fossilizability of our conventional technology stems from its stupidity. to remain standing, a two-story house would once be made with meter-thick walls, while modern hollow brick with plaster and reinforced concrete reduces this to perhaps ten solid centimeters between indoors and outdoors. more frugal balloon-frame designs consist entirely of metastable materials like wood and steel, materials which will lose their structure if left exposed to air and water, either suddenly in a fire or gradually over decades. but even a balloon-frame house is wasteful and inefficient compared to a five-meter-tall stand of bamboo
remaking the planet for your convenience is much cheaper if you can avoid spending resources on durability and fossilizability which don't benefit you during your lifetime
could you get there without a transitional phase of making lots of thick, solid objects out of materials that are stable on geological timescales? probably, but maybe not if your uplift path starts with fire instead of math...