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If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?
- arthurcolle 7y agoThis idea has come up a few times on conspiracy subreddits, but it seems like a pretty big stretch. Look at all our landfills full of old obsolete electronics. The fact that we don't find similar things make these "hidden civilization" theories pretty unlikely in my opinion.
- duxup 7y agoI think article accounts for that.
- droithomme 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact
- duxup 7y agoIt's an interesting way of thinking of the age of the earth and geological changes that there could have been a civilization and we wouldn't know. Or someone later wouldn't know about us.... outside say an abandoned car floating through space... That would be an interesting story. We travel into space to find things out there only to find things that seem to have come from... home.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWill our geostationary satellites still be there, say, 50 million years from now? The lunar landers probably will be, unless meteorites take out all the landing sites.
- duxup 7y agoMy understanding is that I would expect there would be some left, albeit maybe more debris after their orbits slowly become more erratic (not as coordinated regarding other satellites) and collisions and failures occur.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThey will be somewhere around Earth. But not on the orbits they are now. They won't be hard to spot. I guess the most pressing evidence is that nobody used the fossil fuels before us (at least in large quantities), and a lot of it is from the time that plants first colonized the dry soil.
- philipodonnell 7y agoMaybe they found something better than fossil fuels and used it all up. Or were smarter about the impact to the climate would be if they burned it.
- npo9 7y agoOr maybe there was a whole lot more fossil fuel in the past.
- marcosdumay 7y agoWe have some very good explanations for the distribution of fossil fuels, with a lot of predictive power. They would all be trash of some thinking being decided to take some of it our.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoBut if some being had decided to take some of it, we could still have explanations that seemed good to us and that fit the distribution of what we found. And we would use the match between the theory and the actual distribution to confirm that the explanations were correct.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThey would take the easy to extract fuels first. But it was still there, distributed the same way as the hard to extract stuff. If somebody got it before us, they must have got very little of it.
- hoorayimhelping 7y ago>Or someone later wouldn't know about us.... outside say an abandoned car floating through space... The cars we left on the moon will still be there. The satellites and trash in orbit would still be there. The satellites orbiting Mars would still be there. We can see clear evidence that life has altered the climate in the past [1]. Anyone looking like we are would notice our mark on the environment. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
- zaroth 7y agoAre satellite orbits really stable over millennia? Maybe just the geo-sync ones, but I imagine anything closer will decay in “relatively short order”.
- zamadatix 7y agoDepends what you consider "closer". Geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 km above the surface and while at 500 km you get significant decay (order of years to re-entry) while satellites at 1,000 km are estimated to take centuries to re-enter. Extrapolating that anything above the start of medium earth orbit (2,000 km) and out should last a hell of a long time.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 7y agoInteresting question, and not one I'm finding ready answers to. Among the better: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5583/can-an-artificial-satellite-stay-in-orbit-forever https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5583/can-an-artifi... Low-Earth orbits will decay over periods ranging from years to millennia, based on residual air resistance. Those effects are minimal in geosynchronous orbit, though there's still some residual atmospheric drag which might be significant over millions to billions of years. The period under concern is roughly 5 billion years, at which point the Sun will have ballooned to a red giant, enveloping the Earth. (Increased solar radiance, as well as various cycles and changes on Earth will likely have long made it uninhabitable by life within the next 800 million years or so.) Other effects include solar wind, possible interactions with the Earth's magnetic field, precessional effects caused by the Earth's axial tilt and irregular geometry (to use that word in its literal sense), as well as gravitational perturbation from the Moon and possibly other bodies within the solar system. There's a slight possibility of impacts, though those would be highly unlikely -- space is big, as Doug said, and satellites tiny. Even the Earth only gets wallopped every few tens of millions of years. Though any such impacts might create a sufficient debries field within the orbital zone to affect other satellites. The Geostationary band itself is quite narrow, and preferential placement is above the equator, which would focus placement for potential interaction.
