Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

https://nautil.us/could-an-industrial-civilization-have-predated-humans-on-earth-352964/

by dnetesn • 3 years ago

177 268 3 years ago

simmerup• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Tyrannosaurus Rex existed closer in time to humans than it did to Stegosaurus.

Time is stupid big.

SubiculumCode3• 3 years ago

fucking hell, yeah it is.

DannyB2• 3 years 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?

SubiculumCode3• 3 years ago

The article indicated that surface turnover could have removed that evidence.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years 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.

topspin2• 3 years ago

And yet we have 3.4 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils.

jboogey• 3 years ago

A great Atlantic article explaining how current human civilzation might appear in a fossil record in the distant future https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...

tarikjn4• 3 years ago

Not pre-human but challenging the understood modern human timeline of industrialisation — We have not found the tools, but we may have found the products; in the form of stone-based vases that archeologists attribute to the Early Egyptian Period but are believed to be from much earlier, and would have required tools that have not been discovered yet. The channel UnchartedX make a compelling argument about this hypothesis: https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ

lumost2• 3 years ago

Pre-history is tough. Outside of written accounts and a few major cities cited in particular environments - there isn’t a lot of evidence about what humans were doing for 100k years before the Roman/Chinese empires formed. Even Egyptian history is pretty spotty.

We know there were civilizations in North America such as the Mississippi River valley mound builders - but our knowledge tops out at “they existed”. It would not surprise me if agrarian civilization rose and fell multiple times due to climate change.

FollowingTheDao• 3 years ago

You were assuming that their industrial civilization would look anything like ours. Why do they need nuts and bolts? Why couldn’t they have use some natural form of biodegradable materials?

AlotOfReading5• 3 years ago

What a silly video. The argument he's making is called a unilinear teleology. History is not an arrow-line march from less advanced to more advanced, and it's incredibly common for the apparent workmanship of artifacts to "regress" as styles and intentions change over time. Just look at all the people who complain about modern art because "classical takes more skill".

Also, there's essentially nothing you can't do with stone given primitive tools, sand, and a shitload of talent/time. One thing about ancient people is that they had all of these in abundance. Making arguments from the position of "they couldn't have done this with the tools they had" is almost always wrong because it's coming from a modern perspective of how tedious and uneconomical it'd be to do it today.

WalterBright4• 3 years ago

I recall TV shows saying that the Egyptian pyramids could not have been constructed with Egyptian technology, so it must have been space aliens. The same for the closely fitting stones in Inca buildings.

It doesn't take advanced technology to do either of those things.

My favorite one was pi is there in the relationship between the pyramid base length and its height, and the Egyptians had no notion of pi. Again, space aliens! But if the Egyptians used a wheel 1 cubit in diameter to mark out the base, and the height was in cubits, then there's pi.

(What's a cubit?)

barelysapient• 3 years ago

I like to wonder what undiscovered fossils exist below the oceans that cover 70 percent of our planet.

blueflow4• 3 years ago

Look up about continental vs ocean crust, ocean crust is younger and has a shorter lifetime. You have better chances finding maritime fossils on land.

BuyMyBitcoins4• 3 years ago

I figure that any industrialized civilization would have left indirect evidence of itself by mucking up the fossil record with introduced species. We intentionally and unintentionally introduce plants and animals far outside their natural range.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange

You would see some species inexplicably take on a worldwide distribution, or see species suddenly turn up on far away landmasses with no good explanation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorioactis

The link above is fascinating, but I do not think it is evidence of any past civilization. This probably happened naturally, but it does seem exceedingly rare. If there were a past industrial civilization there would probably be tens of thousands of examples like this one.

naasking4• 3 years ago

How many introduced species are there as a percentage of all existing species? This seems like an important number to calculate the probability that we might have missed such an introduced species given the fossil record we have.

It could also be that introduced species are less likely to be found in the fossil record for whatever reason.

