16 ms·

Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

177 points by dnetesn 3y ago

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I know this headline is about "pre-dating" chronologically, but I keep reading it as a T.rex predator om-nom-nomming crunchy, puny humans.
Zigurd 3y ago
It is a pop science magazine trope to wonder this. There is zero evidence for this. A much more plausible speculation is that stone civilizations rose and fell that we don't know about. Cultivating crops among wild forest and domesticating animals that subsequently go feral is so much more likely to have happened in the time that Sapiens was physiologically modern.
simmerup 3y ago
I hope I'm not the only one that read this as some sort of species hunting humans like the wraith from Stargate
api 3y ago
What I love about this line of thinking is that it highlights the fact that time is as vast as space. Things hundreds of millions or billions of years ago are as far away as distant stars, even if they happened here on our own planet.
- bsder 3y ago
  Tyrannosaurus Rex existed closer in time to humans than it did to Stegosaurus. Time is stupid big.
  - SubiculumCode 3y ago
    fucking hell, yeah it is.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
It's impossible to know with our current level of technology. It's likely to be impossible to know, ever. That's really beautiful.
DannyB2 3y ago
If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast metal part. As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some higher life forms from such an earlier civilization have been in the fossil record?
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  The article indicated that surface turnover could have removed that evidence.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    If that were the case, perhaps someday we will find evidence on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System that an earlier civilization achieved space flight before they were erased from Earth and unable to establish a permanent foothold elsewhere in our corner of the cosmos. The Moon and other celestial bodies in the Solar System of course have their own processes that erase the surface over time, but at least with the Moon, it does appear to be a far slower process.
  - topspin 3y ago
    And yet we have 3.4 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils.
    - newZWhoDis 3y ago
      Various sci-fi has explored this idea, for example Mass Effect, but “Reaper” species could explain that.
      - topspin 3y ago
        Also aliens. I see.
    - 3y ago
jfk13 3y ago
Surprised no-one has mentioned Betteridge's Law of Headlines yet.
Scramblejams 3y ago
I enjoyed this comment on the subject from a few years ago, focusing on a search for carbon cenospheres as a sentinel for an earlier civilization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837470
leafmeal 3y ago
Obviously this doesn't apply when speaking on the scale of millions of years, but I remember reading that there may not be enough easily accessible energy sources (ie fossil fuels) left to jump start another industrial civilization if our current one where to collapse.
- montagg 3y ago
  Well, maybe in another 65 million years, whatever's around will just use us and the rest of this era's biomass as crude oil in the next cycle.
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    Well, "why did so much coal form during the Carboniferous period" is an interesting question. One theory is that plants started to produce lignin (wood) and other novel compounds during that time, while fungi and bacteria had not yet evolved the ability to break them down. So lots of organic matter was piling up on the ground and not being released back into the atmosphere. (Fun related note, the oxygen level in the atmosphere rose to very high levels during this time, which enabled gigantism in insects and amphibians - organisms that depend on simple diffusion of oxygen for their respiratory system). Eventually all that organic matter could be buried and fossilized. So anyway, since fungi and bacteria are more evolved today, it's unlikely that such massive buildup of organic matter would occur again. Any given burial event would trap less organic material, so the resulting fossil fuel deposits would be smaller and it would take much longer for a given amount of carbon to be buried. Of course this is just one theory and there are many other factors in fossil fuel formation as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
- ianburrell 3y ago
  There are a lot of coal deposits left. A lot of them are near the surface, some exposed by mines. The downside is that they are far from current civilization since the closer ones have been mined. Wood was important in the US for industrialization. Unlike Europe, the US had lots of forests. Those might be enough for start. Also, we know how to make electricity from solar, wind, and hydro. They need electricity and good design so may not work in beginning but for later stages.
1270018080 3y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- contact9879 3y ago
  I would argue that Betteridge's law breaks down when the point of the article is to invoke readers to ask themselves the question.
- birriel 3y ago
  IIRC, the Wikipedia article for Betteridge's law stated that, statistically, headlines in the form of a question were more often answered with a "yes."
blululu 3y ago
The arguments here feels like they would apply to pre-industrial civilization but I would suspect that the artifacts of modern civilization are pretty glaring in the fossil record. The layer of lead on the surface is not going to go away anytime soon. The same applies to a variety of other elements that we have blown into the atmosphere - to say nothing of the crazy amount of chicken bones and concentrations of strange metals that we have produced.
StackOverlord 3y ago
Evidence for a Large Anomalous Nuclear Explosions in Mars Past J.E. Brandenburg https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/eposter/2660.pdf https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/eposter/2660.pdf
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  And J.E. Brandenburg's arguments are treated here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Brandenburg https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Brandenburg
- rationalist 3y ago
  That was interesting until the last slide which had pictures of "objects" imaged on mars. At least one of those images has been debunked (random elevations creating coincidentally-interesting shadows). If that slide was a joke, they should have made it obvious for those looking at the slides without context of a presentation.
  - Pompidou 3y ago
    " The new images of the Face at Cydonia Mensa confirm eyes, nose, mouth, helmet structure with additional detail of nostrils and helmet ornaments being clearly seen in new images with details at approximately 1/10 scale of the face. New imagery confirms the pyramid structure seen in Viking images of the The D&M pyramid and new high resolution images show evidence of collapsed brickwork. New images of a face found at Galaxias Chaos (the Utopia site) confirms facial structure with eyes, nose, mouth and helmet. High resolution imagery shows symmetric brickwork around the nose region. The civilization appears to have been primitive and indigenous to Mars. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Mars was the locale of a planetary nuclear massacre." John E.Brandenburg https://www.tsijournals.com/abstract/evidence-of-massive-thermonuclear-explosions-on-mars-in-the-past-the-cydonian-hypothesis-and-fermis-paradox-new-data-2731.html https://www.tsijournals.com/abstract/evidence-of-massive-the...
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      That's some industrial grade apophenia, pareidolia, and good old fashioned cognitive dissonance. The MSSS imagery makes it very plane that the Cydonian face is just a hill. But no, they put some white arrows pointing to nothing and claim it's evidence of a made up thing.