- ttoinou 7y agoIt's an interesting way of thinking of the age of the earth and geological changes that there could have been a civilization and we wouldn't know In science fiction there's the very good Planet of Apes novel about that :)
- leetcrew 7y agosorry for the total aside, but this article reminded me of one of my deepest typo curiosities: why is the misspelling ratio -> ration so common? there are lots of words that can have a character erroneously appended and still be a correctly spelled (different) word. for example: most verbs in english (ride -> rides, bake -> baked, etc.). but for some reason, I see ratio -> ration all the time. 'n' isn't even that close to 'o' on the keyboard! it really jumps out when you subvocalize; the 'n' changes the pronunciation a lot.
- hanniabu 7y agoMaybe when they go to tap the space bar they end up clipping the 'n', just a guess.
- pacbard 7y agoI wonder if it has to do with the suffix -tion. Maybe muscle memory is triggered when the letters “tio” are typed at the end of the word and “n” is automatically added to the end of the word.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoI suspect this. Also note that spell checking won't detect it; you won't get a helpful red underline to warn you.
- caymanjim 7y agoI'm fairly sure this is why I do it. I'm an average typist and above-average speller, but -ion spills out whenever I type it. There are almost no words ending in -io, and there are a lot ending in -ion. For some quick numbers, the OSPD database I have here has 1432 -ion words and only 47 -io words.
- shalmanese 7y agoI always type ratio as ration but never type radio as radion.
- 7y ago
- ColanR 7y agoIsn't there some level of radiation that is ubiquitously present ever since we started nuclear testing? Seems like we could figure out if there ever was a nuclear-capable society in the past just by looking at radiation decay.
- dec0dedab0de 7y agoI think the show ancient aliens claimed that a site (or sites?) Had measurable radiation from an ancient explosion.
- ianai 7y agoWho knows what they were referencing, but there is a site of a “natural nuclear reactor”. They could have built a lot off that.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe Oklo and Bangome natural uranium fission reactor sites, dating to about 2 bya, are in what is now Gambia, Africa. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nuclear-reactors-the-2-billion-year-old-natural-fission-reactors-in-gabon-western-africa/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nucl...
- hermitdev 7y agoIIRC, it was somewhere around the India/Pakistan border. Ive seen the episode, but its been a while.
- ColanR 7y agoI remember reading about that on wikipedia years ago. Don't remember the name, but it's the site of a large crater, and I think there was also glass in the area similar to what's created by modern nuclear explosions.
- marcosdumay 7y agoOn the millions of years scale, that signature disappears.
- ThrustVectoring 7y agoIf a previous industrial civilization put satellites into geo-stationary orbit, they'd still be up there. If there are unknown objects in geo-stationary orbit, would be be able to find them? If we could find them, and we haven't, doesn't that put an upper limit to the technological sophistication of possible previous industrial civilizations?
- droithomme 7y agoNot all industrial civilizations launch geo-stationary satellites.
- hermitdev 7y agoOnly the ones we know of.
- droithomme 7y agoNot necessarily. It is true that the industrial civilizations we know of, considered on a consolidated planetary short-recent-history level, have launched satellites in geostationary orbits. But we can not logically infer from this that only the ones we know of have launched satellites in geostationary orbits. There may be ones that have launched geostationary satellites which we do not know of.
- dredmorbius 7y ago"Geostationary" might have been rather lower in elevation than today, depending on when in time that civilisation might have occurred. The rate of decrease has not been constant with time, and may have been roughly constant from ~2.5 gya to 600 mya. During the Precambrian era, the Earth's day was ~21 hours long, and a geostationary orbit would have been about 32,265 km rather than 35,787 km today. So the satellites might not be precisely where we're putting them, but: 1. We'd all but certainly spot them. 2. The elevation / orbital period itself would give a very strong indication as to when the civilisation had existed.
- kanzenryu2 7y agoIncreased carbon levels are found in ice deposits from the period of the Roman Empire. There's nothing prior to that.
- adaisadais 7y agoThis sounds like an incredible science fiction series that needs to be written. Any chance such books already exist?
