Isaac Asimov's Nightfall [0], but on a longer cycle?
Jokes aside, what is the evidence, beyond "Ancient mystical texts"?
[0] http://www.myths.com/pub/fiction/science-fiction/Asimov/Nigh...
The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
21–30 of 130 posts
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#22if all dolphins were wiped out could we know that they were ever here from physical evidence?
We’ll never know of the existence of most species that ever existed. Fossilization is rare.
right, so how can one easily say this hypothesis is false? "advanced civilization" seems to be strangely characterized. would something a few steps above beavers be advanced enough?
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#23Petroleum could be the byproduct of a previous civilization.
Also, just as we "engineered" animals and plants through selective breeding, previous animals/plants could have been the results of selective breeding by a previous civilization: There'd be no way to tell just as there'd be no way to tell our "tampering" a few million years in the future.
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#24The timelines don't really add up for me. So there could have been this hypothetical civilization 55 million years ago already. And they've only just disappeared (if they did) 10'000 or so years ago? Without a trace? Also, no, a conspiracy cannot be the answer to a question we've not yet asked. The word has a clear meaning, it requires people to conspire to hide something from you.
No. The idea is they could have lived and thrived for a few thousand years a few million years ago, then gone extinct.
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#25However, since we do have plenty of fossils from Silurian, it is hard to believe that none of the advanced technologies never left any hint. Any idea?
Yes. We'd find mines, where the richest veins were mined out and what's left is spread in a pattern that clearly appears to be "a rich deposit but with the best stuff taken already". The mine itself would have long collapsed but would also leave interesting evidence, a pattern of mismatched geological layers that rather than looking like an earthquake or a tectonic upheaval would be something that is relatively clearly shaft-shaped and if followed into the mountain would open out into a pattern that indicates intelligent mining activity as the anomaly is further charted.
Places where there is suddenly a vast collection of foreign rocks from the other side of the world that can't be explained by glaciers.
Radioactivity from nuclear tests that can't be explained by stellar phenomena and leave a layer of weird isotopes and isotope ratios all around the world, as we already have done.
And while we aren't to the point we'd have found this quite yet necessarily, evidence on the Moon where unlike Earth evidence probably would in fact persist for millions of years, especially if it ever attained any scale, e.g., "a large complex of cities" might still leave a visible mark on the surface easily visible to modern satellites and clearly with no other explanation available as to what caused it.
People get stuck on the idea that the only way to determine there was intelligent life earlier is to find a super complicated artifact which obviously can't survive, but there are footprints we've left in the world that are way, way larger than a cell phone or even a major city.
I don't find it hard to believe we've lost entire human civilizations. In fact I'd call it the smart bet. Maybe those civilizations were even a bit more sophisticated than we'd have thought, with maybe an earlier and entirely unknown Iron Age popping up somewhere for some period of time or something. But this is the first major technological civilization this planet has ever seen, even across geological time scales. And those lost human civilizations never reached to the level where they took all the easy resources like we have, because if they had, we wouldn't be able to get them. Some resources we call "non-renewable" do replenish on a few million year time scale, but we also pull lots of resources out of billion-year-old rocks, such as copper mines in northern Michigan which are pulling resources out of pre-Cambrian rocks. Clearly nobody else has been there, at scale.
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#26I don't think we have to go that far back. Plate tectonics, submersion and weathering does a good enough job of wiping the slate clean off the surface of the Earth, that any evidence of earlier hominids developing pre-industrial, coastal civilizations say, a million years ago, would be now under the crust. What we consider civilization is about 5000 years old, so it's not inconceivable that the cycle might have occur…
I mean sure, if they somehow didn't have any trade goods that went in land, didn't work with metals enough to do any appreciable mining, and didn't breed any plants or animals enough to change their genetics. Any hypothetical hidden past civilization would have to have been weird in a number of ways to not leave any evidence.
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#27However, since we do have plenty of fossils from Silurian, it is hard to believe that none of the advanced technologies never left any hint. Any idea?
> Any idea?
Not really, because none of this passes the smell test if you know even a tiny bit about geology and paleontology. The most solid arguments are religious texts, there is not really any substance other than that.
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#28I can't speak to dinosaur people, but the population genetics of our own DNA reveals that there were never many humans on the planet till recently, so that rules out any very large human civilization. (Unless they genetically altered themselves to hide the evidence! Ahaaa...)
If whole populations were wiped out and the world was repopulated by a small remnant would that not account for it? Or if an extinct human species had an advanced civilisation?
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#29So we have microbial fossils from 3.5 billion years ago, fossilised 300 million year old skin , bones from almost 200 my ago, even actually soft tissue inside a fossilised bone from 70 my ago. Ah, footprints too, the most unsubstantial matter of all: pure shape. That's in addition to all the million other fossils that are so common we hardly care: shells, small bones, etc. And someone is saying there could have been…
Actually correct. We have very very few fossils compared to the millions of species that have evolved and gone extinct over 4 billion years.
The fossils we do have are of highly successful species in that geography. It’s a matter of chance, leaving behind a fossil, after all.
And unlike biological matter that can fossilize, industrial structures etc do not. All our manufactured stuff has very short life once it reaches the crust and starts getting compacted.
The more time you add, the better the odds we’d find this evidence lost.
And if this wasn’t a global, but more localized pre-human civilization, the evidence would be thinner still.
Which is why this isn’t a scientific hypothesis really. It’s more showing you the limits of scientific inquiry into the deep history of Earth.
Re: The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The counter argument: dinosaurs were around for a staggering amount of time, no pun intended. 165 million years is reasonably long enough to ensure they left behind some nests, bones, and a feather or two. Modern humans have been around for more like 0.02 million years. The counter-counter argument is that while we’ve been here for a comparative blink of an eye, we’ve left behind 4 orders of magnitude more stuff than…
Yea, but if humans went extinct tomorrow, very little human artifacts would remain after millions of years. Indeed, most would be gone well before that. How much stuff from the 18th century still remains, in percentage terms?
Very few things would in fact remain, you’re correct. But we’ve also created radioactive elements with half lives of many millions of years.
While there would probably very little direct evidence of humans after millions of years, there would probably be at least some anomalous evidence someone could find.