xoa 3y ago
A civilization that got to "industrial" but didn't make it to the nuclear and particularly space age certainly seems like it could leave little trace over long periods depending on how the cards fell. However, if nothing else our civilization has made a habit of disposing of geosync satellites past their life time into super synchronous graveyard orbits that will last a really long time. At the rate things are going there is also reasonable chance we'll have a much more significant presence on the moon at least before any complete implosion seems probable (if we get eaten by AI that doesn't spell the end of development so doesn't count by itself, the AI would then have to also implode or leave no trace for new biological life to arise). Any sort of lunar base would also likely stick around a very long time at this point with the heavy solar bombardment no longer taking place. Granted, a new civilization would have to itself get quite a ways along to notice these artifacts and what they were if everything on Earth was gone.
- hoten 3y ago
  If we weren't already tracking those decommissioned satellites, would we know they were there?
  - xoa 3y ago
    Yes. Everything in orbit above an extremely small size is tracked. Very important for navigation. And satellites themselves are lenty large enough to be visible with a relatively basic telescope so in that respect actually I was probably too conservative, early astronomers would see them although it would take longer to realize they were artificial, but still long, long before space age. And know there were artificial objects up there would probably change history late 1800s.
  - melagonster 3y ago
    A small object can easily kill everyone in spacecraft. unfortunately, we should track most of garbage in our orbit.
- nanreh 3y ago
  I've wondered about stuff we leave off planet too. Like the stuff we left on the Moon. Our rovers on Mars. The JWST. Seems not entirely crazy to be looking in those places for evidence of past Earth-borne civilization.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
coldcode 3y ago
At the risk of angering the HN crowd, there was about 65M years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXpRWHVIPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXpRWHVIPE It's pretty funny.
- showdeadplease 3y ago
  [dead]
placesalt 3y ago
FTA: “The best [counter-argument] is probably the issue of deep mining,” Schmidt said. “We are mining very old deposits for metals and ore, and if these had been depleted by a prior civilization, it might have been noticed. These place limits on the scope of a prior civilization, but don’t eliminate the possibility.” This has interested me before, and I think it's good evidence to the contrary. I am not a geologist, but from what I know, "Very old" means the precambrian shield in Canada, for example, which is among, if not the, oldest rock on earth (~3.6Gy). Oldest, because before that time, the planet was molten on its surface. We're mining that today, and the geology can be fit to geological models: afaik, the geology being encountered in the very old rock is what people expect to see from naturally-occurring processes. I do still wonder, though, what rock would look like after ~billions of years, if parts of it had been mined out, and whether that mining would be detectable. The rock is hard rock; would you see a corridor of rubble in solid rock, from a collapsed tunnel? Or are there still enough geological forces acting on the rock to turn the rubble from a collapsed tunnel into something resembling metamorphic placer (river-borne) rock, for example? Interesting question, either way.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  But was the Canadian Shield exposed before the last glaciation? If it was buried under a large layer of other stuff before, the fact that it wasn't mined may not tell us much.
  - placesalt 3y ago
    Again, not a geologist (or glaciologist), but glaciations happen frequently, in geological terms - every 40k? years or so. And, they don't dig very deep. Mines go >1km deep, so are below what I think any glaciation would have an effect on.
BMc2020 3y ago
Ctrl F Silurian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment which assesses modern science's ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago. The most probable cues for such a civilization could be carbon, radioactive elements or temperature variation. The name "Silurian" derives from the eponymous sapient species from the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, who in the series established an advanced civilization prior to humanity.
mabbo 3y ago
Presuming that such a civilization did exist, another important point as to why there are no artifacts found could be that they aren't on the surface anymore. Plates shift and subduct. Huge sections of land suddenly (geologically speaking) find themselves under the ocean. Just read about "Doggerland", or "Beringia", and you realize that the history we have is only the history of things that remain on the surface of the earth.
WalterBright 3y ago
There's no evidence on the Moon or Mars, either.
Eisenstein 3y ago
I can think of one plausible way that this happened: the simulation theory. Seeing as there are only a few logical options: * We stop being able to advance computing power * We somehow make it impossible or undesirable to create a realistic simulation * We destroy ourselves * We advance to the point where can and do create realistic simulations Then there is a very good chance that we are in fact, living in a simulation.
- machina_ex_deus 3y ago
  And then you remember that there are 10^23 particles in a single gram, which is in orders of magnitude of all CPUs on earth. We're as close in orders of magnitude to the size galaxy 10^20 as we are to the nucleus 10^-18. Or put it another way, there is the same amount of units of proton radius in 10 meters as there are 10 meters in the entire Galaxy. Another way to look at it, is that the most plausible assumption about self- simulation is that it is maxed out at some constant efficiency, say you need a system that is 10 times bigger. Then the entire babushka of simulations are merely a geometric series, and in fact you're most likely to exist in the outermost babushka except the most efficient of all simulations. If you assume the world is a simulation, it must be an imperfect simulation that shortcuts away several orders of magnitude compared to whatever it is meant to mimic.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > If you assume the world is a simulation, it must be an imperfect simulation that shortcuts away several orders of magnitude compared to whatever it is meant to mimic. I don't assume we are in a simulation, but I do agree with the bullet points I stated. Do you?
  - dizkodo 3y ago
    I mean... culling, am I right?
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> a point that might be too subtle for some netizens in our age of Ancient Aliens memes. Funny enough there are actually one or two Ancient Alients episodes on this topic. One asks the same question and draws the same conclusion (i.e., it's hard to say, but certainly not impossible). The other is about odd out of the ordinary artifacts. One of the more intriguing ones was a hammer type object found in sandstone (?), and evidently such rock requires millions of years to form.
saluki 3y ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Yeah, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Researc...
