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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].
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!
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
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.
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.
Layers and layers of compressed shoes.
No sig today...
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.
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
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
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.
Someone should craft and experiment to determine if shoes can become oil...
I'm guessing nobody got the Douglas Adams reference.
No sig today...
We were the first to mine coal, drill for oil, extract deposits of rare earths, and precious metals.
Citation needed.
Also, some things shouldn't go missing. Tracks on the moon
Why would they have necessarily gone to the moon, and even more importantly, why would one of our very few manned missions, or other landing craft, have landed in the right place to have seen those tracks? If we're talking about the scale of millions of years, wouldn't an impact on the moon be an obvious candidate for removing evidence?
orbital satellites
Satellites in a stable orbit for millions of years? The moon is not in a stable orbit when you're talking about geologic time.
undecomposable manmade polymers and alloys
I don't think we've made anything that would be considered "undecomposable" after millions of years. Moreover, even if we could, wouldn't they be buried after millions of years instead of sitting on the surface?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.