So we have microbial fossils from 3.5 billion years ago, fossilised 300 million year old skin, bones from almost 200 my ago, even actually soft tissue inside a fossilised bone from 70 my ago. Ah, footprints too, the most unsubstantial matter of all: pure shape. That's in addition to all the million other fossils that are so common we hardly care: shells, small bones, etc.
And someone is saying there could have been an entire advanced civilization 400 million years ago, large and powerful enough to cause climate change, and that no traces of it would possibly be left? Like, billions of individuals, cities, factories, metals, concrete, mines, wells, roads and bridges and tunnels, stone sculptures!, plastic, waste dumps, farms, agricultural land, billions and billions of artifacts of all materials, most of them entirely artificial. All gone because "nothing resists 400 my" and, "oh btw, check this dinosaur footprint and this fossilised piece of skin, how cool"?
There's a seam of volcanic mountains that runs down the center of the Atlantic, but nothing that resembles a supervolcano. The supervolcano complex under the Pacific is one of the largest known in the solar system, however.
So there could have been this hypothetical civilization 55 million years ago already. And they've only just disappeared (if they did) 10'000 or so years ago? Without a trace?
Also, no, a conspiracy cannot be the answer to a question we've not yet asked. The word has a clear meaning, it requires people to conspire to hide something from you.
This is a good thought experiment to show how time is as vast as space.
400 million years ago is as distant as the stars. The Earth was a different planet then, in a sense.
It’s also yet another Fermi paradox answer. Even if our civilization lasts for millions of years, that’s a blip. We are searching both space and time and both are incomprehensibly vast.
>The oldest place on the earth’s surface—a stretch of Israel’s Negev Desert
I do not understand this statement, I thought an area in Quebec was around 3 - 4 billion years old. I looked, seems Australia may have the oldest area:
But I say the article could be true, but the only issue I have is the large dinos. I would think they could be an impediment to any organized settlements.
One other thing, didn't most of our fossil fuels come from the Carboniferous era ?
I don't think we have to go that far back. Plate tectonics, submersion and weathering does a good enough job of wiping the slate clean off the surface of the Earth, that any evidence of earlier hominids developing pre-industrial, coastal civilizations say, a million years ago, would be now under the crust. What we consider civilization is about 5000 years old, so it's not inconceivable that the cycle might have occurred multiple times during geologic time spans. Perhaps this is the first time civilization was not interrupted and made its way through to a technological civilization.
Are you sure? what about fossils and other remains? So far there is zero evidence that there was an advanced or non advanced civilization. Unfortunately this nonsense is the bread and butter ot pseudo archeologists.
I can't speak to dinosaur people, but the population genetics of our own DNA reveals that there were never many humans on the planet till recently, so that rules out any very large human civilization. (Unless they genetically altered themselves to hide the evidence! Ahaaa...)
Petroleum could be the byproduct of a previous civilization.
Also, just as we "engineered" animals and plants through selective breeding, previous animals/plants could have been the results of selective breeding by a previous civilization: There'd be no way to tell just as there'd be no way to tell our "tampering" a few million years in the future.
Interesting topic, but (to immediately veer off of it) I really wish he would find another word and stop misusing "conspiracy." The word has already been through hell.
That was my first reaction as well. The author seems very confused about it.
He starts off defining it as something that is unknown or secret, and more specifically, he goes on to say, a secret "kept by a nefarious elite". I suppose secrets are usually associated with conspiracies, but a secret is not a conspiracy and conspirators don't have to be an elite.
And then he says that in this case, it's the Earth itself that's conspiring alone. This contradicts all the dictionaries I consulted, which define it to involve multiple parties, which makes sense considering the etymology.
I have a toy hypothesis that once civilization level intelligent life emerges it never disappears barring the planet it inhabits being vaporized by some unfortunately directed GRB or some similar catastrophe.
Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.
Time Machine movie reboot did this in opposite direction into future decently well
dude wind hundreds of thousands of years into future, sands of time, etc. modulo two warring biological descendants of humans not full diff species tho
The fact there is still coal(and oil) in the ground pretty much rules out any "advanced" industrialized civilization that came before us.
I also use the Carboniferous Period as a metric as to why "Advanced alien life" isn't more abundant (and I believe it should be factored into the Fermi equation)...
All those trees growing, soaking up sun, dying and just laying there to be compressed and buried without anything to decompose them, and then humans using them like solar batteries to power civilization (i.e. burning the coal), is one of those million-to-one things that enabled the human race to develop beyond basic society.
We needed all that coal and oil (and gas) based power to get to the point - industrially and technologically - where we could even build solar panels or nuclear to replace them, so its not like you could start from first principals and jump straight to modern power generation either.
