I have a toy hypothesis that once civilization level intelligent life emegerges 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.
hliyan 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
neaden 19 minutes ago [-]
I mean sure, if they somehow didn't have any trade goods that went in land, didn't work with metals enough to do any appreciable mining, and didn't breed any plants or animals enough to change their genetics. Any hypothetical hidden past civilization would have to have been weird in a number of ways to not leave any evidence.
colechristensen 5 minutes ago [-]
Huh?
We have plenty of fossil evidence from, from your example, a million year old hominids. Far more than we would need to expect to see evidence of civilization.
Subduction makes up for a tiny tiny proportion of where coastal land "goes" in any age.
You'd need an enormous set of coincidences for a past civilization of hominids to go unnoticed.
senshan 23 minutes ago [-]
Isaac Asimov's Nightfall [0], but on a longer cycle?
Jokes aside, what is the evidence, beyond "Ancient mystical texts"?
I think there is no evidence for it, but I think the point of the Silurain hypothesis (which the article does not convey well) is that if there were such civilisations we would not know as its unlikely we would find any evidence.
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...)
graemep 18 minutes ago [-]
If whole populations were wiped out and the world was repopulated by a small remnant would that not account for it? Or if an extinct human species had an advanced civilisation?
throw1234567891 11 minutes ago [-]
No. That’s exactly how we know.
markus_zhang 36 minutes ago [-]
However, since we do have plenty of fossils from Silurian, it is hard to believe that none of the advanced technologies never left any hint. Any idea?
jerf 19 minutes ago [-]
Yes. We'd find mines, where the richest veins were mined out and what's left is spread in a pattern that clearly appears to be "a rich deposit but with the best stuff taken already". The mine itself would have long collapsed but would also leave interesting evidence, a pattern of mismatched geological layers that rather than looking like an earthquake or a tectonic upheaval would be something that is relatively clearly shaft-shaped and if followed into the mountain would open out into a pattern that indicates intelligent mining activity as the anomaly is further charted.
Places where there is suddenly a vast collection of foreign rocks from the other side of the world that can't be explained by glaciers.
Radioactivity from nuclear tests that can't be explained by stellar phenomena and leave a layer of weird isotopes and isotope ratios all around the world, as we already have done.
And while we aren't to the point we'd have found this quite yet necessarily, evidence on the Moon where unlike Earth evidence probably would in fact persist for millions of years, especially if it ever attained any scale, e.g., "a large complex of cities" might still leave a visible mark on the surface easily visible to modern satellites and clearly with no other explanation available as to what caused it.
People get stuck on the idea that the only way to determine there was intelligent life earlier is to find a super complicated artifact which obviously can't survive, but there are footprints we've left in the world that are way, way larger than a cell phone or even a major city.
I don't find it hard to believe we've lost entire human civilizations. In fact I'd call it the smart bet. Maybe those civilizations were even a bit more sophisticated than we'd have thought, with maybe an earlier and entirely unknown Iron Age popping up somewhere for some period of time or something. But this is the first major technological civilization this planet has ever seen, even across geological time scales. And those lost human civilizations never reached to the level where they took all the easy resources like we have, because if they had, we wouldn't be able to get them. Some resources we call "non-renewable" do replenish on a few million year time scale, but we also pull lots of resources out of billion-year-old rocks, such as copper mines in northern Michigan which are pulling resources out of pre-Cambrian rocks. Clearly nobody else has been there, at scale.
kergonath 19 minutes ago [-]
> Any idea?
Not really, because none of this passes the smell test if you know even a tiny bit about geology and paleontology. The most solid arguments are religious texts, there is not really any substance other than that.
xg15 59 minutes ago [-]
> or it could’ve been the eruption of a monster volcano, the sort that presently smolders beneath the Atlantic.
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.
randomImmigrant 20 minutes ago [-]
No. The idea is they could have lived and thrived for a few thousand years a few million years ago, then gone extinct.
steve1977 14 minutes ago [-]
That's not what the articles says though:
"Ancient mystical texts hint at earlier creation, the life that preceded the Garden, prequels to Genesis. These incarnations are not reported in the Bible because they are none of your goddamn business, but the evidence is everywhere. Some students of conspiracy believe there was a time when lizard people shared the earth with modern men, the older race dying as the younger emerged from the forest. The last of the lizards were worshipped as gods; these were the deities of ancient India and Greece. The technology—weapons and machines—created miracles. You can see the lizard kings in carvings from Mesopotamia, the oldest historical records, where humans bow before reptile men. You find them again in the Torah, where they appear as Nephilim..."
randomImmigrant 11 minutes ago [-]
That’s not the Silurian hypothesis the astrophysicists put out. That’s the author extending it to fit those myths.
amazingamazing 27 minutes ago [-]
if all dolphins were wiped out could we know that they were ever here from physical evidence?
kergonath 12 minutes ago [-]
We’ve already got fossils of dolphins. Not exactly the species we know today but close enough. We have enough fossils to trace their evolution since their ancestors walked on land. So yes, we definitely would have evidence that dolphins were here.
nkrisc 24 minutes ago [-]
We’ll never know of the existence of most species that ever existed. Fossilization is rare.
amazingamazing 22 minutes ago [-]
right, so how can one easily say this hypothesis is false? "advanced civilization" seems to be strangely characterized. would something a few steps above beavers be advanced enough?
rdiddly 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
jmclnx 51 minutes ago [-]
>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 ?
