Live data from Hacker News

I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

medium.com

11–20 of 135 posts

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#14
post #10
post #2

One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits. It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

It’s gotta be coins though. Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists. At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals. So the King created a vast medal series ( Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings. These bronze and gold medals were intentionally bur…

If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world.

Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#15
post #2

One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits. It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

It is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun. Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sen…

That ol' Silurian Hypothesis is fun, but, knowing how damn smart birds are, it's not inconceivable that the theropods could have become advanced enough to be at least tool-users.

Of course, now, we know they probably had as much similarity to lizards as we do.

Another interesting thought experiment is an octopus civilization. They are probably smart enough to have also developed along those lines.

Depending on what that civilization would have looked like, there might not be much left.

I remember reading an essay (probably linked from here), that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization. They posited that the only evidence of our civilization, in a few million years, would be marbles.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun. Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sen…

Was the sense of wackiness wrong though? Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. It's useful to play around with ideas, yes, but it's also important to acknowledge that some ideas simply are wishful thinking.

>Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous.

If only, but no. Thanks to equally ubiquitous video and image editing and now AI and the profit potential of social media there are more such claims than anyone can count.

The sitting president of the US is even intentionally stirring the pot releasing obvious AI photos of himself walking with aliens while the government is releasing "evidence" that isn't any more credible than the stuff you find on Reddit and Youtube. A significant number of Americans already believe the government has confirmed the existence of aliens and UFOs on Earth thanks to "whistleblowers" like Grusch and the Tic-Tac stuff, even though the government's official position has never changed, and most of that "evidence" has been debunked, and Grusch et.al have yet to provide anything conclusive.

Far from going away, the whole thing has become normalized and I feel like we're going to reach the point where more people believe in interdimensional space elves than believe humans ever landed on the moon by the end of the decade.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#17
post #2

One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits. It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

Or, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties.

But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons ago to harness quantum capabilities back in the day.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#19
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s gotta be coins though. Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists. At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals. So the King created a vast medal series ( Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings. These bronze and gold medals were intentionally bur…

If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world. Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.

Shame that dopant drift would render the chips inoperable eventually.

But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.

Re: I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

#20
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s gotta be coins though. Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists. At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals. So the King created a vast medal series ( Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings. These bronze and gold medals were intentionally bur…

If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world. Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.

They're clearly a ceremonial artifact, and their reflective surface is used to perform some religious ritual or other, probably related to the sun.
Post reply on HN