51–60 of 130 posts
Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.
dude wind hundreds of thousands of years into future, sands of time, etc. modulo two warring biological descendants of humans not full diff species tho
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Petroleum could be the byproduct of a previous civilization. How so? We know how it forms, there is no real gap in understanding there. What could lead to the kind of distribution of oil and gas fields we can observe?
Just fun to think about and base fiction on I mean, would an ant walking on a highway be able to tell that it's artificial?
I also use the Carboniferous Period as a metric as to why "Advanced alien life" isn't more abundant (and I believe it should be factored into the Fermi equation)...
All those trees growing, soaking up sun, dying and just laying there to be compressed and buried without anything to decompose them, and then humans using them like solar batteries to power civilization (i.e. burning the coal), is one of those million-to-one things that enabled the human race to develop beyond basic society.
We needed all that coal and oil (and gas) based power to get to the point - industrially and technologically - where we could even build solar panels or nuclear to replace them, so its not like you could start from first principals and jump straight to modern power generation either.
The odds that the same sequence of events - fungus and bacteria not having the tools to decompose lignin (or whatever the alien equivalent is) - to happen on an extra-solar planet is ... pardon my pun ... astronomical :D
(yes, I used a dash to separate ideas in a sentence, deal with it...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Did a rapid check on T-rex, just as an example. Was around for max 3.6 million years. Max population at any one time must have been around 20k individuals. We have about 150 skeletons. So current human population is 400 thousand times the maximum T-rex population at any one time. A few decades are enough to produce more human individuals than the entire T-rexes history. We also have the ability to go (and die…
>We also produce an absolutely staggering amount of artifacts of all kinds, from plastic straws to giant tunnels and artificial caves. Plastic will be gone in ~1000 years, https://www.activesustainability.com/environment/waste-plane... tunnels and artificial caves in a few million years at most as they are compressed by the weight of the rocks above them ("tunnel squeezing").
And how long does it take to dissolve skin? Footprints? Because we have those from hundreds of millions of years ago.
I 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…
Nah, you way off on that, coastlines have remained relatively same last million years, def not subducted into an ocean trench
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just fun to think about and base fiction on I mean, would an ant walking on a highway be able to tell that it's artificial?
Probably not, but an ant cannot do any kind of isotope analysis.
but again, would someone a million in the future be able to tell that today's bananas, corn, watermelons, cattle, dogs etc. were the result of selective breeding by an intelligent species? (with no human records for reference)
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That's not what the articles says though: "Ancient mystical texts hint at earlier creation, the life that preceded the Garden, prequels to Genesis. These incarnations are not reported in the Bible because they are none of your goddamn business, but the evidence is everywhere. Some students of conspiracy believe there was a time when lizard people shared the earth with modern men, the older race dying as the younger e…
That’s not the Silurian hypothesis the astrophysicists put out. That’s the author extending it to fit those myths.
So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?
> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies. Thus, we hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.
[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
I have a toy hypothesis that once civilization level intelligent life emerges it never disappears barring the planet it inhabits being vaporized by some unfortunately directed GRB or some similar catastrophe. Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.