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?
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...
In otherwords this is a supernatural, not natural hypothesis.
In other words, that’s more of a religious rather than scientific hypothesis.
It’s cool to have inspiration from where-ever, the whole point of religion and art is that they don’t need to be scientific.
But one really shouldn’t confuse non-scientific inspiration with actual science. Confusing the two leads to arguments like earth is 6000 years old and god just faked all the fossil evidence etc.
I get what you're getting at, but I don't think it's so clear cut. Religion is more about organizational beliefs than just beliefs. Many parts of science are pretty far fetched in terms of us only knowing a bit with a very tightly constrained perspective (humans sitting on Earth with limited technology in the Solar System in the Milky Way) but making leaping conjectures. So in fact, science and religion have some shared analogues. (C.f. Paul Feyerabend.)
Certainly, the hypothesis you replied to is incredibly far fetched. But I don't think it's religious. It's more fantasy.
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.
This is the topic of the paper, I think the authors settled on climate markers and radiation from elements like plutonium-239 as among the very few pieces of evidence that might still be around on that time scale. They also observe that there has likely been enough exploitable energy in the form of oil, natural gas etc. to support an industrial civilization since about 250 million years ago.
It's chemically inert like aluminum (after oxidizing, e.g. foil), so the processes acting on it are mechanical and subject to probability.
Some amount is going to be abraded, buried, etc, but you only need a few pieces to remain. Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.
Yet we can barely imagine a society without wheels, but some human cultures in South America didn't get that idea.
Assuming that every civilization invented glass is very tenuous.
Dinosaurs presumably fossilize very badly compared to many artificial artifacts, like buildings made out of machined stone.
I don't think they would fossilise. It's a process specific to the porosity of organic tissue. They might be preserved, but the Cambridge paper explains why it’s unlikely they would last for a hundred millennia or more.
Why? The Cambridge paper gives a scientist’s reasons for that not being the case being supposition.
Pompeii looked remarkably fresh when dug out.
The point stands, most things don’t survive all that long (in the grand scheme of things). Occasionally, the conditions are exactly right to preserve something, but there is a limit.
However, that happened very early in the history of the solar system, likely before life had a chance to start.
Those things also are all in the probability.
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.
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.
Perhaps, I suppose. I don't know enough about the physics and control of the abrasive techniques referenced. Though, I'm always in favor of emphasizing plausible variables that weaken a hypothesis.
What are the chances that abrasion work like that, hypothetically, was so specialized and unknown in 10,000 BC that Gobekli Tepe's high relief sculptures are the sole examples of that period and the earliest examples of such large and truly technical work? Nevermind the artistic skill that is reflected.
Cro Magnon was carving anthropomorphic stone statuettes in the region of modern Germany in 40,000 BC.
Food for thought: the Tell archaeological sites that dot the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Haran area (Gobekli Tepe), contain the most concentrated evidence of human technological firsts that seems to exist. Including evidence of earliest metalsmithing tech, if I remember correctly. See Yarim Tepe for a jumping off point.
So the situation is:
a. Stone carving predated Gobekli Tepe by at least 30,000 years b. The earliest known stone carvings were not in the region of Gobekli Tepe. Implying that stone carving culture and tech was known far outside of Mesopotamia, from an extremely early period. c. Gobekli Tepe's specific accomplishments are the first evidence that we have of such advanced sculpture and megalith construction skill. d. Metalsmithing arose in the immediate regions and cultures that included the area of Gobekli Tepe.
So on one hand we have widespread tech suggested to be responsible for the first evidence of highly technical stonework that is limited to one area in this early period of pre-history, and on the other we have specific advanced tech (metallurgy) that is best for such technical and large scale work arising out of that same area.
It could be a coincidence, but arguably it would be a large one.
Add time to that, so that your project can have a scope of generations, passing down knowledge gained from a lifetime of doing this particular thing, the results become unsurprising even.
Amazing, inspiring and ingenious but also unsurprising.
I guess industrialization has made lot of people oblivious to this fact.
Whatever metal objects from ancient civilizations we know, are either grave goods (swords of warriors etc.), or were found in shipwrecks etc., or were found in destroyed settlements, plus a few accidentally lost (fell into a well etc.). But most metal objects get recycled.
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
There is so much cosmic space that exists between any two historical artifacts. There's definitely room for a multitude of completely unpreserved civilizations.
On-the-nose reading that comes to mind, Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin... very anomalous book / quick entertaining read...
For example, when you are debugging code, you usually have an idea of where the error might be. So the process looks like: print at line 43, is everything as expected? yes, so print at line 48 and try inspecting values at the suspected code path in search of errors.
The same detective-like work (which he calls question and answer) is used by historians and archaeologists to reconstruct historical narratives. If you don't have specific questions in your head and a way to falsify them while trying to answer a question, you likely aren't going to learn as much.
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.