Then again, maybe we have found such a thing but haven't recognized it for what it is due to missing context.

SubiculumCode3• 3 years ago

Interesting thought. However, one of the ideas that the article brings up is the extreme undersampling problem of fossil records. Its conceivable that a 300 year blip->catastrophe would be missed entirely in the fossil record.

redandblack• 3 years ago

Obligatory Pratchett reference - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)

greatfilter250• 3 years ago

worldwide distribution

Why does an industrial civilization need to be global?

Our industrial civilization appeared extremely quickly, perhaps in the past 300 years, but it happened to appear within a preexisting global trade and travel network. An industrial civilization which existed for a few hundred years, outside the context of such a network, might not ever see the need for one.

tetris11• 3 years ago

You would see some species inexplicably take on a worldwide distribution

Im reaching here, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_gap

getmeinrn• 3 years ago

Random thought, but if we extrapolate the path we're on in terms of biodegradability and sustainability, it's not ridiculous to assume that a very advanced version of us would have developed the technology and legislation to ensure that all products biodegrade safely within X years.

blueflow4• 3 years ago

This doesn't undo all the stuff that already is in the ground and rivers everywhere.

mc322• 3 years ago

And retroactively apply that technology to all the previous garbage they produced and their predecessors produced too?

Sounds like they invented the magic wand.

JackFr• 3 years ago

One hundred million years is a long time for a screwdriver.

hooande• 3 years ago

This assumes that their technology would be similar to ours. They could have used biological mechanical parts, made from plant or animal material. They could have had radically different theories of mechanics or construction that better fit the state of the planet at their time.

In general the statement "They couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" limits what we look for and how we look for it.

notahacker• 3 years ago

The statement "they couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" is a straw man though

The actual question the article posits is "Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humankind?", and so it seems logical to take evidence of industry as a starting point to answer that question. A mere couple of hundred years of human industry has moved vast quantities of matter about, created many new types of molecule, demonstrably altered the climate and filled sediment beds with objects far more eyecatching and likely to be preserved than the dinosaur feathers and skin prints and footprints we've found fossils of. An industrial civilization need not regard combustion engines as the most useful power source, prefer wheels to gliders or think straight lines look cool, but it does need to be characterised by some sort of industry.

A hypothetical species of dinosaur that spent its life writing beautiful poetry, studiously avoiding dropping its organic tools anywhere they might be fossilised and generally being content enough with its life to not try to remake the planet for its convenience might even be more intelligent and cultured than us, but it wouldn't be an industrial civilization.

dheera• 3 years ago

Maybe, but on a planet that's full of rocks one would think they would have at least organized a FEW of the rocks into structures of sorts.

SiVal• 3 years ago

If they were so advanced that they left the ordinary material world behind, then anything is possible. Otherwise, they would probably be like us in the sense that their in-use technologies would span every level from lowest to their own highest. As our tech improves, we continue to use the wheel and shaped stone and conrete, iron, steel, glass, knives, ceramics, etc. We still use things that are pulled out of the ground (like our distant ancestors) while also using the latest AI algos.

So, a very wide range of "industrial civilizations" would be expected to leave behind lots of basic natural materials in artificial forms. Their basic natural materials would be about the same as ours because they are found in nature and not very diverse (compared to high tech pharma chemicals or digital algos), so we ought to be finding lots of evidence of pre-human low(ish) tech, even if they were quite high tech.

thrashh3• 3 years ago

That’s possible that they don’t have the same materials as us but they would have the same problems.

Take plastic or metal. Their main draw is that they do not decompose or degrade. There are a billion problems that can be solved when you have a material that does not naturally degrade or decompose.

So even if this civilization did not use plastic or metal, I find it hard to believe they didn’t come across a problem that needed a stable non-self-destructing material, which would then have been left behind for us to discover now.

It’s not feasible to build anything advanced if all your materials naturally decay.

