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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].
and the Flintstones.
Short answer? No. Not on any scale like our current civilization.
Evidence: the coal is still here for us to burn. :P And there's no plastic in lake and sea sediments. :P
So sand is good evidence?
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans, that they may have been the architects of the Great Pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to surviveâ"somewhere beyond the heavens!
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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.
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If there was a global industrialized civilization like ours 1,000,000 years ago, we would know. Even if all their foundations had long been covered by eons and crushed to dust, we would still see the impact of the civilization in our geology. Humans in the last 100 years have permanently changed millions of square miles of millions of centuries of geologic record. If a species before us had that kind of impact, we would know.
Now, if there was some species of dinosaur at some time that lived in small mud-hut villiages, I can't see that we would ever be lucky enough to find evidence of that.
Look up topics like "out-of-place artifacts", tools and manufactured items found embedded in coal rock, or unexpectedly found at great depths during construction or mining.
I'll just leave this here. TLDR, proponents of out of place objects are either seeing what they want to see, perpetuating a hoax, or have an insufficient grasp of relevant scientific or historical topics.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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%.
They didn't state 1% odds; they said 1% of earth is currently urbanized, and they implied much less chance of finding a similar 1% coverage by our exposure to old earth surfaces.
Also near-water locations aren't static over millions of years.
The hidden signs of civilizations in jungles are found because they are on our present geological surface, and can be exposed with LIDAR scans.
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.
No, that mining evidence would have been crushed away too. We don't mine that deeply, 2.5 miles is a limit we've never crossed
Looks like they had a triumvirate headed by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. They had some ministers for water (Varunan) or fire (Agni) etc. The head of the cabinet was Indran. Lots of detail of their biographies are available.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They are able to control insects remotely via telepathy to watch the humans. They've already discovered everything discoverable and now have nothing to do.
Near water isn't really a static thing. Pangaea started to break up only about 175M years ago.
What I think is more interesting there is if Pangaea was less of a host to civilized life than the modern day continents, simply by virtue of the fact that presumably non-specialized life would only have found it easy to flourish in a band around the edge.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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"
nonsense, we know the earth had only single cell life for most of its history. Only 600 million years ago did multicellular life appear. And in 300 million years the earth will be too hot for multicellular life due to expansion of the sun. So, in the universe life might be rare, multicellular life might be rare, and maybe most planets that even had life get roasted before anything interesting evolves. conclusion: we could well be alone
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
Maybe if, somehow, we found enough evidence of a previous non-hominid terrestrial civilization, and what caused their downfall, then maybe, just maybe, we'd get pulled up short long enough to stop and think about some of the things we're doing right now, and how they may affect us, as a species, a hundred or few years from now.
..or, maybe, everyone would just say "LOL, what a bunch of losers, they blew themselves up! Glad we're smarter than that!" and just go on without missing a beat, like the arrogant animals we are.
Dinosaur bone fossils are not made out of bone.They are made up of a variety of inorganic minerals through a process called mineralization. They are basically rocks.
There's a lot of stuff we produce that doesn't rot or corrode away with the passage of time.
I think you underestimate the effects of Deep Time. If humans all disappeared today, in 10 million years the only things left *might* be some fragments of space probes and a thin geologic layer with some odd chemistry.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
You are quite wrong.
We basically have no evidence for anything we did not explicitly look for.
Consider the last "Ice Age", North America under an ice shield of about 3 miles thickness. Glaciers flowing outward to the oceans. If there was a "modern building" made from concrete and steel it would have been grinded to dust, it would been smeared over hundreds if not thousands of km of landscape. There is not real a chance in hell to find anything from it.
If there was a civilization on the level of ancient Egypt or even steam age UK before the previous ice age, in the area of the ice shield, then absolutely nothing, except lost tools in a cave, would have survived the ice age. I doubt a WWII battle ship, like Prince Eugene, which survived several nuke strikes, swimming, would have survived getting dragged by a glacier 3000 miles far to the sea under giga tonnes of ice.
A modern city like Las Vegas would have been smeared to dust. Nothing left. A city like New York would be somewhere 1000 miles out in the sea in minimum (originally) 150 yards deep water, probably covered by 50 yards of sludge or more (and grinded to pieces as well).
On the other hand, we found Oezi ... a stone age man inside of a glacier when he got spit out he probably was about 10k years inside (but was not on the ground and got grinded)
So were could we find something? Somewhere where there was no ice shield. But then again, about 1000km out in the sea, modern water depth about 50 or 70 meters, 50 to 100 meters under the sludge that has deposited there.
Good luck in searching there, I doubt we even know how to look below such deep levels of sludge, you probably need detonations and acoustic methods like in oil exploration.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yup, along with Ceremonial Burial, Horseback Riding, Alphabet, The Wheel, Masonry, and Bronze Working.
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.
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Deep Time? What does that even mean?
Deep time is time scales on the hundreds of millions of years, up to the billions. Time scales so huge that entire contents can be subsided and reborn. Your gold coin tossed in the dirt would be slowly crushed and molded by forces over millions of years. So much so that it would be broken back up into is component atoms eventually.