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Lol, yeah, the agenda started to be revealed with: ``` However, there are plenty of documented, though not widely known, reasons why the methods used to date ancient earth materials are faulty.4 In fact, when "300 million year old" coal is examined for carbon, it routinely returns measurable radioactive carbon-14, which would have disappeared by radioactive decay in under 90,000 years.5 Also, the Bible's historical information documents a world that is only thousands of years old. In this context, deeply buried coal deposits were produced by the historical Flood of Noah.6 The people who were alive back then could have provided coal-embedded artifacts. ``` Oh, are we doing a fun thought experiment? Entertaining the idea that the coal was formed merely thousands of years ago? Like, in the time of the Ancient Egyptians? It's coal made of mammoths? I guess it's possible, but... :D
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  > Institute for Creation Research Yeah, nope, not bothering to read that. It is ridiculous the lengths to which people will go to justify the balderdash in an old cracked book written two thousand years ago.
TMWNN 3y ago
As usual, there are relevant SCPs. Two favorites are <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115> and <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2000 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2000>.
rdevsrex 3y ago
I think in some sense probably not. I can't imagine an industrial civilization before us, as there would have been fewer fossil fuels in the ground than we initially found. But that assumes every intelligence operates like our own. Heck you even see that with the difference in worldview that Westerners and indigenous people have. That's why I can imagine a species that chose to focus its energies on other things than resource extraction and industrialization. It's not a bad path for us to consider. It is an interesting thought exercise though.
1letterunixname 3y ago
This is the lowest evidence, wildest speculation thing I've read today that makes "Ancient Aliens" appear peer reviewed.
- yreg 3y ago
  It's a thought experiment, you can say the same about an xkcd what if.
xwdv 3y ago
What seems chilling to me is that there is a sort of terrestrial Fermi Paradox where given the amount of time Earth has existed relative to how long humans have existed, you should expect there to have been sentient non-human civilizations existing prior to our emergence. If life and technology are so easy, living in a world where previous civilized species have once lived should be the norm. And yet, we have found no such evidence. The probability is so low that we are the first true industrial civilization to have been on this planet’s 4.5 billion years, yet here we are.
- yreg 3y ago
  The scale is different, since obviously there have been far fewer dice rolls for spawning a civilization on Earth than galaxy-wide. Anyway, I would bet that the 'terrestrial great filter' is evolutionary selection for large brains. Big brain costs a lot of energy and makes birth difficult to the point that humans have to be born prematurely and are as newborns utterly incompetent compared to other animals. And marginally better brain gives very little advantage to gene spreading.
BurningFrog 3y ago
The current continents have clearly been evolutionary isolated for many million years. This means there can't have been a civilization that routinely traveled between the continents during that time.
- mrangle 3y ago
  The Yemeni Island Socotra is a remnant continental island. That is, it is an artifact of a continent that no longer exists. When one digs into the history of Socotra going back about 8 million years iirc, I believe that there is logical evidence of homo sea travel millions of years ago. Going on the timelines of Socotra's emergence as an island, of homo species, and of the evidence of who resided on Socotra.
mikewarot 3y ago
We know that the Antikythera mechanism was made in a shop, on a small production line, it was likely one of a series of devices made. It is possible that the orthodox timeline of the rise of man needs quite a correction, given the events at the end of the Younger Dryas. Many of the megafauna were wiped out, and mankind almost went with them. We need to survey the areas of the ocean less than about 200 foot deep (and the seabed below them) to see what mankind was doing before the sea level rose to the current levels.
1970-01-01 3y ago
No, because there is no genetic evidence of this civilization. Our DNA remains linked to our ancestors in Africa. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-dna-tied-mostly-to-single-exodus-from-africa-long-ago/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-dna-tied-mostly-to-single...
- GuardianCaveman 3y ago
  I think they mean not necessarily human beings but any advanced civilization.
anothernewdude 3y ago
There's no article here. Just a picture and a sentence. Why post this?
javajosh 3y ago
Well, this is why we should leave an easily visible monument on the moon, so if and when the next civ evolves on Earth they will know we existed.
- BorgChiquita 3y ago
  Yeah, lets make it a solid shape and to be obvious lets align it perfectly with the geographic north pole, no one will claim they did it instead of us
ETH_start 3y ago
It's implausible that a species would develop an industrial civilization and then get killed off in an event that doesn't wipe out every other species of vertebrate. A species with human-level technology could survive even the Chicxulub asteroid that killed off non-avian dinosaurs, given the huge population and vast range that industrial civilization enables that species to attain, as well as the diverse array of energy sources, and robust habitats that become accessible to such a species.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Similarly why climate change won't be existential crisis for human race. Civilization maybe, but for the race no. Getting rid of every member of species that is adapted to wide range of environments and globally spread might be impossible. And likely they would at least leave some evidence somewhere. It is not like every surface of planet has gone through ice ages or other events grinding away the top soil.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Guess it comes down to the definition of "existential". That humans could be reduced back to scattered pre-industrial tribes, many people would call an "existential" crisis. Even if a species of animal called Homo Sapiens would still survive. I think a lot of people would disagree that this is a good outcome, even if some humans are still alive and wondering around.
john_max_1 3y ago
One thing I always wonder is bury vs cremation. Hindus, 1/6th of the world population usually cremate their dead. The bodies are gone. And the bones are washed away into ganges. I would guess Hindus in USA or Europe would do the same. An archeological study of skeletons in 4000 AD would drastically undercount groups that cremate their dead. Or won't it?
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Most cultures that cremate their dead won't throw the ashes into the Ganges (not even most Hindus, historically - the vast majority of Indians don't live within walking distance from the Ganges), but bury them in urns, which are often very recognizable in the archeologic record.
nothrowaways 3y ago
Probably
rkagerer 3y ago
I highly recommend the novel Strata by Terry Pratchett, to anyone who is tickled by this question.
keepamovin 3y ago
There’ve been multiple such throughout history. Some evolved here but most were refugees from elsewhere. Cataclysms have rewritten the surface geography many times, and combined with erosion and more gradual plate and water changes, the Earth has buried, eroded and eaten most of the evidence. What little there has been, has been covered up and sequestered away for the same reasons the alien UAP info has been: because the rulers of men are terrified their subjects will see something else besides humans, more advanced, because they fear it will erode their authority and influence. It’s never been because “we can’t take it, therefore suppressed for ‘our own good’” — that’s just how we’ve been gaslit — it’s always been because our rulers are terrified. We’re an ape species and therefore tribal and hierarchical. A new alpha is a serious destabilizing threat to those who see themselves as the existing alpha. As a species, our collective mind has grown up with blinders on, shaped, in a test tube, so to speak, of artificial ideas. I hope a big explosion is coming, to blow away all our ignorance and put us in touch with who we are and who everyone else is.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Source?