- h2odragon 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden and many others :)
- dghughes 7y agoThat reminds me of the Troodon dinosaur. It had a large brain size compared to its body. I think I recall reading Troodon's brain left marks on its inner skull. It was supposedly very intelligent due to its brain size.
- brownbat 7y agoIn some ways, Howard's Hyborian Age stories featuring Conan were a response to scientific revelations of his day indicating the plausibility of a vanished age prior to recorded history. Aschulean hand axes have been dated to 1.76 million years ago, Oldowan tools were made up to 2.6 Mya. Just really smart apes, sure, but who would know if they had a breakaway 5,000 years of brilliance reflected mainly through an extensive oral tradition and crafts with exceptionally disposable materials. Not known in Howard's day, but Göbekli Tepe is an extensive temple complex in Turkey that predates when we thought sophisticated organized societies emerged, and seems like something his Hyboreans might have built. If you want to get way out on a limb, our theory about how monkeys got to the new world is pretty suspicious. Currently, we theorize that a breeding population managed to accidentally raft across the Atlantic exactly one time in all of history, but this is so rare it didn't happen for other animals, and never took them to the much closer North America from there. Might as well guess some ancient extinct navigators brought some monkeys along as pets, then died out and left the monkeys as the only evidence. Crazy and unsupported conjecture, but why not, par for current theories.
- filoeleven 7y ago
- dontbenebby 7y ago>The current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface But doesn't this assume cities are distributed uniformly and randomly? Cities seem to be build at ports (ex: Port of NY, Oakland) and waypoints with natural resources or barriers (Salt Lake City, Denver on either side of the mountains for example)
- gshdg 7y agoThe locations of rivers, good natural harbors and resources would have been completely different tens of millions of years ago.
- dontbenebby 7y agoThat's a good point, I just meant that it seems odd to focus on cities. (Especially since while the cities themselves are small, the swathes of land to supply them aren't. Also I think someone else commented evidence of atomic tests would persist a very long time, for example?)
- dredmorbius 7y agoDifferent, yes. Unknowable, no. We know the general distribution of continents dating to 550 million years ago (Gondwanaland), and to some extent prior, though that largely predates the Cambrian explosion of complex life on Earth. Ancient coastlines, estuaries, and riverbeds leave quite distinctive geological traces and would be detectable. We'd be looking for ancient civilisations on or near such features.
- mellosouls 7y ago2018. Interesting idea and covered many times before on HN including at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837120
- sfblah 7y agoWhat about artifacts on the moon?
- dmead 7y agostar trek voyager had an episode about this
- dylan604 7y agoIsn't it the premise of the Stargate universe as well?
- nealabq 7y agoCeramics should last a very long time if they are buried. Ceramic toilets and stoneware dishes are like stone. If buried in sand or silt that collected over time they would be like other fossils. They might get crushed or broken, but I don't think they'd dissolve or corrode.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoYes we have fossils of many of the most delicate creatures that have ever lived, it seems impossible to believe that nothing of all the durable items we have created would remain or be fossilized. It’s a cool thought experiment wondering if we aren’t the first but it seems completely impossible. I’m afraid our generation will be known as “The Plastic Generation” from our layer in the sediment.
- garmaine 7y agoNah, molds are already evolving to eat plastic in landfills. The fact that until now life hasn’t adapted to plastic as a good source indicates that no prior civilization had developed plastics before, or else it’d already be biodegradable.
- ByThyGrace 7y agoBut plastics don't occur spontaneously in nature, do they? So why would any species of plastic eating life form survive until our days after running out of all the available early plastic?
- erulabs 7y agoNow that's an interesting thought - look at biological adaptations in the ancient ancestors of existing animals. If a 40 million year old extinct insect appears to be able to process plastics, that's a pretty good indication that _its_ ancient ancestors had a diet of plastics. Biology might just be the "last artifact". I suppose that's not terribly useful when looking at mars though :P
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoThey glaced over nuclear war a little too quickly. While I'm not an expert, I've heard many times that a significant nuclear exchange between countries would likely result in so much debris being thrown into the atmosphere it would cause a nuclear winter. This could lead to a full blown ice age, mass extinctions, etc... Surely those "side effects" of the bombs would be measurable far longer than the radiation. We know of past super volcanic eruptions and the dinosaurs' extinction because of similar circumstances.
