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The problem people are complaining about in the comments is the tendency of many science journals lately to use their articles as undercover delivery vehicles f
by SiVal 6y ago
The problem people are complaining about in the comments is the tendency of many science journals lately to use their articles as undercover delivery vehicles for political messages in the guise of investigating something else.
If I had no agenda other than looking for evidence of pre-human technological civilization, I would focus on artifacts, as most people would. That is how we have found almost all ancient civilizations. You can't have even a slightly advanced civilization without creating big, hard objects such as rock or concrete or metal. Even a rather poor SE Asian town of 100,000 people out in the jungle will leave some fossils where their cheap, concrete buildings stood that, a billion years from now, may still exist and appear clearly non-organic (fossilized basements with pipes, for example). And if the civilization was "technological", it was probably populated enough for many such towns to have existed, at least one of which would probably have exposed fossils somewhere.
Of course asteroid strikes and plate tectonics could have buried it, and it's an interesting question where you might look for a city built a billion years ago, but there would probably be a lot more column inches devoted to solid artifacts, fossils, and questions like these than to climate change if the only thing on these scientists' agenda really was the question they claim.
- simonh 6y agoI don’t think you can dismiss the problem of plate tectonics so easily. Vast amounts of the former surface of the earth are now several kilometres under our feet. That’s not something you can wave away. Also it’s not reasonable to compare species fossil hunting with artefact hunting as equivalent. T-Rex as a species existed for 18 million years, with total cumulative population numbers estimated in the trillions or thousands of trillions across huge geographic areas and time spans. We have fossil fragments for only 50 individuals. That’s a staggeringly minuscule sample for a species spread out over a considerable span in both time and space. An ancient civilisation might have existed for only a few thousand years, less than the blink of a geological eye. Unless you were to look at exactly the right strata at exactly the right layer you’d miss them completely. As a result it makes much more sense to look at environmental level effects, massively expanding the scope of your available evidence.
- hutzlibu 6y agoBut enviromental effects billions of years ago could have be by any cause. They might indicate something, but much more solid would be real artifacts. Structures. Chemical compounds, etc. But yes, the question is, what trace would our civilisation leave, if abandoned today, in a billion years, if the tectonic plates move in those timescales?
- ganzuul 6y agoMoon landers.
- noir_lord 6y agoPossibly objects in an L4/L5 lagrange point as well. Though I couldn't find an answer on whether those are stable on geological time scales, Earths only Trojan has been there for thousands of years but that isn't 60 million either.
- TomMarius 6y agoIf they got to the Moon, surely they left some space junk?
- ganzuul 6y agoWe should go take a look.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoIn a micrometeorite environment, they'll last a million years at most. All that will be left after a million years is a curious and anomalous concentration of metallic particles. After a billion years it will be buried and very easy to miss.
- hutzlibu 6y agoAnd probably hard to distinguish from a old meteor with the right metal combination.
- elihu 6y agoSomething I remembered from visiting Stonehenge a long time ago: the standing stones are impressive things, having been there for about four thousand years or so if memory serves. But also in the surrounding area are piles of dirt from approximately the same era. I wasn't expecting that. It seems that every non-trivial modern construction project leaves behind a pile of dirt somewhere, usually as an unintentional side-effect rather than an end in itself. And these piles of dirt it seems stick around for a really long time if no one goes out of their way to flatten them back out. I remember once reading about someone, I think he was a bored meteorologist in the wilderness of Alaska with a bulldozer and a lot of time on his hands. The story goes that he used the bulldozer to write something offensive (I don't think the story said what, exactly) and the local legislature chose not to do anything about it because then the offensive message would be part of the official records of the legislature. Maybe it's an urban legend; I wasn't able to find it with a quick google search. But I'd like to think his message will be visible from space long after most modern constructions have been torn down or destroyed by the slow process of time.