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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

If there was a civilization on Venus anything like our current civilization on Earth, I expect there would still be evidence of it, even in that hostile environment. If nothing else, there'd probably be unnatural formations of ground from mines or freeway construction or whatever.

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The oldest known undisturbed area of the Earth's surface is only about 2 million years old

It turns over very fast in geological time

https://www.livescience.com/3542-oldest-surface-earth-discov...

A fair point. I wasn't thinking about tectonic subduction, which would hide pretty much all evidence that anyone was there. Though I think that article is talking more about having the same surface exposed to the air for a long time, without being worn down by weathering or covered in silt. You could have an area covered in dirt or partly eroded away, and still be recognizably an artifact of civilization for a long time. I don't know if such things would last billions of years though.

Also, I expect weathering and erosion would happen a lot faster on Venus, what with the high heat and extreme winds that are more like a flowing ocean current than what we'd think of as "wind".

Have a look at the Silurian Hypothesis. If one can examine things very closely, literally on the ground, then the window of detectability might extend to hundreds of millions of years, even billions perhaps. But from orbit, there's not so much hope of detection after a million years

And yet we have fossils from half a billion years ago. "Oldest surface" is not a good measure for how long evidence can survive.

Life After People was a good series about this. IIRC, the only thing left of humanity after some appreciable amount of time (say a couple millenia), would be the pyramids. Evidence might be on Venus, but we might have to look thoroughly to find it.

A couple of NASA scientists published a paper on this a little while back and apparently we’d have a hard time even detecting a previous advanced society on earth. Pretty mind blowing. I often wonder if Venus had an industrial society that set off a runaway greenhouse effect.

Not if a resurfacing event destroyed that evidence.

But can we even see it through that thick atmosphere? Even probes we'd send down get corroded by the acid.

Lava seems to destroy everything. Tectonic plates shifting would eventually turn everything over.

If the Venusians ever became atomic, and then space faring, then the best way to find evidence of them is probably in their ancient technology in space. Maybe dead satellites floating around the sun in a stable orbit. Or floating around in a geosynchronous orbit around Venus itself.

Or maybe they even sent spacecrafts to other outer planets, like Earth or Mars. I would look there, to find ancient alien Venusian technology.

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