- simonh 7y agoIt’s not just radioactive material that would betray a past nuclear war. Some of the stable decay products are extremely rare in nature, and their presence in the ratios we know atomic weapons produce would be a dead giveaway.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y agoIt also assumes industrialization similar to our own. A past civilization would most likely have developed entirely different technologies that we may not know what to look for.
- zaphirplane 7y agoThis reminds me of https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/daniel_patrick_moynihan_182347 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/daniel_patrick_moynihan_1... “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” they wouldn’t have developed their own physics and universal constants. Of course if they were tens of 1000s of years ahead of us and deliberately cleaned up who knows what’s possible. We could be the evolved pet like in red dwarf
- adrianN 7y agoSome technologies seem too universal to assume an industrial civilization would miss them. Things like ceramics for example are easy to make, very useful and would likely survive in the geological record.
- koheripbal 7y agoFossil fuels are the same. It burns. It's obvious it burns. The internal combustion engine was inevitable.
- gdm85 7y agoIf another civilization had reached space-faring technology then one day they might come back and discover that the (perhaps inhospitable) home planet...harbors again life. Probably too far-fetched and better suited as material for a scifi story, but the idea is interesting.
- adventured 7y ago> Probably too far-fetched and better suited as material for a scifi story, but the idea is interesting M. Night Shyamalan directed a terrible movie from 2013 that is a version of that premise. After Earth, starring Will and Jaden Smith. Solid idea for a sci-fi movie, they botched it unfortunately. "In the future, an environmental cataclysm forces the human race to abandon Earth in search of a new habitable planet, eventually settling on the planet Nova Prime" ... "A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige and his father Cypher stranded on Earth, a millennium after events forced humanity's escape. With Cypher injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Earth https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1815862/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1815862/
- geuis 7y agoJust thinking off the cuff and channeling a bit of Isaac Arthur here. Coming from the angle of a non-native intelligence colonizing Earth in the super distant past, there may not be many or any terrestrial remains over such a long span of time. It’s reasonable to think “aliens” would not burn coal and oil for energy. If they crossed the gulf of space, they likely used fusion or some other power source. A ground side civilization could sift helium3 from the oceans for thousands of years without a noticeable depreciation. If they used power satellites, those would likely have fallen from orbit or been knocked out of the Earth-Moon system within hundreds to thousands of years. Within human history, many of the same geographical areas of the world have been good places to live for thousands of years. But when you extend that to hundreds of thousands to millions of years, those places generally change drastically and disappear. One could assume, for the sake of argument, that aliens colonizing Earth might have similar biological needs as we do and would live in similar areas of the distant past. We might not easily find those places now given environmental changes over geological ages. We also are still very early in exploring the solar system. It’s plausible there could be remnants of mining and manufacturing in places we haven’t looked. It’s important to remember that if your civilization is colonizing a new system, you’re already a space based society. It’s then reasonable to expect little on the ground industrialization since most of your infrastructure will be in space. There’s a new study talking about solar electrostatic effects on the Moon and how it causes lunar dust to rise and drift around despite no atmosphere. Given long enough spans of time this might even conceal evidence of prior space-based industrialization. One big red flag to me that this hasn’t happened in Earth’s history is the biological record. We have a fairly good overall map of biology over large areas of the world. Everything alive here seems to come from here. There’s nothing alive that doesn’t appear to use the same general base chemistry and biology as everything else. If some aliens showed up a hundred million years ago, we might expect to see some distantly evolved branches of life that are somewhat different in at least DNA or other chemistry. We might find something like this but it’s unlikely. The follow-on to that might be an argument that all current life is descended from some ancient aliens. That could be true but it would be nearly impossible to tell at this point. All life seems to have a common descent with no aberration, so following up on this line of thought is extremely difficult to test for. We would need to find examples of life outside of Earth before we could make comparisons to investigate that hypothesis.
