Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 181 posts

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#151

Post by candiodari »

jccooper wrote: post #95

Yes, over geologic time, nearly anything has no chance of survival. And, yes, the lifetime of such a civilization may be a window that is, geologically, basically invisible. But an industrial civilization makes a LOT of stuff, and much of that is quite durable and easily recognizable as artificial, and is likely to be scattered all over the planet. Given that there are places that preserve tracks over 300 million yea…

Yeah but I bet there's, even now, like 80-90% (guess) of the planet that don't have a single manmade object on them.

And those million/billion years tracts of land that archaeologists see are like 0.0000001% (guess) of the total. Odds seem good that surviving rocks came from very boring, very pointless places.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#152

Post by candiodari »

ardit33 wrote: post #132
8bitsrule wrote: post #129

There have been many civilizations on Earth, maybe not many were industrial (ancient Egypt was clearly semi-industrial so far as lithic tooling is concerned.) We haven't looked deep enough very much. Many of the 10-25,000 year sites are buried dozens of feet underground. If there are any previous ruins, they're probably a hundred-or-more feet down. Seaside ruins from 10k+ years ago are now under 400 feet of water and…

ok... i get your point, but the major counterpoint: as earth / plate tectonic move around, underneath earth is constantly surfaced... from dinosaur fragments, to Cambrian era mollusks found in top of mountains (due to earth's crust movement). If there was a previous 'intelligent' civilization previous to us, they would have altered their environment to be detectable to us even today.

Exactly. Mullusks. Think of them like ants. Almost exclusively small dinosaurs. Things that would have been everywhere, including many places civilization would never choose to go. They are things that would be much more widespread than gameboys (just giving an example).

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#153

Post by rmtech »

dvdkhlng wrote: post #144
rmtech wrote: post #140

Yes, it will definitely be possible via hundreds of different pathways, some of which they thought of in the paper and others that they didn't. > The Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition, and mineralogy. It will likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior…

> One that they didn't mention was our artifacts on the moon which will last 100 million years or so. Geostationary and HEO satellites will stay for a while but I'm not exactly sure how long. Erosion due to micrometeorites erodes the surface of the moon at 1mm per 1e6 years [1]. I wonder whether erosion of human-made moon artifacts will commence at a comparable rate. Note that the hull thickness of the apollo lander…

Well, 100mm is not that much, I suspect there is something in all that stuff that is at least that thick. Maybe the bags of excrement? That would be pretty funny.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#154

Post by codeulike »

filoeleven wrote: post #123

One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series, paraphrased here since I don’t recall which book it’s in, is that technological progress is more like scaling a rock face than climbing a ladder. There is so much room for surprise and incomprehension. I sometimes think about how vast the parameter space of our physical universe is, and if that vastness means we wouldn’t be able to recognize ancient advanc…

One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series

Its from "Matter"

Hippense cleared his throat and said, "The type of progress you guys are used to doesn't scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime - god-like retirement, if you will - and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who've achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something's ancient doesn't mean its inferior."

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#155

Post by throwanem »

jacobr1 wrote: post #136
filoeleven wrote: post #123

One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series, paraphrased here since I don’t recall which book it’s in, is that technological progress is more like scaling a rock face than climbing a ladder. There is so much room for surprise and incomprehension. I sometimes think about how vast the parameter space of our physical universe is, and if that vastness means we wouldn’t be able to recognize ancient advanc…

My favourite example came from my 9th grade physics class, our textbook told a story that attempted to teach scientific method. Imagine a soda vending machine. Now imagine that I tell you that when you insert money and press the buttons, small goblins are can see what buttons are being pressed, take the money and it put it in a box, and then hand you the selected soda. The textbook even had helpful diagrams that seem…

I mean, one of the first major papers about supercapacitors from back in the late 50s, early 60s, something around that, included a line like "we don't know what's actually going on inside this component when we use it this way, but it sure does store a lot of energy, here's how to make one".

There's nothing shocking or unreasonable or even old-fashioned about understanding what something does before we wonder why it does it. In fact, I'm pretty sure the origin of almost all human knowledge has been precisely in questions of exactly that sort.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#156

Post by rmtech »

ncmncm wrote: post #12

Every time this pops up on HN, people post insisting that it won't all go away, that the skyscrapers will, somehow, still be there. No, they won't. Look at any place in the world where there are mesas. All of the land around the mesa used to be level with the top of the mesa. It has all eroded away, and in only a few million years. So, the metals will corrode, collapse, and wash away. The stone will erode away. The c…

If someone starts looking they will find this layer containing plutonium-244 (which is made by nuclear explosions, 80 million year half life) and microplastics, and yeah that will make it pretty obvious. But I think you're right that if it was even 5 million years in the future you would really have to be looking for it.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#157

Post by yxhuvud »

cozzyd wrote: post #139
timoth3y wrote: post #87

It more convincing to look at it the other way. It's not what such civilizations would have left, but what they would have taken. Our early civilizations found easily accessible deposits or tin, copper, gold, etc that would have been depleted if another advanced civilization had existed in the past 10 million years or so.

Oil, especially, would probably be less common if there was an ancient industrial civilization.

If there was one involving humans, sure. Involving dinosaurs (or earlier)? No. Oil is constantly reforming and the oil we drill today wouldn't have formed back then. Sure, we suck it up a LOT faster than the replenish rate or the rate of natural reintroduction of fossilized carbohydrates into the circulation, but over geological timespans oil has a best-before date. Eventually there will be fissures (due to land movement or erosion) and it would end up being released onto the surface in one way or another.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#158

Post by eru »

zaphirplane wrote: post #145
filoeleven wrote: post #123

One of my favorite quotes from Iain M. banks’ Culture series, paraphrased here since I don’t recall which book it’s in, is that technological progress is more like scaling a rock face than climbing a ladder. There is so much room for surprise and incomprehension. I sometimes think about how vast the parameter space of our physical universe is, and if that vastness means we wouldn’t be able to recognize ancient advanc…

Why do you think that an old civilization with deeply held beliefs of gods, magic, seers, oracles ... etc find it hard to believe that a library worth of books has been shrunk down. There is only a small window where magic/gods was being supplanted by monotheistic dogma that is plausible. On the other hand you tell me this dot contains the total sum of knowledge and I’d be nice ... or a drop of this liquid would dest…

What people profess to believe in and how they act are two different things.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#159

Post by eru »

throwanem wrote: post #155
jacobr1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite example came from my 9th grade physics class, our textbook told a story that attempted to teach scientific method. Imagine a soda vending machine. Now imagine that I tell you that when you insert money and press the buttons, small goblins are can see what buttons are being pressed, take the money and it put it in a box, and then hand you the selected soda. The textbook even had helpful diagrams that seem…

I mean, one of the first major papers about supercapacitors from back in the late 50s, early 60s, something around that, included a line like "we don't know what's actually going on inside this component when we use it this way, but it sure does store a lot of energy, here's how to make one". There's nothing shocking or unreasonable or even old-fashioned about understanding what something does before we wonder why it…

Thermodynamics was largely invented to understand how steam engines work.

Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?

#160

Post by yxhuvud »

ncmncm wrote: post #12

Every time this pops up on HN, people post insisting that it won't all go away, that the skyscrapers will, somehow, still be there. No, they won't. Look at any place in the world where there are mesas. All of the land around the mesa used to be level with the top of the mesa. It has all eroded away, and in only a few million years. So, the metals will corrode, collapse, and wash away. The stone will erode away. The c…

I strongly doubt microplastics would survive heat and pressure well enough to not revert back to oil/gas/coal.
Post reply on HN