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Wow, I always assumed that complex life prior to our own was unlikely because it would have left a trace that we could detect. But if there is a plausible mecha
by jl6 8y ago
Wow, I always assumed that complex life prior to our own was unlikely because it would have left a trace that we could detect. But if there is a plausible mechanism by which all such traces would have been erased, then who knows what might have happened deep in those billions of years when supposedly only single-celled life existed?
Perhaps Earth’s previous inhabitants triggered runaway global cooling, effectively hitting the reset switch back to single-celled life. Perhaps they escaped to Venus and vowed not to let the same thing happen there, but got it wrong in the other direction.
- rjf72 8y agoI'd be hesitant to attribute any sort of hypothetical causes, but it's fun to also consider such scenarios when thinking just one rock a bit further out. Mars was at one time a warm, watery planet not dissimilar to Earth. It's going to be extremely interesting once we get feet on the ground and can start really digging into the planet's past, quite literally. Most tantalizing of course is that it seems to have had all that was necessary to see the development of life. In many ways even finding absolutely no evidence of life at all will be as exciting as finding the opposite. Okay definitely not as exciting, but it'd certainly be really quite interesting!
- erikpukinskis 8y agoEven on shorter timescales, there are 100+ ton milled monoliths all over the world, which are seemingly 4000+ years years old. Yet the civilizations of 4000 years ago don’t seem to have known how to mill such stones. It probably wasn’t until the 19th century at the earliest that we “re-learned” the basic skills required. My default assumption is that history has only picked up, at best, the latter cycles on big time scales.
- zilian 8y agoDo you have sources for those claims ?
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI just watch a lot of Brian Foerster videos on YouTube e.g. https://youtu.be/AGBOf8mrWjs https://youtu.be/AGBOf8mrWjs Baalbek is a good place to see 1000+ ton milled stones: https://youtu.be/jo-oEk8itlo https://youtu.be/jo-oEk8itlo Cuzco also seems to have some pre-Inca constructions that can’t be explained: https://youtu.be/66x9VLwZaDQ https://youtu.be/66x9VLwZaDQ
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- a3n 8y agoMaybe. But the political/industrial class would have mind-fucked us into clamoring to do nothing about it. If they went to Venus, only the people who could afford or command it would have made it, and they would have died off almost immediately because they had no minions to hold up the bottom layers of civilization.