- tzs 7y agoThe History Channel had a 20 episode series called Life After People that looked at what would happen if every human suddenly disappeared. The National Geographic had a similar, but only one episode program looking at that questions, called Aftermath: Population Zero. I have a vague recollection of seeing something like this on one of Discovery's channels, too, but I may be mixing that up with an article in their magazine. My recollection is that they all concluded that in the very long term (tens of millions of years), if some other species evolved intelligence it would probably not be able to tell we were here. Some of the materials we used might survive, but things like glaciers in ice ages would grind them to a powder. The next intelligent species might notice these odd concentrations of unusual combinations of metal particles and powdered long chain carbon compounds, but there would be nothing to tell them it wasn't made by some unknown natural process.
- airza 7y agoAt least they'd be incredibly confused when they eventually went to the Moon :)
- awb 7y agoAlthough over tens of millions of years the chances of an asteroid impact wiping out our Lunar or Martian legacies might be more realistic than not.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoI've always wondered if future people will believe that we put up the all our artificial satellites, without help from aliens. If we can't even imagine egyptians being able to stack rocks, who's gonna believe that we forged metal ships and launched them into orbit?
- C14L 7y agoSatellites would disappear pretty quickly without constant orbit adjustments.
- jammygit 7y agoIts not industrial, but I recommend At the Mountains of Madness by lovecraft for an example of this sort of question being asked in fiction
- klodolph 7y agoWe are the first nuclear civilization. We know the expected isotope ratios too well and test them too often. This is how we discovered evidence of a natural nuclear reactor from 1.7 Gya. Any other nuclear civilization would have changed the isotope ratios in detectable ways in some part of the world.
- Engineering-MD 7y agoOut of interest what was this natural nuclear reactor? And also how do we know it was definitely natural? I don’t believe it wasn’t natural, but I wonder how one would prove that.
- japaget 7y agoOklo in Gabon, Africa. See https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-tw...
- xenadu02 7y agoWe would know it. We probably wouldn't know much about that civilization; almost all of their culture or art would not survive. But we would find bits of glass or pottery fossilized in rocks at the very least. We haven't found anything like that so it seems extremely unlikely.
- irrational 7y agoHow long does it take for tectonic action to "recycle" the plates? Could a civilization have existed as extensive as our own in the extreme past, but we can't see any evidence because it is all hundreds of miles under the surface of the earth being melted down slowly?
- adrianN 7y agoThe oldest rocks are about four billion years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_dated_rocks
- dotancohen 7y agoBut the oldest surface material is less than 2 million years old (Israel), and the second oldest surface is about half a million year old (Nevada). https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth-discovered.html https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth-discov...
- resheku 7y agothis youtube channel i like "Curious Droid" made not long ago a video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDK2LgSeyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xDK2LgSeyk What Fossils Will We Leave Behind in 65 Million Years? 65 million years ago the dinosaurs died out, we only know of their existence because of the few fossil remains found. So what if a similar fate were to happen to us humans tomorrow, in 65 million years time what would remain of everything we had created and would there be anything be left for any future intelligent species to find.
- gmuslera 7y agoOil was a good push for the development of our civilization, and should have been for any past technological civilization too. If we have oil today (in the amount we are getting it, at least) then the previous civilizations didn't reached our oil dependent civilization stage, or existed before the actual oil reserves formed. It doesn't imply that there wasn't any civilization before, but or it happened hundreds of millions of years ago, or never became as advanced or global as our actual one. Unless there could had been back then an abundant energy source different from oil but with similar efficiency, and it got globally depleted by that previous civilization.
- koheripbal 7y agoThe same argument can be made for rich surface deposits of Iron, Aluminum, Tin, etc... If there were civilizations in the past - even a hundred million years ago - they likely would have mined those.