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Ah, I mean, probably nothing that would convince you. If you go looking, you can put the picture together if you have the capability for discovery and the mindset to do that. But I don’t think I could just list some sources where you could go in and sort of in computational fashion go and deduce this conclusion. And I understand that, so for the most part for many people, this conclusion will remain out of reach, because there are it appears no easy set of sources that could satisfy them that they couldn’t say “well that source could be discredited because of this, or clearly, it was written by this person who we can discredit, or by saying they’re sure it was written at a time where people didn’t understand, or that there was political pressure to write such and such a thing or it was done for entertainment or whatever it is,” I mean there’s always arguments you can make against any source. And so I understand and I think it’s perfectly fine for those people that These types of ideas will remain out of reach for them for now until such a day as there is some sort of official confirmation from some important authority figures of these ideas and at that point those ideas will then have a wider audience of acceptance, because there is certainly some people that require not discovery, but authoritative confirmation, I suppose. Yet, if you were the discovering type than what I have said, combined with your innate abilities, surely you already have enough to go put the picture together for yourself to your own satisfaction. If so, my friend, good luck! Bon voyage :)
radu_floricica 3y ago
Just for fun, a possibility is Antarctica. Cold is a straightforward problem to solve - make a fire, throw a fur or a blanket on you. Even the most primitive emerging civilizations ca thrive in cold climates. Heat on the other hand is a lot more complex to solve. You need fully industrial civilization to have air conditioning, and we still don't have anything portable enough. Even today's solution to 40C+ is "drink a lot of water and stay inside". So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature. GPT was full of disclaimers, but suggested a typical heat wave in Late Cretaceous might exceed 50°C (122°F), while parts of Antarctica would be a very comfortable 20°C (68°F). One could easily imagine an intelligent species with poor thermal control that was very well adapted to Antarctica, but could never settle the rest of the world if once every 5-10 summers a heat wave would wipe them out. That was the time of Velociraptors btw, so not a bad stock to evolve intelligence from.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature. Are you arguing that the chances of a large-scale Antarctic industrial civilization that reached Mars is higher than one that reached South America, Southern Africa, or Australia?
  - radu_floricica 3y ago
    "reached" vs "colonized". We ourselves reached the moon and will soon reach Mars, but we have no intention of leaving more than a couple of buildings in Antarctica, or deep in the oceans. So yeah, it's certainly possible they've sent a couple of dinosaurs on Mars, but didn't leave a lot of concrete buildings anywhere else.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    In this hypotherical event they possibly spread there too before their complete demise. But I guess we’d have found their traces by now…
FreshStart 3y ago
With biology based tooling? Yes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nologic01 3y ago
Industrial civilization is today synonymous with large scale environmental transformation. But it took only like a couple of centuries to realise that this process cannot be limitless and need to be converted into a sustainable, circular/renewable pattern for advanced civilization to last not just for a few more decades but hopefully, for eternity. Now, it is conceivable (and kinda scary) to contemplate that earlier versions of humans developed a sustainability consciousness much earlier, before actually engaging industrial level terraforming. The result would have been very limited tangible environmental impact, possibly hard to identify today.
8bitsrule 3y ago
Only recently there is growing evidence that there are ancient artifacts made with precisions/symmetry/accuracy that could only have been approached in the last 50 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyQQRNoQaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyQQRNoQaE That doesn't explain what happened to the tools, but that might be attributable to rust, death of small numbers of experts by war/famine/cataclysm/disease, and widespread recycling of rare metals and objects. OOP artifact-finders have traditionally been mocked into silence. It was 50 years before Antikythera got serious study, 50 more before it got close attention.
- TheCapeGreek 3y ago
  This is the comment I was looking for. The ultimate explanation might not be as wild as non-human civilizations, advanced "prehistoric" humans, or aliens. But it does seem that there are some mysteries of construction over the eons that have been lost.
- tzs 3y ago
  It wasn’t actually technically hard to achieve great precision and accuracy with the technology of ancient times. What is hard is to do it fast, cheaply, and in volume.
jl6 3y ago
All the possibilities seem extremely unlikely, but I’ll add one more just for fun: We currently equate “advanced civilization” with “large scale”. But what if there was a small-scale advanced civilization? Small enough to evade detection using the crude geological tools at our disposal. Imagine a species that was both intelligent (like humans) and immortal (like jellyfish). With unbounded lifespans, they could do work that would take millions of humans - just over a much longer period of time. With no urgent need to reproduce, their population could stay small. Perhaps with long life comes enough accumulated wisdom to exercise restraint. They might even marvel at how a mortal species could ever achieve civilization when knowledge has to be re-learned by every generation. Over millions of years of slow civilization they might have achieved great sophistication and advanced technology, concentrated in one small region that we either haven’t found yet, or which has been subsumed beneath ocean or tectonic plate. Perhaps a changing climate forced them to leave Earth, or to hibernate somewhere, peeking out every few million years to see if the conditions are right for their return.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  No benefit of scale or consumer society; without that, seems hard to get to chip fabs? But maybe writing and some machines?
  - jl6 3y ago
    They might have scale, but over time rather than distance.
    - dr_dshiv 3y ago
      But that doesn’t lead to the efficiency of mass production, specialized labor, Moore’s law, etc.
- fatuna 3y ago
  How would an immortal society evolve though? Both biologically and socially. If they are anything like humans, you need the old generation to die for new knowledge to take hold.
christkv 3y ago
Reminds me of the book inherit the stars where they find a human skeleton on the moon.
speedbird 3y ago
Toilet bowls
dmd 3y ago
The book "Living Memory" by David Walton (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Memory-David-Walton/dp/108803537X https://www.amazon.com/Living-Memory-David-Walton/dp/1088035...) is about this, and is great.