The claim isn't about the age of rock, but that the surface has churned almost everywhere. Israel does contain the oldest measured continuous surface at about 1.8M yo, but nobody claims to have looked everywhere.
DFHippie 12 minutes ago [-]
How churned is "churned"? Does this mean particular pebbles have have been found to have lain in their current arrangement for 1.8 million years, or just that not much has happened? I expect any arid region far from the poles or mountains and lacking dune fields will have similar patches of inert land. Much of Australia would fit this bill.
Razengan 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
kergonath 15 minutes ago [-]
> Petroleum could be the byproduct of a previous civilization.
How so? We know how it forms, there is no real gap in understanding there. What could lead to the kind of distribution of oil and gas fields we can observe?
Razengan 5 minutes ago [-]
Just fun to think about
I mean, would an ant walking on a highway be able to tell that it's artificial?
throw310822 1 hours ago [-]
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"?
randomImmigrant 16 minutes ago [-]
Actually correct. We have very very few fossils compared to the millions of species that have evolved and gone extinct over 4 billion years.
The fossils we do have are of highly successful species in that geography. It’s a matter of chance, leaving behind a fossil, after all.
And unlike biological matter that can fossilize, industrial structures etc do not. All our manufactured stuff has very short life once it reaches the crust and starts getting compacted.
The more time you add, the better the odds we’d find this evidence lost.
And if this wasn’t a global, but more localized pre-human civilization, the evidence would be thinner still.
Which is why this isn’t a scientific hypothesis really. It’s more showing you the limits of scientific inquiry into the deep history of Earth.
throw310822 2 minutes ago [-]
> It’s more showing you the limits of scientific inquiry into the deep history of Earth.
I think this is it: the point of this argument is to inspire some awe in the listener, making them realise how vast Earth's time is compared to our horizons.
But in practice, the argument is wrong. A dead animal's skin is expected to lasts weeks to months- and yet we have fossilised specimens. A footprint typically lasts hours, and yet we have ones that are hundreds of millions of years old. Even if the expected lifespan of our artifacts is nothing in comparison with these timespans, a small percentage of artifacts will either be preserved or leave recognisable traces- exactly as it happened for soft tissues and footprints. It's extremely naive to think that none of this will leave traces.
gorgoiler 1 hours ago [-]
The counter argument: dinosaurs were around for a staggering amount of time, no pun intended. 165 million years is reasonably long enough to ensure they left behind some nests, bones, and a feather or two. Modern humans have been around for more like 0.02 million years.
The counter-counter argument is that while we’ve been here for a comparative blink of an eye, we’ve left behind 4 orders of magnitude more stuff than just nests, bones, and a feather or two.
nwah1 40 minutes ago [-]
Yea, but if humans went extinct tomorrow, very little human artifacts would remain after millions of years. Indeed, most would be gone well before that. How much stuff from the 18th century still remains, in percentage terms?
neaden 6 minutes ago [-]
There would still be many signs. Dug up mines, metal alloys that don't exist in nature along with refined metals in quantities they don't exist, animal and plant species we bred along with all the ones we made extinct.
bensyverson 10 minutes ago [-]
Unless it was burned, melted, decomposed or crushed to dust, it's all out there or in a landfill somewhere.
I do find it difficult to believe that we would not leave enough fossil and mineral evidence for future paleontologists to find. I get that the surface will churn, but layers of rock routinely become exposed, revealing the geological history of the area. No tea cup shards, no impressions of rusted cars in the mud, no concentration of metal in strangely rectilinear formations that suggests skyscrapers?
nkrisc 16 minutes ago [-]
Very few things would in fact remain, you’re correct. But we’ve also created radioactive elements with half lives of many millions of years.
While there would probably very little direct evidence of humans after millions of years, there would probably be at least some anomalous evidence someone could find.
throw310822 42 minutes ago [-]
Indeed. Did a rapid check on T-rex, just as an example.
Was around for max 3.6 million years. Max population at any one time must have been around 20k individuals. We have about 150 skeletons.
So current human population is 400 thousand times the maximum T-rex population at any one time. A few decades are enough to produce more human individuals than the entire T-rexes history. We also have the ability to go (and die) pretty much anywhere, so there will be human skeletons in every crevice, depth and environment on Earth. We also produce an absolutely staggering amount of artifacts of all kinds, from plastic straws to giant tunnels and artificial caves. There are zero chances an advanced civilisation on Earth won't be aware of us in 400 million years.
