Slashdot Mirror
Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? (theatlantic.com)
Adam Frank, writing for The Atlantic: We're used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you're only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization -- things like cities, factories, and roads -- the geologic record doesn't go back past what's called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It's "just" 1.8 million years old -- older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
And, if we're going back this far, we're not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn't make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. [...] Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we'd leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Mr. Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have published their research on the subject [PDF].
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization -- things like cities, factories, and roads -- the geologic record doesn't go back past what's called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It's "just" 1.8 million years old -- older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
And, if we're going back this far, we're not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn't make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. [...] Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we'd leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Mr. Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have published their research on the subject [PDF].
So sand is good evidence?
The place to look for civilizations that pre-date us is, of course, Antarctica. We really have not done much exploring of the Transantarctic Mountains. Who knows what might be found there.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
I think the more interesting variation of the question isn't, was there a civilization like ours.. industrial, nuclear, "advanced". Most signs point to no... but were there any pre-industrial civilizations that didn't make it and died out? They wouldn't have used up the earth's resources like we have. They wouldn't have produced advanced materials that would survive millions of years. They wouldn't have left a layer of radioactive material to be preserved in the fossil record.
A pre-industrial civilization, with their homes made out of earth and tools made out of stone would be completely wiped out from the ravages of time, and we would have no way of knowing.
Well if we can still find fossils of dinosaurs many millions of years old that were not "crushed to dust" wouldn't a city leave some trace?
I find both the Drake equation and this hypothesis to be faulty.
The Drake equation outputs whatever you decide to plug into it. It is a fine mathematical example of manipulating non-scientific people since the input to the equation is the supposition. Any faulty supposition gives an erroneous output. We do not know what the input should be. Therefor we do not have an accurate output.
The supposition that an entire city would leave *nothing* when the bones of ancient animals can be found is a faulty presupposition.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Glass doesn't rust but over time environmental forces will turn glass back into its sandy components.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
the current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earthâ(TM)s surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drilling sites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface
And yet we keep finding buried and hidden signs of civilisations in the middle of the Amazon, and fossilized remnants of long extinct species in the middle of Africa.
They're also ignoring that any reasonable civilisation would have been likely to build their urban centres in many of the same locations we have; near water. This isn't a cultural preference; it's a huge logistical advantage. Given that we've been doing a hell of a lot more excavating near coastlines than we have in the middle of the Canadian tundra, the odds of finding signs of a past culture are WAY higher than the stated 1%.
We already knew about a lot of the "hidden" Amazonian civilizations, it was knowing where to look that allowed geospatial tools to be used to notice how much larger the scale was. Even if you accept the idea that they were well-hidden, they've only been gone, what, 2000 years or so? What would finding them be like if they had been gone millions of years ago?
Building near water is obvious, but this assumes that water has always been where it is now. Wild rivers change course dramatically on a nearly annual basis, and over millions of years they may have radically changed course in addition to their flood planes accelerating the destruction of any evidence they once existed. Cities on oceans would have had millions of years of exposure to erosion, storms, tidal action, etc.
I'm glad you're so sure of your conclusions. Maybe you could write the paper's authors and share your analysis and relevant research experience.
We already had a steam age around 100 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But people that time had no idea what to do with them, they used them for "spectacular tricks" like "magically" opening huge doors of temples.
If we once had another civilization (there are plenty of plausible reasons, which I will explain in another post) then two thinks are most important to consider:
a) coverage of the ground with dust. The city Troy has about 9 layers of destroyed buildings and rebuild buildings on top of it. And that is a town just 5000 years old. When it was found it was more or less unrecognizable covered under earth.
b) Considering the last "ice age", sea levels where some 120m lower than now. E.g. Australia was nearly connected with Asia via a land bridge. A civilized nation most likely would have many cities at the coast. Today that would be hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the coast line. In water depths of about 120+ meters. And obviously, depending of about what time frame we are talking, last "ice age", or 6 "ice ages" ago, those areas would be covered with perhaps a mile of mud.
No one is searching dozens or hundreds or thousands of kilometers out in the sea in depths around 150m - 60m under a mile or hundred meters of sludge. If you would try to get funding for something like this people would declare you mad. Anyway, if another Schliemann shows up and gets enough funding I could imagine we find something (note: I said imagine, not that I'm convinced or believe there is something)
Here, two nice pictures about coast lines and sea levels: https://www.iceagenow.com/Sea_... Note Japan, Indonesia, North America and Europe, the land bridge closing Spain with north Africa. The second picture has the outline of the coast lines during the last "ice age" as a grey frame around the green land masses.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Since they're talking about civilizations that may have occurred tens to hundreds of millions of years in the past, the likelihood that THEIR "near water" is not only not the same places as OUR "near water", but it's unlikely that their "near water" is even on the surface of the Earth.
Do note the part about the oldest surface currently existing on the planet is less than two million years old....
And this ignoring small, recent things like sea level changes. Just in the last million years, sea level has changed by many meters, many times, what with the advance and retreat of the glaciations that are part and parcel of the Ice Age we're still in (yes, technically, we're still in an Ice Age. An Interglacial in the Ice Age, but an Ice Age nonetheless - until the continents rearrange themselves so that the Arctic Ocean isn't, we'll be in an Ice Age)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
no, you spew in ignorance.
any metal tools or walls would be pushed into the earth and crushed over the timescales mentioned. that's how plate tectonics work.
fossils are rare and hard to find, including any kind of tools even for less than one million years.
all the objections people make here are done without even reading the paper, they are addressed
" The fact they they failed to do something about the incoming asteroid"
ROFL. What could WE do about it?
With enough lead time, we could do plenty. The Chicxulub asteroid was about 10 km in diameter, or about 500 cubic km, and had a mass of a few trillion tonnes. We have surveyed earth crossing asteroids of that size pretty well, and would have months or even years of lead time. A series of nukes could easily knock it off course by a fraction of a degree, which would be enough to miss the earth a few months later.
Space launches take a long time, and a lot of planning and testing, but that is because of all the bureaucracy, safety concerns, and cost controls. All that would be gone if our survival were at stake. Multiple projects would run in parallel with nearly unlimited budgets.
Glass rarely survives intact after even a century of neglect. After millions of years of earthquakes, hailstorms, wild-fires, hurricanes,etc,etc,etc - how would you recognize leaded sand in amongst all the other grains? Metals rust, plastics degrade. Hard stone is about the only thing we could reasonably expect to survive intact.
Mining tunnels would probably be one of the few things we could reasonably expect to find evidence of - and you'd have to be looking really hard to recognize the telltale geologic anomalies distinguishing a tunnel that collapsed millions of years ago.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
You look at it the wrong way. Dinosaur eggs can hardly survive millions of years, and most didn't. But some did, and their fossilized remains have been found. Yes, lots of things will not survive, but there are ways for things to survive, and some inevitably will.
Someone should craft and experiment to determine if shoes can become oil...
I'm guessing nobody got the Douglas Adams reference.
No sig today...
Why would an ancient civilization use nuclear power?
Because it's a clean, reliable, and safe means of generating electricity for a technologically advanced society to use. Assuming they don't have a bunch of smelly fucking hippies get in the way of developing into such clean, reliable, and safe source of power.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Fundamental misunderstanding of energy consumption and storage, eh?