177 points by dnetesn 3y ago

I know this headline is about "pre-dating" chronologically, but I keep reading it as a T.rex predator om-nom-nomming crunchy, puny humans.

Zigurd 3y ago

It is a pop science magazine trope to wonder this. There is zero evidence for this. A much more plausible speculation is that stone civilizations rose and fell that we don't know about. Cultivating crops among wild forest and domesticating animals that subsequently go feral is so much more likely to have happened in the time that Sapiens was physiologically modern.

simmerup 3y ago

I hope I'm not the only one that read this as some sort of species hunting humans like the wraith from Stargate

api 3y ago

What I love about this line of thinking is that it highlights the fact that time is as vast as space. Things hundreds of millions or billions of years ago are as far away as distant stars, even if they happened here on our own planet.

bsder 3y ago
Tyrannosaurus Rex existed closer in time to humans than it did to Stegosaurus. Time is stupid big.
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  fucking hell, yeah it is.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

It's impossible to know with our current level of technology. It's likely to be impossible to know, ever. That's really beautiful.

DannyB2 3y ago

If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast metal part. As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some higher life forms from such an earlier civilization have been in the fossil record?

SubiculumCode 3y ago
The article indicated that surface turnover could have removed that evidence.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  If that were the case, perhaps someday we will find evidence on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System that an earlier civilization achieved space flight before they were erased from Earth and unable to establish a permanent foothold elsewhere in our corner of the cosmos. The Moon and other celestial bodies in the Solar System of course have their own processes that erase the surface over time, but at least with the Moon, it does appear to be a far slower process.
- topspin 3y ago
  And yet we have 3.4 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils.
  - newZWhoDis 3y ago
    Various sci-fi has explored this idea, for example Mass Effect, but “Reaper” species could explain that.
    - topspin 3y ago
      Also aliens. I see.
  - 3y ago

jfk13 3y ago

Surprised no-one has mentioned Betteridge's Law of Headlines yet.

Scramblejams 3y ago

I enjoyed this comment on the subject from a few years ago, focusing on a search for carbon cenospheres as a sentinel for an earlier civilization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837470

leafmeal 3y ago

Obviously this doesn't apply when speaking on the scale of millions of years, but I remember reading that there may not be enough easily accessible energy sources (ie fossil fuels) left to jump start another industrial civilization if our current one where to collapse.

montagg 3y ago
Well, maybe in another 65 million years, whatever's around will just use us and the rest of this era's biomass as crude oil in the next cycle.
- anon84873628 3y ago
  Well, "why did so much coal form during the Carboniferous period" is an interesting question. One theory is that plants started to produce lignin (wood) and other novel compounds during that time, while fungi and bacteria had not yet evolved the ability to break them down. So lots of organic matter was piling up on the ground and not being released back into the atmosphere. (Fun related note, the oxygen level in the atmosphere rose to very high levels during this time, which enabled gigantism in insects and amphibians - organisms that depend on simple diffusion of oxygen for their respiratory system). Eventually all that organic matter could be buried and fossilized. So anyway, since fungi and bacteria are more evolved today, it's unlikely that such massive buildup of organic matter would occur again. Any given burial event would trap less organic material, so the resulting fossil fuel deposits would be smaller and it would take much longer for a given amount of carbon to be buried. Of course this is just one theory and there are many other factors in fossil fuel formation as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
ianburrell 3y ago
There are a lot of coal deposits left. A lot of them are near the surface, some exposed by mines. The downside is that they are far from current civilization since the closer ones have been mined. Wood was important in the US for industrialization. Unlike Europe, the US had lots of forests. Those might be enough for start. Also, we know how to make electricity from solar, wind, and hydro. They need electricity and good design so may not work in beginning but for later stages.

1270018080 3y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

contact9879 3y ago
I would argue that Betteridge's law breaks down when the point of the article is to invoke readers to ask themselves the question.
birriel 3y ago
IIRC, the Wikipedia article for Betteridge's law stated that, statistically, headlines in the form of a question were more often answered with a "yes."

blululu 3y ago

The arguments here feels like they would apply to pre-industrial civilization but I would suspect that the artifacts of modern civilization are pretty glaring in the fossil record. The layer of lead on the surface is not going to go away anytime soon. The same applies to a variety of other elements that we have blown into the atmosphere - to say nothing of the crazy amount of chicken bones and concentrations of strange metals that we have produced.

StackOverlord 3y ago

Evidence for a Large Anomalous Nuclear Explosions in Mars Past J.E. Brandenburg https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/eposter/2660.pdf https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/eposter/2660.pdf

joe_the_user 3y ago
And J.E. Brandenburg's arguments are treated here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Brandenburg https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Brandenburg
rationalist 3y ago
That was interesting until the last slide which had pictures of "objects" imaged on mars. At least one of those images has been debunked (random elevations creating coincidentally-interesting shadows). If that slide was a joke, they should have made it obvious for those looking at the slides without context of a presentation.
- Pompidou 3y ago
  " The new images of the Face at Cydonia Mensa confirm eyes, nose, mouth, helmet structure with additional detail of nostrils and helmet ornaments being clearly seen in new images with details at approximately 1/10 scale of the face. New imagery confirms the pyramid structure seen in Viking images of the The D&M pyramid and new high resolution images show evidence of collapsed brickwork. New images of a face found at Galaxias Chaos (the Utopia site) confirms facial structure with eyes, nose, mouth and helmet. High resolution imagery shows symmetric brickwork around the nose region. The civilization appears to have been primitive and indigenous to Mars. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Mars was the locale of a planetary nuclear massacre." John E.Brandenburg https://www.tsijournals.com/abstract/evidence-of-massive-thermonuclear-explosions-on-mars-in-the-past-the-cydonian-hypothesis-and-fermis-paradox-new-data-2731.html https://www.tsijournals.com/abstract/evidence-of-massive-the...
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    That's some industrial grade apophenia, pareidolia, and good old fashioned cognitive dissonance. The MSSS imagery makes it very plane that the Cydonian face is just a hill. But no, they put some white arrows pointing to nothing and claim it's evidence of a made up thing.