The odds that the same sequence of events - fungus and bacteria not having the tools to decompose lignin (or whatever the alien equivalent is) - to happen on an extra-solar planet is ... pardon my pun ... astronomical :D
(yes, I used a dash to separate ideas in a sentence, deal with it...)
one thing I enjoyed about The Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky: the spiders learned to build "computers" out of ant colonies by hijacking the ants ability to generate and respond to chemical stimuli.
not that it makes me believe in the silurian hypothesis, but i'm always reminded of that whenever i start to think "well it couldn't possibly be done any other way".
This article is a weird mash-up of an actually very interesting paper [0] with random personal slop like i've asked my rabbi, consulted my kabbalah-initiated friends and for the fun mixed it up with some fashionable ancient text (Mahabharatha)
So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?
> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies. Thus, we hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.
I think the article greatly underestimates our archaeological capabilities. We can identify five mass extinctions in the last 500 million years, so why should such a civilization simply be overlooked? Of course, we wouldn't find abandoned ruins, but the idea that an industrial civilization wouldn't leave behind any detectable artifacts is practically impossible. Perhaps there were a few primate species before that could make fire and hunt with bows and arrows, but certainly nothing industrial and hardly any extensive agricultural culture.
From author and druid John Michael Greer's essay, "The Next Ten Billion Years"[1],
"One hundred million years from now:
The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.
A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon."
Funny, as I was reading the original article, I was thinking that anything left on the moon would survive being recycled by plate tectonics.
It seems like reaching the moon isn't such a stretch for any technological civilization, so the lack of preexisting artifacts counts as pretty definitive for me.
Are you saying that things on the moon are less likely to survive because of meteor impacts and radiation?
If so I think you misunderstood a few things. The earth is hit by far more meteors than the moon because of its stronger gravity well. You see the moon covered in craters not because it's hot more often, but because there is no erosion or plate tectonics to erase them. You see basically all the craters over a billion years on display.
Also, radiation doesn't just randomly destroy things. It's harmful to biology for sure, but a chunk of metal on the moon isn't going to be much affected by the level of radiation present. Like the craters, we would expect it to remain for a very long time. Radiation can make metals brittle, but without atmosphere it's unlikely to turn to dust unless someone were to go touch it.
thanks :D clearly not astronomer. doesnt the atmosphere kinda make a lot of stuff that hits the earth burn up though? i -imagine- the moon get hits also by small rocks really hard where those burn up in our atmosphere
To recognize the possibility, one has to grapple with incredible scale and deep time: In roughly 300 million years (1/10th of the time life has been around), the Appalachians split off from the Atlas; the Atlantic Ocean first started splitting open; uplifts underneath North America pushing the West up from the seabed and caused the rivers to carve millions of acres of sandstone landscape down, leaving towering plateaus, cliffs, and eventually river chasms. Over the 3 billion years before that, what was carried away like so much sediment? What was subsumed by subduction boundaries?
On a much more recent timescale, one of the dominant theories of the emergence of civilization places the ancestors of the Sumerians in a stupendously fertile valley at the bottom of what is now the Persian Gulf, eventually flooded during the retreat of the glacial maximum and covered in Tigris & Euphrates sediment. It could be the very origin of regional flood and primordial garden myths. But it's all buried.
Silurian Hypothesis, SETI, a widely help motivation for space exploration, much of sci-fi: all posit a high-ish rate of life (or intelligent life) invention, because the alternative is terrifying. I/we need/enjoy this, but it's fiction. When humans reason about the rate, they're extremely biased by what they want to be true.
+1 in general that anthropic bias is strong, but it cuts both ways, even in relatively hard nosed statistical models (@see Drake equation vs Rare Earth hypothesis). Truth is, there are a ton of factors we just can't observe (yet?) that play a big part. For example, since the rare earth hypothesis was published, we know a lot more about exoplanets, and earth-range size in the habitable zone of a stable star and galaxy appears much more common than we thought. But we don't know if plate tectonics are really required, or gas giant "vacuum cleaner" planets int he same system, or even oxygen. But we do know that the minimum value for intelligent species is at least 1, because we exist.
For me, it's carl sagan's "invisible dragon" comparison that sticks in the back of my head. If there's intelligent life out there (or in earth's ancient past) but there's no physical way to detect or know it... Then like the invisible dragon in mu garage, it's the same as not existing.
Maybe we'll develop new techniques and gather new evidence, but until we figure out how to bend spacetime for FTL anything, or find clear evidence, we should act as if it isn't/wasn't there.
So TFA says that 55M years ago there was a climate fluctuation that looks similar to the anthropocene one. Good start. But interpretation of ancient stories across cultures is practically the definition of anthropic bias. We have to wait until there is real evidence that the temperatuee bump was dragonfire and not my heating system acting up, to ascribe cause.
41 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadAnd someone is saying there could have been an entire advanced civilization 400 million years ago, large and powerful enough to cause climate change, and that no traces of it would possibly be left? Like, billions of individuals, cities, factories, metals, concrete, mines, wells, roads and bridges and tunnels, stone sculptures!, plastic, waste dumps, farms, agricultural land, billions and billions of artifacts of all materials, most of them entirely artificial. All gone because "nothing resists 400 my" and, "oh btw, check this dinosaur footprint and this fossilised piece of skin, how cool"?