It’s true that there are fewer decomposing organisms the farther back you go, but you have to go way way back to a point where the chance of intelligent life existing is pretty low.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

Eh, industrialization is heavily dependent on metallurgy.

What is the word industrial? Metallurgy, mass production, interchangeable parts, and the steam engine. Materials, tools, efficiency techniques, and energy.

The other aspect of industrialization is the sheer scale of it.

Honestly the only thing that comes close IMO is a lot of the cellular mechanisms. It uses materials in novel ways, efficient protein devices, and ATP energy. But I don't think it would scale to macro levels.

Maybe you could squint and look at ant/insect colonies?

andsoitis5• 3 years ago

biological mechanical parts

What’s that?

fuzzfactor2• 3 years ago

"They couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us"

Well if you go back to the dawn of Homo Sapiens that's quite a ways back, but then you could rearrange that concept to say "they couldn't have been that uncivilized because they were exactly like us."

Oh, wait a minute . . .

marginalia_nu3• 3 years ago

To be fair, there are entire human civilizations we know have existed that we barely have archeological evidence to make sense of. We know they had language, culture, technology and we've found shells, bones and rubble.

That, and the fact that we've found one antiktythera mechanism and nothing like it before or since raises questions. It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

tyg13• 3 years ago

To the contrary: the fact that only one ever was found, to me, suggests that it was the work of one brilliant mind whose work was not understood or continued by their culture.

giantrobot2• 3 years ago

It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

A culture didn't create it. A person or team created it. The Antikythera mechanism was built before the ISO 9001 specification so its documentation may not have survived long past its creators lives. The high precision manufacturing required, in an era before high precision was all that precise, suggests the mechanism was likely a rare artifact. It was dumb luck it was found in the first place.

There's likely many complicated ancient devices lost to time because they weren't widely available or described in documents that have persisted. You literally run a search engine for marginalia that may not be popular or widely known. It wouldn't take much to knock a lot of that content off the web and be lost to history.

mc322• 3 years ago

It's one of those "prove a negative" but with the enthusiasm of flat-earthers. Is it technically possible there could have been an isolated population that evolved and emerged and then got engulfed by a supervolcano or was taken under by a sudden asteroid impact or ... and all traces erased? We can think and work out such scenarios, but they are not likely at all.

MR4D• 3 years ago

If it were more than 65 million years ago there would be no evidence due to plate tectonics destroying all evidence. Still could be on the moon or another planet though.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

We still have fossilized bones that old and older. And even if they had corroding tools there would likely be cast fossils proving their existence.

flangola7• 3 years ago

We have fossils of cyanobacteria from 3 billion years ago. There's plenty of dinosaur fossils that are 100+ million years old. We definitely could have found something.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

There would be no evidence on the surface of the earth, but just as there's characteristic fossil layers in the ground there would be evidence in the sediment. Right now about 30 billion tons of concrete are used by our species every year. If there were industrial civilizations of that scale, you'd have a whole stratum of very obvious artificial origin between the rocks.

Also some leftovers of the nuclear industry. Enriched Uranium does not occur in nature but U235 has a half-life of about 700 million years. So remnants of our nuclear activity will be detectable for a long time.

analog31• 3 years ago

Any such civilization would have to have been configured to leave no traces for us to discover. Russell's Teapot comes to mind.

thrashh3• 3 years ago

That species would have to be completely united and able to collude without a single disagreement.

Not only that, they would have had to achieve complete perfection because we haven’t found a single trace.

markus_zhang• 3 years ago

The only possibility is...they sank into deep ocean. But then it's going to very unlikely that nothing surfaced for the last 20k or so years. So you have to throw a valcano or a large meteor on top of them, which would require even more proofs.

mrangle8• 3 years ago

There are megaliths under water, off of the coast of Israel. Not natural rock formations that look like such, but confirmed and clear megaliths of the rock circle type that is all over Europe as well as in Israel and elsewhere in the Near East.

mrangle8• 3 years ago

Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago?

Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it?

For example.

And we don't need to go nearly that far back to notice lack of ancient metal that had to exist, given what it accomplished.

Metal disintegrates fast. Megalithic evidence, at minimum and across history, implies a woefully incomplete archaeological record.

EdwardDiego2• 3 years ago

Serious question, do we know that metal tools were used for those carvings?

From what I recall, until iron/steel was invented, it was pretty much abrasion as bronze was not hard enough to chisel nearly every stone.

civilitty• 3 years ago

Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago?

Mostly flint. It's a seven on the Mohs hardness scale which is harder than unhardened steel tools.

Archaic humans have been making flint tools for millions of years.

Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it?

Where to begin? Abri Castanet 35 kYa [1]. Venus of Laussel 25 kYa [2]. Roc de Sers cave 17 kYa [3]. There are countless other examples - most of them don't event have wikipedia pages.

Oldest known engravings by an Erectus are about 500,000 years old so it's been in the family for hundreds of thousands of years.

[1] https://www.archaeology.org/issues/63-features/top-10/270-to...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Laussel

[3] http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/roc-de-sers.htm

ses1984• 3 years ago

You’re looking for evidence of a specific thing, which is not the same as looking for evidence of anything.

zakki• 3 years ago

OOT but same vibes, this same reasoning is used by Creationist as well. If evolution happened, why don't we find more and more fossils of the intermediate form? Until now we only found final result of the evolution. And some hundred million years animals still exist, i.e. Coelacanth.

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

Not sure what you're talking about here. There have been many thousands of fossils found at various stages of evolution. Human evolution alone has a wealth of examples, and this is not new:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossil...

coredog64• 3 years ago

There’s a Sci-Fi series that explores a technologically advanced ice age civilization that built with water/ice and hydraulics. The current protagonists couldn’t figure anything out because all that was left was tiny bits of corroded metal.

safety1st3• 3 years ago

I think the argument goes that if the civilization was sufficiently old and short-lived, no we probably wouldn't find any fossilized evidence. For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago. Humans have only been industrialized for around 200 years. If you imagine a dinosaur civilization that's industralized for 1,000 years before it kills itself off, they still hung on 5 times longer than we have so far and yet we probably wouldn't have found fossils of their wrenches. (Not to mention that our archaeology is concentrated on places where humans lived which have little correlation to whatever might have been a good site for a dino city 100 million years ago.)

The authors of the Silurian hypothesis paper believe it's unlikely that there was an ancient non-human industrialized civilization. But they think if there was we wouldn't find its fossils. We might need to look for other markers like climate variances, radioactive materials or artifacts on the moon. Maybe some civilization arose, got stuck in the bronze age or early industrial tech for a thousand years, didn't generate those signatures, then died out. If our fossil record isn't thorough enough to find them then that possibility seems hard to disprove.

Wikipedia has a bit more detail on the Silurian hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

And the actual paper is here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

benj111• 3 years ago

But we don't have any evidence for anything approaching civilisation, fair enough humans have been industrialised for 200 years, but they've been building to that point for 10s of 1000s of years.

colordrops2• 3 years ago

Another argument goes that they transcending to technology and form beyond what we can comprehend, covered their tracks, and left us be because we aren't interesting or to avoid interfering in our development. Perhaps our perception through the 5 senses and an understanding of reality as a physical universe of spacetime is just a short phase between being an animal and being a multidimension being.

ethbr02• 3 years ago

In order for a civilization to be undetectable, you'd essentially bound terms in a terrestrial version of the Drake Equation [0]

You'd need a civilization that did not produce long-lived technological signatures (e.g. glass panes), that did not have a large number of individuals (i.e. produce remains), that did not substantially alter their environment (i.e. leave geographic markers), AND that did not consume easily available resources (e.g. oil/gas or metal ore).