xoa 3y ago

A civilization that got to "industrial" but didn't make it to the nuclear and particularly space age certainly seems like it could leave little trace over long periods depending on how the cards fell. However, if nothing else our civilization has made a habit of disposing of geosync satellites past their life time into super synchronous graveyard orbits that will last a really long time. At the rate things are going there is also reasonable chance we'll have a much more significant presence on the moon at least before any complete implosion seems probable (if we get eaten by AI that doesn't spell the end of development so doesn't count by itself, the AI would then have to also implode or leave no trace for new biological life to arise). Any sort of lunar base would also likely stick around a very long time at this point with the heavy solar bombardment no longer taking place. Granted, a new civilization would have to itself get quite a ways along to notice these artifacts and what they were if everything on Earth was gone.

hoten 3y ago
If we weren't already tracking those decommissioned satellites, would we know they were there?
- xoa 3y ago
  Yes. Everything in orbit above an extremely small size is tracked. Very important for navigation. And satellites themselves are lenty large enough to be visible with a relatively basic telescope so in that respect actually I was probably too conservative, early astronomers would see them although it would take longer to realize they were artificial, but still long, long before space age. And know there were artificial objects up there would probably change history late 1800s.
- melagonster 3y ago
  A small object can easily kill everyone in spacecraft. unfortunately, we should track most of garbage in our orbit.
nanreh 3y ago
I've wondered about stuff we leave off planet too. Like the stuff we left on the Moon. Our rovers on Mars. The JWST. Seems not entirely crazy to be looking in those places for evidence of past Earth-borne civilization.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

coldcode 3y ago

At the risk of angering the HN crowd, there was about 65M years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXpRWHVIPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXpRWHVIPE It's pretty funny.

showdeadplease 3y ago
[dead]

placesalt 3y ago

FTA: “The best [counter-argument] is probably the issue of deep mining,” Schmidt said. “We are mining very old deposits for metals and ore, and if these had been depleted by a prior civilization, it might have been noticed. These place limits on the scope of a prior civilization, but don’t eliminate the possibility.” This has interested me before, and I think it's good evidence to the contrary. I am not a geologist, but from what I know, "Very old" means the precambrian shield in Canada, for example, which is among, if not the, oldest rock on earth (~3.6Gy). Oldest, because before that time, the planet was molten on its surface. We're mining that today, and the geology can be fit to geological models: afaik, the geology being encountered in the very old rock is what people expect to see from naturally-occurring processes. I do still wonder, though, what rock would look like after ~billions of years, if parts of it had been mined out, and whether that mining would be detectable. The rock is hard rock; would you see a corridor of rubble in solid rock, from a collapsed tunnel? Or are there still enough geological forces acting on the rock to turn the rubble from a collapsed tunnel into something resembling metamorphic placer (river-borne) rock, for example? Interesting question, either way.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
But was the Canadian Shield exposed before the last glaciation? If it was buried under a large layer of other stuff before, the fact that it wasn't mined may not tell us much.
- placesalt 3y ago
  Again, not a geologist (or glaciologist), but glaciations happen frequently, in geological terms - every 40k? years or so. And, they don't dig very deep. Mines go >1km deep, so are below what I think any glaciation would have an effect on.

BMc2020 3y ago

Ctrl F Silurian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment which assesses modern science's ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago. The most probable cues for such a civilization could be carbon, radioactive elements or temperature variation. The name "Silurian" derives from the eponymous sapient species from the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, who in the series established an advanced civilization prior to humanity.

mabbo 3y ago

Presuming that such a civilization did exist, another important point as to why there are no artifacts found could be that they aren't on the surface anymore. Plates shift and subduct. Huge sections of land suddenly (geologically speaking) find themselves under the ocean. Just read about "Doggerland", or "Beringia", and you realize that the history we have is only the history of things that remain on the surface of the earth.

WalterBright 3y ago

There's no evidence on the Moon or Mars, either.

Eisenstein 3y ago

I can think of one plausible way that this happened: the simulation theory. Seeing as there are only a few logical options: * We stop being able to advance computing power * We somehow make it impossible or undesirable to create a realistic simulation * We destroy ourselves * We advance to the point where can and do create realistic simulations Then there is a very good chance that we are in fact, living in a simulation.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago
And then you remember that there are 10^23 particles in a single gram, which is in orders of magnitude of all CPUs on earth. We're as close in orders of magnitude to the size galaxy 10^20 as we are to the nucleus 10^-18. Or put it another way, there is the same amount of units of proton radius in 10 meters as there are 10 meters in the entire Galaxy. Another way to look at it, is that the most plausible assumption about self- simulation is that it is maxed out at some constant efficiency, say you need a system that is 10 times bigger. Then the entire babushka of simulations are merely a geometric series, and in fact you're most likely to exist in the outermost babushka except the most efficient of all simulations. If you assume the world is a simulation, it must be an imperfect simulation that shortcuts away several orders of magnitude compared to whatever it is meant to mimic.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > If you assume the world is a simulation, it must be an imperfect simulation that shortcuts away several orders of magnitude compared to whatever it is meant to mimic. I don't assume we are in a simulation, but I do agree with the bullet points I stated. Do you?
- dizkodo 3y ago
  I mean... culling, am I right?

chiefalchemist 3y ago

> a point that might be too subtle for some netizens in our age of Ancient Aliens memes. Funny enough there are actually one or two Ancient Alients episodes on this topic. One asks the same question and draws the same conclusion (i.e., it's hard to say, but certainly not impossible). The other is about odd out of the ordinary artifacts. One of the more intriguing ones was a hammer type object found in sandstone (?), and evidently such rock requires millions of years to form.

saluki 3y ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 3y ago
Yeah, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Researc...
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Lol, yeah, the agenda started to be revealed with: ``` However, there are plenty of documented, though not widely known, reasons why the methods used to date ancient earth materials are faulty.4 In fact, when "300 million year old" coal is examined for carbon, it routinely returns measurable radioactive carbon-14, which would have disappeared by radioactive decay in under 90,000 years.5 Also, the Bible's historical information documents a world that is only thousands of years old. In this context, deeply buried coal deposits were produced by the historical Flood of Noah.6 The people who were alive back then could have provided coal-embedded artifacts. ``` Oh, are we doing a fun thought experiment? Entertaining the idea that the coal was formed merely thousands of years ago? Like, in the time of the Ancient Egyptians? It's coal made of mammoths? I guess it's possible, but... :D
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> Institute for Creation Research Yeah, nope, not bothering to read that. It is ridiculous the lengths to which people will go to justify the balderdash in an old cracked book written two thousand years ago.

