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As the article points out, an ancient industrial civilization would need to mine resources. I think it is fair to say that they would mine a lot of gold and sil
by dustfinger 9y ago
As the article points out, an ancient industrial civilization would need to mine resources. I think it is fair to say that they would mine a lot of gold and silver for use in electronics. If such a civilization existed then one would think that most of the earth's natural veins of gold and silver would have been mined making large easy to find naturally occurring veins rare. It seems though that our civilization has found plenty of easy to find large scale veins of gold and silver.
Does that not make it unlikely that any ancient industrial civilization lasting centuries could have existed before us? Or over tens of millions of years would more naturally occurring easy to find veins of gold and silver rise to the surface of the Earth's crust?
- leetcrew 9y ago> Or over tens of millions of years would more naturally occurring easy to find veins of gold and silver rise to the surface of the Earth's crust? i am not a geologist but, as i understand it, plate tectonics cause a lot of "churn" in the crust. so i think it is certainly conceivable that a civilization could mine all the accessible veins to exhaustion but have many more veins brought up near the surface in the following 60 million years.
- dustfinger 9y agoYah, as I wrote my comment I realized that it made sense that there would be churn. I am not a geologist though. It is a fascinating notion. It makes me think of Mote Cook's Numenera http://numenera.com http://numenera.com