Which is to say... possible, but not very likely.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Equation

cubefox8• 3 years ago

For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago.

Dinosaurs presumably fossilize very badly compared to many artificial artifacts, like buildings made out of machined stone.

Simon_O_Rourke• 3 years ago

Lets not forget all their detritus and trash too - as well as any industrial waste... that stuff would have shown up long long ago if it in fact existed.

ElFitz• 3 years ago

I recall someone asking on World Building StackExchange what aliens could find in a few tens of millions of years or so if the human race were to disappear today [0].

The answer was "not much", aside from discrepancies in metals distribution, with intriguing concentrations of iron oxyde, nuclear waste, or gold.

I am aware it certainly isn’t the most scientific or authoritative of sources, but they made interesting points.

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117267/hum...

defrost• 3 years ago

As of last Tuesday, the mark of human indistrial and technology activity on Earth is officially marked in the geological layer:

Welcome to the Anthropocene, Earth's new chapter (phys.org)

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-anthropocene-earth-chapter.htm...

    Since 2009, a cloistered band of hard-rock geologists and other scientists have toiled on a mission of great consequence.

    On Tuesday they will deliver the last of their findings—the location of ground-zero for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch borne of humanity's outsized impact on the planet.

How the weight of the world fell on one geologist's shoulders

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-weight-world-fell-geologist-sh...

    Zalasiewicz pointed to an "embarrassment of riches" of evidence locked in ice cores, sediment and coral skeletons: microplastics, forever chemicals, traces of invasive species, greenhouse gases, and the fallout from nuclear bombs.

Proof humans reshaped the world? Chickens

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-proof-humans-reshaped-world-ch...

    When aliens or our distant progeny sift through layers of sediment 500,000 years from now to decode the Earth's past, they will find unusual evidence of the abrupt change that upended life half-a-million years earlier: chicken bones.

pvaldes• 3 years ago

What aliens could find in a few tens of millions of years

Much more than we are finding. The earth would be a mess with plenty of really puzzling events.

Wild tomatoes with narcissus and flounder genes for example.

Sudden extinction of entire groups of animals and plants in only a few thousands of years

Radioactivity holes and missile holes fossilized with metals in the bottom

Cities, and cemeteries in particular, would be a geological nightmare waiting for an explanation. A collection of grey granite from Canada carved in lames of uniform thick, polished for no reason and accumulated in a point. At 20 meters away another set of lames of Chinese black granite and 30 meters away a lot of yellow marble only known from Italy. All wrapped in asphalt, gravel, glass and concrete. Dumpsters would also be very strange places with plenty of plastics and chemicals that shouldn't be there.

Gems also. Diamonds carved in impossible shapes all ending in a more or less conical tail in the whole planet. Lots of things shaped like a heart. Strange collections of elements with unique properties of the periodic table found always together: Mixed minerals found near, gold, silver and platinum, at tens thousands of Km far away from its known mines. As they are often saved in fireproof boxes, would had survived miraculously in burnt areas.

Implants. Titanium fossils shaped like the femur of an animal (and always the same animal) and porcelain teeth would be enough to show a civilization and signal us in charge of it.

ekianjo2• 3 years ago

What do you know about the preservation of metal in fossil layers over millions of years?

pragmatic• 3 years ago

Read the article.

RecycledEle2• 3 years ago

I would not say there has never been a single ancient thing discovered. There are many anomalous findings in archeology.

Here are a few examples: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument * Parts of the Egyptian Pyramids seem to have been cut with circular saws. * Places in the ancient world seem to have been nuked, including the ancient city of Sodom. * Some ancient maps are amazingly accurate, when they should not have know the shapes of land masses.

I'm NOT saying any of this proves the Silurian Hypothesis. I looked into some of these claims, and realized how hard it is to be an archaeologist. The amount of stuff left behind is small, and you can never be sure who did what to it over the centuries.