TMWNN 3y ago

As usual, there are relevant SCPs. Two favorites are <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115> and <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2000 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2000>.

rdevsrex 3y ago

I think in some sense probably not. I can't imagine an industrial civilization before us, as there would have been fewer fossil fuels in the ground than we initially found. But that assumes every intelligence operates like our own. Heck you even see that with the difference in worldview that Westerners and indigenous people have. That's why I can imagine a species that chose to focus its energies on other things than resource extraction and industrialization. It's not a bad path for us to consider. It is an interesting thought exercise though.

1letterunixname 3y ago

This is the lowest evidence, wildest speculation thing I've read today that makes "Ancient Aliens" appear peer reviewed.

yreg 3y ago
It's a thought experiment, you can say the same about an xkcd what if.

xwdv 3y ago

What seems chilling to me is that there is a sort of terrestrial Fermi Paradox where given the amount of time Earth has existed relative to how long humans have existed, you should expect there to have been sentient non-human civilizations existing prior to our emergence. If life and technology are so easy, living in a world where previous civilized species have once lived should be the norm. And yet, we have found no such evidence. The probability is so low that we are the first true industrial civilization to have been on this planet’s 4.5 billion years, yet here we are.

yreg 3y ago
The scale is different, since obviously there have been far fewer dice rolls for spawning a civilization on Earth than galaxy-wide. Anyway, I would bet that the 'terrestrial great filter' is evolutionary selection for large brains. Big brain costs a lot of energy and makes birth difficult to the point that humans have to be born prematurely and are as newborns utterly incompetent compared to other animals. And marginally better brain gives very little advantage to gene spreading.

BurningFrog 3y ago

The current continents have clearly been evolutionary isolated for many million years. This means there can't have been a civilization that routinely traveled between the continents during that time.

mrangle 3y ago
The Yemeni Island Socotra is a remnant continental island. That is, it is an artifact of a continent that no longer exists. When one digs into the history of Socotra going back about 8 million years iirc, I believe that there is logical evidence of homo sea travel millions of years ago. Going on the timelines of Socotra's emergence as an island, of homo species, and of the evidence of who resided on Socotra.

mikewarot 3y ago

We know that the Antikythera mechanism was made in a shop, on a small production line, it was likely one of a series of devices made. It is possible that the orthodox timeline of the rise of man needs quite a correction, given the events at the end of the Younger Dryas. Many of the megafauna were wiped out, and mankind almost went with them. We need to survey the areas of the ocean less than about 200 foot deep (and the seabed below them) to see what mankind was doing before the sea level rose to the current levels.

1970-01-01 3y ago

No, because there is no genetic evidence of this civilization. Our DNA remains linked to our ancestors in Africa. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-dna-tied-mostly-to-single-exodus-from-africa-long-ago/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-dna-tied-mostly-to-single...

GuardianCaveman 3y ago
I think they mean not necessarily human beings but any advanced civilization.

anothernewdude 3y ago

There's no article here. Just a picture and a sentence. Why post this?

javajosh 3y ago

Well, this is why we should leave an easily visible monument on the moon, so if and when the next civ evolves on Earth they will know we existed.

BorgChiquita 3y ago
Yeah, lets make it a solid shape and to be obvious lets align it perfectly with the geographic north pole, no one will claim they did it instead of us

ETH_start 3y ago

It's implausible that a species would develop an industrial civilization and then get killed off in an event that doesn't wipe out every other species of vertebrate. A species with human-level technology could survive even the Chicxulub asteroid that killed off non-avian dinosaurs, given the huge population and vast range that industrial civilization enables that species to attain, as well as the diverse array of energy sources, and robust habitats that become accessible to such a species.

Ekaros 3y ago
Similarly why climate change won't be existential crisis for human race. Civilization maybe, but for the race no. Getting rid of every member of species that is adapted to wide range of environments and globally spread might be impossible. And likely they would at least leave some evidence somewhere. It is not like every surface of planet has gone through ice ages or other events grinding away the top soil.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Guess it comes down to the definition of "existential". That humans could be reduced back to scattered pre-industrial tribes, many people would call an "existential" crisis. Even if a species of animal called Homo Sapiens would still survive. I think a lot of people would disagree that this is a good outcome, even if some humans are still alive and wondering around.

john_max_1 3y ago

One thing I always wonder is bury vs cremation. Hindus, 1/6th of the world population usually cremate their dead. The bodies are gone. And the bones are washed away into ganges. I would guess Hindus in USA or Europe would do the same. An archeological study of skeletons in 4000 AD would drastically undercount groups that cremate their dead. Or won't it?

inglor_cz 3y ago
Most cultures that cremate their dead won't throw the ashes into the Ganges (not even most Hindus, historically - the vast majority of Indians don't live within walking distance from the Ganges), but bury them in urns, which are often very recognizable in the archeologic record.

nothrowaways 3y ago

Probably

rkagerer 3y ago

I highly recommend the novel Strata by Terry Pratchett, to anyone who is tickled by this question.

keepamovin 3y ago

There’ve been multiple such throughout history. Some evolved here but most were refugees from elsewhere. Cataclysms have rewritten the surface geography many times, and combined with erosion and more gradual plate and water changes, the Earth has buried, eroded and eaten most of the evidence. What little there has been, has been covered up and sequestered away for the same reasons the alien UAP info has been: because the rulers of men are terrified their subjects will see something else besides humans, more advanced, because they fear it will erode their authority and influence. It’s never been because “we can’t take it, therefore suppressed for ‘our own good’” — that’s just how we’ve been gaslit — it’s always been because our rulers are terrified. We’re an ape species and therefore tribal and hierarchical. A new alpha is a serious destabilizing threat to those who see themselves as the existing alpha. As a species, our collective mind has grown up with blinders on, shaped, in a test tube, so to speak, of artificial ideas. I hope a big explosion is coming, to blow away all our ignorance and put us in touch with who we are and who everyone else is.