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.
neurons, however, fossilize very poorly indeed; after death they typically liquefy within days, losing all of the structure that could betray how they functioned
the particular shape of our industrial civilization is based on mass production in centralized facilities of durable goods that are identical to high precision (deep submicron precision in the case of this cpu). clearly this is not the only possible way to produce massive abundance; the rain forest or even the corn field does not work this way, but produces much more detail than tsmc does
much of the durability and fossilizability of our conventional technology stems from its stupidity. to remain standing, a two-story house would once be made with meter-thick walls, while modern hollow brick with plaster and reinforced concrete reduces this to perhaps ten solid centimeters between indoors and outdoors. more frugal balloon-frame designs consist entirely of metastable materials like wood and steel, materials which will lose their structure if left exposed to air and water, either suddenly in a fire or gradually over decades. but even a balloon-frame house is wasteful and inefficient compared to a five-meter-tall stand of bamboo
remaking the planet for your convenience is much cheaper if you can avoid spending resources on durability and fossilizability which don't benefit you during your lifetime
could you get there without a transitional phase of making lots of thick, solid objects out of materials that are stable on geological timescales? probably, but maybe not if your uplift path starts with fire instead of math...
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.
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.
I just find it hard to believe there to be not a single trace of anything.
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?
What’s that?
What do you postulate were the power sources such an industry would have used?
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 . . .
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.
This could lend itself to the idea that one person made it, and if nothing whatsoever like it had ever come before you have to figure it took an awfully long time for one person to create something this complicated single-handedly.
Could be a number of years between iterations in a continuous improvement process that adds up to something like a life's work.
Maybe also could be passed down to a subsequent individual like a very specialized craft, and build technology across generations.
While I don't think that the following implies that robots existed, to my above point recall that Talos of Greek Myth is a robot.
Which does imply that the concept of such tech was shared across the entire culture. Which, in turn, suggests that related tech is less likely to be the product of one mind.
Extrapolating automatons only requires having basic concepts of mechanical automation, which the Greeks very much had.
The idea of space flight predates powered flight by centuries.
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.
Well that's my point. Not that the greeks had some forgotten industrial revolution, but that archeological records are very limited, and we were a stroke of dumb luck away from never discovering the antikythera mechanism. It raises the question of if we almost missed this, what else did we miss. Not just in greece but elsewhere too.
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.
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.
I also assume that these species, often invasive, would outlast the civilizations that introduced them. So you could probably also infer some of this by looking at descendant populations.
If we lacked progenitors of those species in some places, we would just call it a temporary gap in the fossil record, of which we have many.
We're pretty good at inventing explanations. Eventually these gaps might start looking conspicuous, but I'm not sure if we're at that point yet.
Eventually there might be enough separate lines of evidence to refute these possibilities, but no one aside from those on the fringe would entertain the possibility that this was evidence of an advanced culture without overwhelming evidence.
Percentage of total biomass is more interesting. The more (and bigger) bodies, the higher the likelihood of being fossilized.
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.
Im reaching here, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_gap
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...
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.
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.
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.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.
0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superworms-eat-an...
"Rinke and his colleagues are not suggesting that superworms should be released into landfills or polluted landscapes to munch through mountains of plastic"
Sounds like they invented the magic wand.
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.
We might find some old equipment from an elder spacefaring species. If we don't find anything, maybe we should leave some human monuments out there so the next civilization can know about us.
> The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.
Casting iron(copper) is relativly easy and powerful.
Experiment with hot things in fire and you will discover it after a while.
"Why couldn’t they have use some natural form of biodegradable materials?"
Like bones for bows and spears? Humans did that, but metal is apparently more effective and useful.
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.
Again, you can do this to shape virtually any rock. Stonemasons don't do this today because it's excessively annoying and slow. It's not a coincidence that khafre enthroned is a royal piece for a wealthy and powerful pharoah.
Most people will have some familiarity with emery cloth/sandpaper, which are basically the same principle. We don't even need to look at fancy egyptian statues. Carnelian beads were a common trade item across the Ancient near east and Egypt made this way. It's not magic.
I think we just don't comprehend, as mentioned above, how much time and effort could be allowed for back then. I'm sure 100 people could create a near perfect vase given 30 years to work on it (random example).
This idea that its just not feasible because it is hard ignores existing architecture that we can date in places like China and India, but cannot easily replicate in the US or other spaces because the generationally developed skill and method is not available.
This precision occurs in hard materials like stone, in massive scale as well as in soft materials like cottons and silks which weren't replicated in Europe in previous or current times.
How absurd! Skill and craftsmanship can get you far, but they will not allow you to craft with such precision that it's imperceivable to the human eye, how could they even verify their efforts? The video, while long, presents dozens of well structured arguments with strong evidence, your dismissal comes off as extremely arrogant and foolish in comparison.
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?)
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.
If my hypothesis is that pottery will look like this after being buried for 2,000 years, how do I test that? I don't have 2,000 years before I need to publish.
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.
In fact most earthly rock is relatively young.
Plate tectonics was such a clever idea. So obvious now, I mean just look at a map of the world of course continents were once one, you can see where they join, like a jigsaw puzzle.
It astonished early western explorers finding seashells on mountains!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossil...
the main crux of these arguments always depends on how it's hard to prove something didn't happen without exact historical evidence for every single organism in every single recorded geologic period, which is a terminating thought to actually holding a rational conversation. OK, cool, then we also: live in a simulation, are observed by aliens or influenced by aliens, move to alternate realities every time we sleep, etc. wow, so "interesting"!!
Not only that, they would have had to achieve complete perfection because we haven’t found a single trace.