We still don't know how life got its start on this planet alone. Not to mention other planets. We have a good working theory, but its just a theory. Who really knows. Our planet could have been seeded by a advanced civilization 2 billion years ago with some kind of cosmic yeast. They would come back to our planet every few years and harvest the yeast as a food stock. Then that advance society could have went extinct, say some great telepathic war. Then over time we simply evolved from this yeast food stock in to our present civilization.
Well it could happen.
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Jesus Christ, I'm pro-nuke and even I think your post is completely slanted horseshit.
Oh please. Name a mineral that in natural deposit has a cup like shape with a manufacturing logo impressed on the bottom? The ends of Coke bottles will last for eons.
Oldest ceramics? Around 20K years. In other words, as long as we've been making it.
They most certainly do. The workings of an ant colony aren't nearly as placid and cooperative as high school level reading would indicate. Workers go rogue, internecine conflicts within castes occur, etc.
Oh sure, even the guys in the article didn't think it was likely, they just thought it would be really hard to tell if it happened, which is a fun thought experiment.
Jesus Christ, I'm pro-nuke and even I think your post is completely slanted horseshit
Oh I fully admit that it's slanted, it's slanted as hell. But it isn't horseshit. I wish it was but it isn't. In fact if you stretch it out you can almost tie every problem we have today from climate change to wars in Africa right at the feet of the '60s hippies.
You see, the anti nuke movement didn't just stick to protesting nuclear weapons. They protested everything nuclear, fucking thing. From nuclear weapons, to nuclear medicine, right down to peaceful use of nuclear energy. But they didn't limit their fucking bitching to real issues, they protested nuclear research.
Thanks to all this protesting nuclear research ground to halt. They are the reason that no new reactors have been commissioned and we are still stuck with coal burning plants. Their protest shut down all research in to new reactors so we are stuck with designs from '60s and '70s.
But the biggest crime is the protests also stopped almost all funding for fusion research. If the hippies had stopped at nuclear weapons we might have working fusion reactors, which would have solved all our energy problems.
I'll stop here now because you don't to get me bitch'n about what the hippy protest did to our expansion in to space with nuclear engines.
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clean as chernobyl? reliable as three mile island? safe as fukushima?
Three Mile Island was over blown by the media and was caused by human error. The safety systems in place worked exactly as designed. No significant level of radiation was attributed to the TMI-2 accident outside of the TMI-2 facility
Chernobyl was a old style reactor designed in the '50. It was a cluster fuck waiting to happen.
Fukushima actually proves my point. Fukushima was a design from the '70. Since the fucking hippies had shut down all research into new nuclear systems there wasn't anything better available. If the hippies had just stuck to nuclear weapons then Fukushima wouldn't have happened be cause it wouldn't have existed. It would have been replaced long ago with a much safer system.
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That's REAL tenuous
It's not at tenuous as it looks if you think it all the way through. Sure, I admit that a lot of very iffy and there are a lot of different directions that we could have went with this.
I don't hold any thing against the hippies that just protested nuclear weapons, that was a good thing. Even some of those that protested peaceful use of nuclear power did raise awareness of some of the issues. But what gets me the most is they continued to protest nuclear research.
If nuclear research would have continued the "unsafe" designs we have today, designed in the '60 and the '70s would have been replaced long ago with cleaner and more efficient systems. We would have built new with the new designs instead of building a cheap coal plant. With continued research we might not even be using uranium as a fission resource any more. Thorumn and pebble bed reactors might be the norm instead of still in the research phase.
Project Orion and nuclear aircraft in the atmosphere where just plan foolishness. I'm thinking of nerva rockets and orion in space. Thanks to hippie bullshit this scared the establishment enough to add it to the list of banned things in space.
As for wars in Africa and the connection to fusion. Yeah, that is a bit of the stretch but there is a possibility. What are wars caused over? Mostly resources and ideological idiocy. We can't do much about the ideological idiocy, stupid is as stupid does, or something like that. With fusion we could have done something about the resources.
The problem with resource is, it not that we don't have enough resource. It is we don't have enough resources that are cheaply available. When it comes down to it what is the currency of civilization? It's not money or anything like that. Those are just tangible means that we use to place value on the real currency. The real currency is energy.
It costs energy to do everything from processing goods to moving them. If the promise that fusion might have delivered of cheap clean energy would have come true then cost would no lounger be an issue. With fusion energy desalination of sea water would not be a issue, so no more clean water problems. We could afford to mine and process resources that it wasn't economic to do before. We may have even moved those operations off planet completely.
I know the fusion connection is really really far out there, but it could have happened. To bad we will never know.
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An your just a smelly hippie that has not concept of history.
Fukushima was a originally build General Electric which meant that it was a U.S. designed reactor. You, know one like your smelly brethren decided to protest the design of?
So, yes, if people like you, hippie, had kept your yaps shut and stuck to protesting stuff you know about. Mainly badly made bongs, then Fukushima would have more than likely been ether replace with a better design or build from the ground up with better technology.
So back in your hold smelly hippie, education isn't for you.
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You started it, hippie, I just ran with it, hippie. You know how I know you're hippie? Because you where the only one that responded with butt hurt, hippie.
An yes, Fukushima would never have happened if it wasn't for your smelly hippie groupies. So are you an original hippie or one of these new generation of hippies?
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