CalRobert 3y ago
Source?
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Ah, I mean, probably nothing that would convince you. If you go looking, you can put the picture together if you have the capability for discovery and the mindset to do that. But I don’t think I could just list some sources where you could go in and sort of in computational fashion go and deduce this conclusion. And I understand that, so for the most part for many people, this conclusion will remain out of reach, because there are it appears no easy set of sources that could satisfy them that they couldn’t say “well that source could be discredited because of this, or clearly, it was written by this person who we can discredit, or by saying they’re sure it was written at a time where people didn’t understand, or that there was political pressure to write such and such a thing or it was done for entertainment or whatever it is,” I mean there’s always arguments you can make against any source. And so I understand and I think it’s perfectly fine for those people that These types of ideas will remain out of reach for them for now until such a day as there is some sort of official confirmation from some important authority figures of these ideas and at that point those ideas will then have a wider audience of acceptance, because there is certainly some people that require not discovery, but authoritative confirmation, I suppose. Yet, if you were the discovering type than what I have said, combined with your innate abilities, surely you already have enough to go put the picture together for yourself to your own satisfaction. If so, my friend, good luck! Bon voyage :)

radu_floricica 3y ago

Just for fun, a possibility is Antarctica. Cold is a straightforward problem to solve - make a fire, throw a fur or a blanket on you. Even the most primitive emerging civilizations ca thrive in cold climates. Heat on the other hand is a lot more complex to solve. You need fully industrial civilization to have air conditioning, and we still don't have anything portable enough. Even today's solution to 40C+ is "drink a lot of water and stay inside". So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature. GPT was full of disclaimers, but suggested a typical heat wave in Late Cretaceous might exceed 50°C (122°F), while parts of Antarctica would be a very comfortable 20°C (68°F). One could easily imagine an intelligent species with poor thermal control that was very well adapted to Antarctica, but could never settle the rest of the world if once every 5-10 summers a heat wave would wipe them out. That was the time of Velociraptors btw, so not a bad stock to evolve intelligence from.

andsoitis 3y ago
> So if you want a large scale industrial civilization that got to Mars but didn't leave large traces, a possibility is that they evolved at a time when Antarctica was friendly (for them), and the rest of the world was above their threshold temperature. Are you arguing that the chances of a large-scale Antarctic industrial civilization that reached Mars is higher than one that reached South America, Southern Africa, or Australia?
- radu_floricica 3y ago
  "reached" vs "colonized". We ourselves reached the moon and will soon reach Mars, but we have no intention of leaving more than a couple of buildings in Antarctica, or deep in the oceans. So yeah, it's certainly possible they've sent a couple of dinosaurs on Mars, but didn't leave a lot of concrete buildings anywhere else.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  In this hypotherical event they possibly spread there too before their complete demise. But I guess we’d have found their traces by now…

FreshStart 3y ago

With biology based tooling? Yes.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nologic01 3y ago

Industrial civilization is today synonymous with large scale environmental transformation. But it took only like a couple of centuries to realise that this process cannot be limitless and need to be converted into a sustainable, circular/renewable pattern for advanced civilization to last not just for a few more decades but hopefully, for eternity. Now, it is conceivable (and kinda scary) to contemplate that earlier versions of humans developed a sustainability consciousness much earlier, before actually engaging industrial level terraforming. The result would have been very limited tangible environmental impact, possibly hard to identify today.

8bitsrule 3y ago

Only recently there is growing evidence that there are ancient artifacts made with precisions/symmetry/accuracy that could only have been approached in the last 50 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyQQRNoQaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAyQQRNoQaE That doesn't explain what happened to the tools, but that might be attributable to rust, death of small numbers of experts by war/famine/cataclysm/disease, and widespread recycling of rare metals and objects. OOP artifact-finders have traditionally been mocked into silence. It was 50 years before Antikythera got serious study, 50 more before it got close attention.

TheCapeGreek 3y ago
This is the comment I was looking for. The ultimate explanation might not be as wild as non-human civilizations, advanced "prehistoric" humans, or aliens. But it does seem that there are some mysteries of construction over the eons that have been lost.
tzs 3y ago
It wasn’t actually technically hard to achieve great precision and accuracy with the technology of ancient times. What is hard is to do it fast, cheaply, and in volume.

jl6 3y ago

All the possibilities seem extremely unlikely, but I’ll add one more just for fun: We currently equate “advanced civilization” with “large scale”. But what if there was a small-scale advanced civilization? Small enough to evade detection using the crude geological tools at our disposal. Imagine a species that was both intelligent (like humans) and immortal (like jellyfish). With unbounded lifespans, they could do work that would take millions of humans - just over a much longer period of time. With no urgent need to reproduce, their population could stay small. Perhaps with long life comes enough accumulated wisdom to exercise restraint. They might even marvel at how a mortal species could ever achieve civilization when knowledge has to be re-learned by every generation. Over millions of years of slow civilization they might have achieved great sophistication and advanced technology, concentrated in one small region that we either haven’t found yet, or which has been subsumed beneath ocean or tectonic plate. Perhaps a changing climate forced them to leave Earth, or to hibernate somewhere, peeking out every few million years to see if the conditions are right for their return.

dr_dshiv 3y ago
No benefit of scale or consumer society; without that, seems hard to get to chip fabs? But maybe writing and some machines?
- jl6 3y ago
  They might have scale, but over time rather than distance.
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    But that doesn’t lead to the efficiency of mass production, specialized labor, Moore’s law, etc.
fatuna 3y ago
How would an immortal society evolve though? Both biologically and socially. If they are anything like humans, you need the old generation to die for new knowledge to take hold.

christkv 3y ago

Reminds me of the book inherit the stars where they find a human skeleton on the moon.

speedbird 3y ago

Toilet bowls

dmd 3y ago

The book "Living Memory" by David Walton (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Memory-David-Walton/dp/108803537X https://www.amazon.com/Living-Memory-David-Walton/dp/1088035...) is about this, and is great.