Artifacts are not stored in hermetically sealed containers until archaeologists dig them up. Instead, artifacts mix with their environments for centuries. This mixes up the carbon and makes carbon dating iffy at best.

I classify archaeology as a pseudo-science.

tanuki• 3 years ago

Aren't there lots of testible hypotheses in archaeology though? I get that you're saying that a lot of explanations feel speculative, but it feels a bit far to say the field itself is incompatible with the scientific method.

jfk13• 3 years ago

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

Scramblejams2• 3 years 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

leafmeal• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

ianburrell• 3 years 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.

wincy• 3 years ago

Russia has essentially an inexhaustible supply of trees in the taiga if people were determined enough. The scope of the number of trees is absurd, with estimates that 18 percent of the worlds biomass is in the taiga.

whaleofatw2022• 3 years ago

Enough to start bit how far would we get?

As a cynical young adult I always giggled at the 'coke express' train cars that flew by on the railroad tracks but nowadays I know what that means what it's used for and how we get it.

I.e. so many of our modern industrial processes still depend on coal, and the alternatives often require huge energy inputs themselves.

local_crmdgeon• 3 years 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.

1270018080• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

StackOverlord2• 3 years ago

Evidence for a Large Anomalous Nuclear Explosions in Mars Past J.E. Brandenburg

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2015/eposter/2660.pdf

rationalist• 3 years 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.

Pompidou2• 3 years 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-the...

joe_the_user• 3 years ago

And J.E. Brandenburg's arguments are treated here:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Brandenburg

xoa2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

If we weren't already tracking those decommissioned satellites, would we know they were there?

xoa2• 3 years 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.

melagonster2• 3 years ago

A small object can easily kill everyone in spacecraft. unfortunately, we should track most of garbage in our orbit.

nanreh• 3 years 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.

coldcode• 3 years ago

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

It's pretty funny.

placesalt2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

placesalt2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Ctrl F Silurian

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• 3 years 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.

WalterBright4• 3 years ago

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

Eisenstein2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Eisenstein2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I mean... culling, am I right?

chiefalchemist• 3 years 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.

TMWNN• 3 years ago

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

rdevsrex• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

yreg2• 3 years ago

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

xwdv• 3 years 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.

yreg2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

mrangle8• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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...

GuardianCaveman• 3 years ago

I think they mean not necessarily human beings but any advanced civilization.

javajosh• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Ekaros2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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_cz6• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Probably

rkagerer• 3 years ago

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

anothernewdude• 3 years ago

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

keepamovin2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Source?

keepamovin2• 3 years 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_floricica2• 3 years 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.

andsoitis5• 3 years 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?

lacrimacida• 3 years 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…

seszett3• 3 years ago

We ourselves would likely try to colonise an exoplanet similar to Earth around a nearby star before we even think about settling on Mercury.

I think they have a point on heat management, too much heat can easily make a place totally uninhabitable while cold can practically always be managed.

radu_floricica2• 3 years 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.

Zardoz84• 3 years ago

You know that there were various civilisations in hot climates long before the industrial revolution: Aztecs, Maya, Egypt, Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, Mali Empire and many others in Africa, America, south Asia, etc...

FreshStart• 3 years ago

With biology based tooling? Yes.

nologic01• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

jl63• 3 years 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_dshiv3• 3 years ago

No benefit of scale or consumer society; without that, seems hard to get to chip fabs? But maybe writing and some machines?

jl63• 3 years ago

They might have scale, but over time rather than distance.

fatuna• 3 years 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.

jl63• 3 years ago

Humans haven’t significantly evolved over the time it took for civilization to emerge. Humans evolve socially as they get older. Who can say what the psyche of such an alien species would be? Maybe we can add “willing to consider new ideas” to the list of assumptions that would have to be true for this scenario to play out.

christkv• 3 years ago

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

speedbird• 3 years ago

Toilet bowls

dmd• 3 years ago

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

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

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