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Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

nautil.us

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Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#271

Post by seszett »

andsoitis wrote: post #256
seszett wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're talking from a human point of view, but you know nothing of the similarity of Antarctica compared to the other continents for this hypothetical sentient species we're talking about. If they can't bear positive temperatures then all other continents are totally out of bounds for them, while Mars isn't. That's different from the reverse, in that even if we can't naturally live in negative temperatures we…

They can build craft to travel to Mars but not to another continent on Earth? That is an extraordinary claim!

I don't think the point was about being able to travel some place or not, but being able to settle it. Even humans can travel to Antarctica but won't leave a trace there.

Also, we're discussing prehuman civilisations so dismissing an hypothesis as being an "extraordinary claim" within this context is a bit weird.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#272

Post by cubefox »

rini17 wrote: post #268
cubefox wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because processed stones are much more massive than bones, which mostly rot away quite quickly.

Mass does not matter. Tungsten metal is heftier that the stone and it rots regardless.

Let's say durable then.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#273

Post by K0balt »

cubefox wrote: post #226
K0balt wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the timescale we are looking at coastal areas are completely destroyed or created and substantial destruction and renewal of crust occurs. No guarantee of anything being found at all.

Dinosaur fossils also didn't have a guarantee of being found. It's all in the probability.

If you flip a fair coin 1000 times I guarantee it comes up heads at least once. If you set a cup on a table I guarantee it won’t pass through the table, even though both the glass and the table are mostly empty space.

Those things also are all in the probability.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#274

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

naasking wrote: post #259
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose a counter example would be a species found on multiple continents but during a time when they weren’t joined together. But you’re right that a natural overlap due to past plate tectonics could lead to false negatives with what I’m suggesting.

Right, but how could we know that they weren't joined together? We don't have DNA evidence for a lot of history so we build narratives from morphological evidence. If we find the same or similar species in two different places, we would typically just create a narrative around one of two possibilities, a) these two places were closer together at one point, or b) there was some great exodus from a common origin driven…

That’s a good point, I do not have a rebuttal.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#276

Post by radu_floricica »

andsoitis wrote: post #165
radu_floricica wrote: post #162

Just for fun, a possibility is Antarctica. Cold is a straightforward problem to solve - make a fire, throw a fur or a blanket on you. Even the most primitive emerging civilizations ca thrive in cold climates. Heat on the other hand is a lot more complex to solve. You need fully industrial civilization to have air conditioning, and we still don't have anything portable enough. Even today's solution to 40C+ is "drink a…

> So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature. Are you arguing that the chances of a large-scale Antarctic industrial civilization that reached Mars is higher than one that reached South America, Southern Africa,…

"reached" vs "colonized". We ourselves reached the moon and will soon reach Mars, but we have no intention of leaving more than a couple of buildings in Antarctica, or deep in the oceans.

So yeah, it's certainly possible they've sent a couple of dinosaurs on Mars, but didn't leave a lot of concrete buildings anywhere else.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#277

Post by carlmr »

ethbr0 wrote: post #227
safety1st wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 100 million years, would any of those signatures be detectable? Glass decomposes, only takes a million years or so. The continents themselves have rearranged so any bets about structures that still remain are off. Depletion of easily available resources perhaps, but if a bunch of iron deposits were mined out that long ago, how would we know now? This is the topic of the paper, I think the authors settled on cli…

Some glass decomposes. It's chemically inert like aluminum (after oxidizing, e.g. foil), so the processes acting on it are mechanical and subject to probability. Some amount is going to be abraded, buried, etc, but you only need a few pieces to remain. Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.

>Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.

Yet we can barely imagine a society without wheels, but some human cultures in South America didn't get that idea.

Assuming that every civilization invented glass is very tenuous.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#278

Post by Zigurd »

It is a pop science magazine trope to wonder this. There is zero evidence for this.

A much more plausible speculation is that stone civilizations rose and fell that we don't know about. Cultivating crops among wild forest and domesticating animals that subsequently go feral is so much more likely to have happened in the time that Sapiens was physiologically modern.

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#279

Post by DavHeheCuddly »

jamiek88 wrote: post #83
blueflow wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up about continental vs ocean crust, ocean crust is younger and has a shorter lifetime. You have better chances finding maritime fossils on land.

Yeah subduction is the missing key that took a while for us to understand. Ocean crust is young. In fact most earthly rock is relatively young. Plate tectonics was such a clever idea. So obvious now, I mean just look at a map of the world of course continents were once one, you can see where they join, like a jigsaw puzzle. It astonished early western explorers finding seashells on mountains!

or maybe all the continents were once one because it was just the full surface of an expanding planet

Re: Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

#280

Post by mbostleman »

ethbr0 wrote: post #203
safety1st wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument goes that if the civilization was sufficiently old and short-lived, no we probably wouldn't find any fossilized evidence. For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago. Humans have only been industrialized for around 200 years. If you imagine a dinosaur civilization that's indus…

In order for a civilization to be undetectable, you'd essentially bound terms in a terrestrial version of the Drake Equation [0] You'd need a civilization that did not produce long-lived technological signatures (e.g. glass panes), that did not have a large number of individuals (i.e. produce remains), that did not substantially alter their environment (i.e. leave geographic markers), AND that did not consume easily…

To me the most important component is not having a large number of individuals. Which is to say there was not a large amount of physical artifacts of the tech left behind. That seems to me like there would not be enough demand to scale much tech. So it's kind of a circular problem.
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