Maybe be the remains of ancient civilizations could be found on orbit? Satellites can stay on geostactacionary orbit for a very long time. Some of them are sent to the "graveyard orbit" the radius of which was the same for Earth even millions years ago. Did anyone actually compared the number of objects there with the number of satellites we made?
Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
61–70 of 181 posts
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if that's always been the case. Maybe humans quickly cleaned up all the easily accessible fossils before realizing what they were. Ancient Greeks thought they'd found a giant's bone and other cultures seem to have used dinosaur fossils as inspiration for myths of dragons. Even western researchers a few hundred years ago thought dinosaur bones were just recent animal bones. Imagine how careless every previous…
Interesting thought in your second paragraph. Through similar reasoning it would also follow that one of the bigger forces promoting science - or at least applied science - would be war . It's one of those things that keep you grounded in reality - the ship will either sail or it will sink; the shell will either land on target or it will miss. When your invention is going to be put into combat use, you can't get away…
More broadly: survival. The crop that will grow or wither, the patient who will recover or die. Etc.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if that's always been the case. Maybe humans quickly cleaned up all the easily accessible fossils before realizing what they were. Ancient Greeks thought they'd found a giant's bone and other cultures seem to have used dinosaur fossils as inspiration for myths of dragons. Even western researchers a few hundred years ago thought dinosaur bones were just recent animal bones. Imagine how careless every previous…
Interesting thought in your second paragraph. Through similar reasoning it would also follow that one of the bigger forces promoting science - or at least applied science - would be war . It's one of those things that keep you grounded in reality - the ship will either sail or it will sink; the shell will either land on target or it will miss. When your invention is going to be put into combat use, you can't get away…
I'd say so but only once the science is advanced enough to be of more use than technology developed by trail and error and intuition, which is a pretty high bar. Just think that when steam engines were already in use commercially, we didn't even have the law of conservation of energy, and the whole field of thermodynamics was developed afterwards. We made metal and gunpowder without chemistry, electric lights without electromagnetism, etc.
For clarity, I'm not counting engineering and technology as science. You can develop techniques for building ships that float without understanding anything about buoyancy or mechanics of materials but just though gradual evolution of ideas and passing knowledge down through generations of craftsmen.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
But not finding fossil fuels wouldn't tell you anything, because nobody knows how much there ought to be. If they discovered better sources of energy a little faster, they would stop pumping almost immediately. But for politics, the US might easily have started the switch to wind power forty years ago, and billions of barrels' worth would still be in the ground.
Oil is useful for a lot more than just burning it. Fertilizers, plastics, and asphalt are the most well known but a host of industrial processes use it as a feedstock. It’s only recently that oil has been hard to find, initially it was seeping up from the ground which still occurs on the sea floor in some areas making it hard to miss. So some other civilization could exist without using it, but they would look nothin…
It is one thing to use it, entirely another to exhaust it. A civilization consuming only 1% as much could look very similar, if it were not dependent on oil for fuel.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how it is that the iron in meteorites doesn't just dissolve away. Any thoughts on that?
The meteorites we find fell “recently”? The iron is in a stable oxide?
I don't think so, meteoric iron (according to the wonderful blog series[1]) is early Egyptian.
Iron (and steel) is stable outside the presence of oxygen and water. It doesn't just dissolve. And certainly if it were part of the steel reinforcement inside concrete in a building where special measures had been taken to insure that neither oxygen nor water would come in contact with it (as modern skyscrapers do) would persist for an exceptionally long time.
But I'm just guessing ;-)
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#66Every 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…
At one level yes, most everything built will disintegrate with time, but we have fossilized footprints from dinosaurs. An industrial society disappearing without a trace seems unlikely. Although the vast majority of the evidence would be lost there will always be traces left if you know what to look for.
The thing is, it’s probably unbelievable when you do find evidence. https://archaeology-world.com/200-million-year-old-shoe-prin...
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#67FTA: "The likelihood of objects surviving and being discovered is similarly unlikely. Zalasiewicz (2009)speculates about preservation of objects or their forms, but the current area of urbanization isless than 1% of the Earth’s surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drillingsites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface.Note that even for early human technology, complex objects are very rarely found. For instance,the Antikythera Mechanism (ca. 205 BCE) is a unique object until the Renaissance. Despiteimpressive recent gains in the ability to detect the wider impacts of civilization on landscapesand ecosystems (Kidwell, 2015), we conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4Ma, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples oftheir population is small. "
These people have clearly never been to the beach--any beach. The oceans are absolutely chock full of our garbage and it is being deposited not only on the ocean floor, but on every shoreline the world over, where much is ground up and still more silted over. Plastic trash wafts the world over. Everything from beer cans to glass bottles to cars to aircraft are strewn through the entire industrialized world, in forests, creeks, and backyards. We have landfills the size of small towns. There are thousands of shipwrecks all over the oceans. Bazillions of items will be fossilized and preserved, and the odds of stumbling over something just digging anywhere will be very high.
This article is completely full of shit. Humans have left their mark and our junk is going to be here, fossilized, for eternity. If we've discovered hundreds or thousands of fossilized dinosaurs from over 100 million years ago, when there might be only a few thousand such skeletons even to be found, there's a damn good bet that someone is going to find one of the tens of billions of beer cans or beer bottles that are lying around, even if only a tiny fraction survive the aeons.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#68Every 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 agree with this take. I've been working on a paper comparing the effects of the Anthropocene to mega catastrophes in the geologically recent past. In addition to the Younger Dryas Impact (12kya), there's the Oruani (26kya) and Mt Toba (77kya) eruptions. From my calculations, it seems the climate change from each of these dwarfs any actions humans are currently capable of, namely petrocarbon burning and als…
The earth is warming at a rate of four Hiroshima bombs per second [1] primarily because of human actions. I haven't read your document but it sounds like you're grossly underestimating our energy output.
[1] https://archive.thinkprogress.org/earths-rate-of-global-warm...
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting thought in your second paragraph. Through similar reasoning it would also follow that one of the bigger forces promoting science - or at least applied science - would be war . It's one of those things that keep you grounded in reality - the ship will either sail or it will sink; the shell will either land on target or it will miss. When your invention is going to be put into combat use, you can't get away…
More broadly: survival. The crop that will grow or wither, the patient who will recover or die. Etc.
That's quite a different concept. Agriculture techniques would have evolved that way but entirely devoid of science or understanding of how they worked, just evolution of ideas ossified into wisdom. Colonists in new countries experienced crop failures because they couldn't predict how things would behave in the different climates/ecosystems and just applied their "dumb" knowledge. I heard about a hunter-gatherer society that used a seemingly pointless ritual to decide where to get food each day. They had only a superstitious explanation of how it worked until we eventually figured out that the ritual was actually a random number generator that helped them to spread their gathering more uniformly or prevent prey from learning their habits or something along those lines. We can do a lot without understanding.
Medicine was a complete shit-show until modern science because people didn't even understand how to test if it caused patients to live or die! Even today in modern China, doctors still prescribe useless herbs based on superstition. They've stripped away the obvious nonsense about stars and planets that it used originally but still explain it using a mythical description of how the body works and how traditional medicines interact with it.
Re: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record?
#70Every 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…
At one level yes, most everything built will disintegrate with time, but we have fossilized footprints from dinosaurs. An industrial society disappearing without a trace seems unlikely. Although the vast majority of the evidence would be lost there will always be traces left if you know what to look for.
The dinosaurs lived for a couple hundred million years. An industrialized society might last a few thousand.