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That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it se
by xwdv 6y ago
That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it seems? Some day they may say Earth could have been habitable for billions of years.
- samatman 6y agoThat's practically guaranteed. Eventually, the Sun will expand so much that Earth's atmosphere will boil clean off. A mega-civilization with enormous power could move Earth, buy some time, but nothing lasts forever.
- selcuka 6y ago> buy some time, but nothing lasts forever That reminded me of The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. Quite enjoyable if you haven't read it already: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoI remember, when I first read this story, thinking how quaint this notion was: "In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called." Yet here we are, consolidating our planet's computing power to a handful of cloud computing providers.
- eloff 6y agoWhy move earth when you could just throw up some shade? By then things would be so different it's impossible to imagine what humans might do or be capable of our interested in - if we're still around.
- mrkstu 6y agoShade won’t help much when the sun is a red giant star…
- eloff 6y agoWhy not? Shade continues to function the same. If placed at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun (supposing that's not too close to said red giant), you wouldn't even need that much.
- samatman 6y agoThat's why I made reference to a generic "mega civilization". We're talking hundreds of millions of years from now, the only safe bet is that "humans" as we understand them won't be around. That would be as weird as the vernacular language of a people being an English we would understand, in 100,000 years! Our descendants might be a mega-civilization. Our creations might be, or rather the descendants of our creations. We might get wiped out by an alien von Neumann probe, get wiped out and then get von Neumann probed, or ordinary colonization, or, maybe we'll uplift the rats and they'll overthrow us, or dolphins will come back on land and grow thumbs! It's a lot of time, is what I'm saying.
- lumost 6y agoIt's a bit extreme to make that leap. Multi-cellular life only emerged on Earth ~600 million years ago, after the supposed habitable period of Venus. It's unclear for how much of the 4.6 billion year history of the earth multicellular life could have emerged and just how improbable the evolution of multicellular life is. There are certainly events such as the symbiosis of mitochondria which appear to have occurred only once in the history of life on earth.
- andrewflnr 6y agoComplex multicellularity and cellular endosymbiosis have both occurred multiple times on earth. Those aren't the hard part. Further, there's no reason to assume that having mitochondria (rather than just having an intrinsically more efficient metabolism) is optimal, much less necessary, rather than a path-dependent accident of Earth eukaryotes.
- zabzonk 6y ago> both occurred multiple times on earth Citation?
- vmception 6y agoAny Biology & Ecology 101 book from the last decade and a half.
- zabzonk 6y agoProvide a link to one.
- mannerheim 6y agoThere are several kingdoms with multicellular life. Plants, animals, most fungi, some protists (many protists are more closely related to animals, fungi, or plants than they are to each other for that matter). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote#Five_supergroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote#Five_supergroups Note e.g. that animals and fungi are closely related on this diagram, but there are unicellular fungi (notably yeast). I would guess that this means the common ancestor between animals and fungi would have been unicellular. At any rate, both are far from plants, and other protist species unrelated to all of these are multicellular. Endosymbiosis is generally accepted to also have occurred with chloroplasts. I believe there are also contemporary observed cases of protists consuming photosynthetic organisms and becoming immobile.
- andrewflnr 6y agoIf we could get heavy rock-moving equipment on the surface and blast through the lava, maybe we could find out. Or if we got lucky and landed a probe on a high spot that escaped the lava and found either fossils or artifacts. All that to say, not likely in our lifetimes.
- elihu 6y agoIf there was a civilization on Venus anything like our current civilization on Earth, I expect there would still be evidence of it, even in that hostile environment. If nothing else, there'd probably be unnatural formations of ground from mines or freeway construction or whatever.
- teeray 6y agoLife After People was a good series about this. IIRC, the only thing left of humanity after some appreciable amount of time (say a couple millenia), would be the pyramids. Evidence might be on Venus, but we might have to look thoroughly to find it.
- herendin2 6y agoThe oldest known undisturbed area of the Earth's surface is only about 2 million years old It turns over very fast in geological time https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth-discovered.html https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth-discov...
- elihu 6y agoA fair point. I wasn't thinking about tectonic subduction, which would hide pretty much all evidence that anyone was there. Though I think that article is talking more about having the same surface exposed to the air for a long time, without being worn down by weathering or covered in silt. You could have an area covered in dirt or partly eroded away, and still be recognizably an artifact of civilization for a long time. I don't know if such things would last billions of years though. Also, I expect weathering and erosion would happen a lot faster on Venus, what with the high heat and extreme winds that are more like a flowing ocean current than what we'd think of as "wind".
- herendin2 6y agoHave a look at the Silurian Hypothesis. If one can examine things very closely, literally on the ground, then the window of detectability might extend to hundreds of millions of years, even billions perhaps. But from orbit, there's not so much hope of detection after a million years
- GekkePrutser 6y agoExactly what I thought. Maybe there was a civilization and they totally messed up their planet like we do now. Only half joking by the way.
- sintaxi 6y agoI must be the only person on the planet who thinks humans are doing a phenomenal job taking care of Earth. Within a couple hundred years we went from struggling to survive to thriving with significant pollution, to rapid iteration on the energy sector with environment being a top priority. That all happened very quickly.