Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth Before Ours? | Hacker News Reader

Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth Before Ours?

scientificamerican.com

12 pointsandsoitis12 comments

Bettrriges (sp) law of headlines.

But this is a very interesting related article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...

The anthropocene is a joke (2019)

Thanks fur posting this. A well-written read which pretty much mirrors my own thinking on the human race's place in the great span of Earth's history.

And why [although I agree with many of their aims] I get irritated by the environmentalist slogan "Saving the planet" The planet doesn't need 'saving' by us. It will carry on just fine, whether or not we wipe ourselves out.

I assume that they would have used up the easily accessible fossil fuels - that stuff was ancient even to the dinosaurs. They could have left something on the moon if they wanted a more lasting monument to their existence though.

The easily accessible fossil fuels got to the surface somehow for us. Maybe given enough time and geologic changes more gets exposed. So the coal we started with used to be hidden, and wasn't touched by an earlier civilization.

I don't think they're all that exposed to us as is, and we're constantly wringing out more and more as technology improves, but you have a good point - it's a big planet still and geologically active.

The Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts https://www.liveabout.com/the-most-puzzling-ancient-artifact...

Out of Place Artifacts https://www.discovery.global/out-of-place-artifacts

What is creationist bullshit doing here.

> I looked back into the science-fiction literature to try to find the earliest example of a story featuring a nonhuman industrial civilization on Earth. The earliest I could find was in a Doctor Who episode.“

> That 1970 episode of the classic TV series involves the present-day discovery of “Silurians” [...]

That can't possibly be the first example of that concept in sci-fi, can it? Nothing against Doctor Who, just seems unlikely. Trying to think through the early sci-fi I've heard of or read though and I'm not coming up with anything with that concept.

HG Wells Time Machine might qualify, but it imagined humanoid life following humanity's inevitable decline in the far flung future. I don't suppose that imagining this backwards instead of forwards in time would have been too much of a stretch. The heavy influence of Abrahamic religions up to the time might have influenced early scifi writers to treat the far flung "future" as a safer topic for allegory, metaphor, or thought experiment than the religiously more significant past I guess, especially with the relatively rapid rate of invention and change represented by industrialization.

I've always wondered where the phrase 'silurian hypothesis' came from. I never imagined it came from an ancient doctor who episode.

Maybe some Lovecraft's tales (?). There are several advanced civilizations predating humans, but I can't pin down if some evolved strictly on earth.

We've found dinosaur footprints, but we've not found dinosaur bootprints.

Only because their arms are way too short for anything except grip food.

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