I know about Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, etc, but I haven't heard about a supervolcano below the Atlantic. What's that referring to?
So there could have been this hypothetical civilization 55 million years ago already. And they've only just disappeared (if they did) 10'000 or so years ago? Without a trace?
Also, no, a conspiracy cannot be the answer to a question we've not yet asked. The word has a clear meaning, it requires people to conspire to hide something from you.
400 million years ago is as distant as the stars. The Earth was a different planet then, in a sense.
It’s also yet another Fermi paradox answer. Even if our civilization lasts for millions of years, that’s a blip. We are searching both space and time and both are incomprehensibly vast.
I do not understand this statement, I thought an area in Quebec was around 3 - 4 billion years old. I looked, seems Australia may have the oldest area:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220126-is-the-pilbara-t...
But I say the article could be true, but the only issue I have is the large dinos. I would think they could be an impediment to any organized settlements.
One other thing, didn't most of our fossil fuels come from the Carboniferous era ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
Dash out of context
Jokes aside, what is the evidence, beyond "Ancient mystical texts"?
[0] http://www.myths.com/pub/fiction/science-fiction/Asimov/Nigh...
Also, just as we "engineered" animals and plants through selective breeding, previous animals/plants could have been the results of selective breeding by a previous civilization: There'd be no way to tell just as there'd be no way to tell our "tampering" a few million years in the future.
He starts off defining it as something that is unknown or secret, and more specifically, he goes on to say, a secret "kept by a nefarious elite". I suppose secrets are usually associated with conspiracies, but a secret is not a conspiracy and conspirators don't have to be an elite.
And then he says that in this case, it's the Earth itself that's conspiring alone. This contradicts all the dictionaries I consulted, which define it to involve multiple parties, which makes sense considering the etymology.
Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.
dude wind hundreds of thousands of years into future, sands of time, etc. modulo two warring biological descendants of humans not full diff species tho
I also use the Carboniferous Period as a metric as to why "Advanced alien life" isn't more abundant (and I believe it should be factored into the Fermi equation)...
All those trees growing, soaking up sun, dying and just laying there to be compressed and buried without anything to decompose them, and then humans using them like solar batteries to power civilization (i.e. burning the coal), is one of those million-to-one things that enabled the human race to develop beyond basic society.
We needed all that coal and oil (and gas) based power to get to the point - industrially and technologically - where we could even build solar panels or nuclear to replace them, so its not like you could start from first principals and jump straight to modern power generation either.
The odds that the same sequence of events - fungus and bacteria not having the tools to decompose lignin (or whatever the alien equivalent is) - to happen on an extra-solar planet is ... pardon my pun ... astronomical :D
(yes, I used a dash to separate ideas in a sentence, deal with it...)
not that it makes me believe in the silurian hypothesis, but i'm always reminded of that whenever i start to think "well it couldn't possibly be done any other way".
So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?
> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies. Thus, we hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.
[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
"One hundred million years from now:
The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.
A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon."
1. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...
Though I'm kind of disappointed the last section did not end with fusion power, stellar migration and artificial intelligence...
It seems like reaching the moon isn't such a stretch for any technological civilization, so the lack of preexisting artifacts counts as pretty definitive for me.
additionally radiation is much more so decay is accelerated a lot? (might be wrong but i think so?)
If so I think you misunderstood a few things. The earth is hit by far more meteors than the moon because of its stronger gravity well. You see the moon covered in craters not because it's hot more often, but because there is no erosion or plate tectonics to erase them. You see basically all the craters over a billion years on display.
Also, radiation doesn't just randomly destroy things. It's harmful to biology for sure, but a chunk of metal on the moon isn't going to be much affected by the level of radiation present. Like the craters, we would expect it to remain for a very long time. Radiation can make metals brittle, but without atmosphere it's unlikely to turn to dust unless someone were to go touch it.
On a much more recent timescale, one of the dominant theories of the emergence of civilization places the ancestors of the Sumerians in a stupendously fertile valley at the bottom of what is now the Persian Gulf, eventually flooded during the retreat of the glacial maximum and covered in Tigris & Euphrates sediment. It could be the very origin of regional flood and primordial garden myths. But it's all buried.
For me, it's carl sagan's "invisible dragon" comparison that sticks in the back of my head. If there's intelligent life out there (or in earth's ancient past) but there's no physical way to detect or know it... Then like the invisible dragon in mu garage, it's the same as not existing.
Maybe we'll develop new techniques and gather new evidence, but until we figure out how to bend spacetime for FTL anything, or find clear evidence, we should act as if it isn't/wasn't there.
So TFA says that 55M years ago there was a climate fluctuation that looks similar to the anthropocene one. Good start. But interpretation of ancient stories across cultures is practically the definition of anthropic bias. We have to wait until there is real evidence that the temperatuee bump was dragonfire and not my heating system acting up, to ascribe cause.