T-A 5 minutes ago [-]
>We also produce an absolutely staggering amount of artifacts of all kinds, from plastic straws to giant tunnels and artificial caves.
tunnels and artificial caves in a few million years at most as they are compressed by the weight of the rocks above them ("tunnel squeezing").
fnord77 30 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
If humanity vanished today, in 1 million years almost all of our artifacts would be gone or burned under miles of subduction.
In 10 million years there would literally be nothing left.
kergonath 8 minutes ago [-]
> If humanity vanished today, in 1 million years almost all of our artifacts would be gone or burned under miles of subduction.
That is completely incorrect. We have sedimentary rocks from 100 M years ago on the Earth’s surface right now, that never underwent any kind of subduction.
throw1234567891 4 minutes ago [-]
Bollocks. We find fossils millions of years old right on the surface.
DFHippie 7 minutes ago [-]
> under miles of subduction
Subduction only occurs at plate boundaries and is not nearly this fast. Continental plates float on top like foam and do not get subducted. It's the oceanic plate that is created at mid-ocean ridges and gets subducted at the margins.
api 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 15 minutes ago [-]
How can a galaxy spanning civilisation fail. If life can spread to other worlds, unless you get FTL, how could you end all life in a galaxy
As such it seems impossible for life to have reached interstellar travel anywhere in the Milky Way before at most a few million years ago, otherwise we would see it.
Which is weird because life surely can’t be that rare in the entirety of space time.
Of course the galaxy could be teaming with non interstellar life, but once you reach mankind’s level of sentience and technology it dormant seem a massive jump to interstellar, and once that happens there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Razengan 37 minutes ago [-]
> time is as vast as space.
This is what I always say to "Why haven't we found any aliens yet??"
Hell, we wouldn't even have known about the existence dinosaurs, lifeforms on THIS VERY PLANET, if we hadn't chanced upon their remains.
meindnoch 49 minutes ago [-]
Joe Rogan tier pseudoscience.
Rendered at 15:34:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.
We have plenty of fossil evidence from, from your example, a million year old hominids. Far more than we would need to expect to see evidence of civilization.
Subduction makes up for a tiny tiny proportion of where coastal land "goes" in any age.
You'd need an enormous set of coincidences for a past civilization of hominids to go unnoticed.
Jokes aside, what is the evidence, beyond "Ancient mystical texts"?
[0] http://www.myths.com/pub/fiction/science-fiction/Asimov/Nigh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Places where there is suddenly a vast collection of foreign rocks from the other side of the world that can't be explained by glaciers.
Radioactivity from nuclear tests that can't be explained by stellar phenomena and leave a layer of weird isotopes and isotope ratios all around the world, as we already have done.
And while we aren't to the point we'd have found this quite yet necessarily, evidence on the Moon where unlike Earth evidence probably would in fact persist for millions of years, especially if it ever attained any scale, e.g., "a large complex of cities" might still leave a visible mark on the surface easily visible to modern satellites and clearly with no other explanation available as to what caused it.
People get stuck on the idea that the only way to determine there was intelligent life earlier is to find a super complicated artifact which obviously can't survive, but there are footprints we've left in the world that are way, way larger than a cell phone or even a major city.
I don't find it hard to believe we've lost entire human civilizations. In fact I'd call it the smart bet. Maybe those civilizations were even a bit more sophisticated than we'd have thought, with maybe an earlier and entirely unknown Iron Age popping up somewhere for some period of time or something. But this is the first major technological civilization this planet has ever seen, even across geological time scales. And those lost human civilizations never reached to the level where they took all the easy resources like we have, because if they had, we wouldn't be able to get them. Some resources we call "non-renewable" do replenish on a few million year time scale, but we also pull lots of resources out of billion-year-old rocks, such as copper mines in northern Michigan which are pulling resources out of pre-Cambrian rocks. Clearly nobody else has been there, at scale.
Not really, because none of this passes the smell test if you know even a tiny bit about geology and paleontology. The most solid arguments are religious texts, there is not really any substance other than that.
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.
"Ancient mystical texts hint at earlier creation, the life that preceded the Garden, prequels to Genesis. These incarnations are not reported in the Bible because they are none of your goddamn business, but the evidence is everywhere. Some students of conspiracy believe there was a time when lizard people shared the earth with modern men, the older race dying as the younger emerged from the forest. The last of the lizards were worshipped as gods; these were the deities of ancient India and Greece. The technology—weapons and machines—created miracles. You can see the lizard kings in carvings from Mesopotamia, the oldest historical records, where humans bow before reptile men. You find them again in the Torah, where they appear as Nephilim..."
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
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.
How so? We know how it forms, there is no real gap in understanding there. What could lead to the kind of distribution of oil and gas fields we can observe?
I mean, would an ant walking on a highway be able to tell that it's artificial?
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"?
The fossils we do have are of highly successful species in that geography. It’s a matter of chance, leaving behind a fossil, after all.
And unlike biological matter that can fossilize, industrial structures etc do not. All our manufactured stuff has very short life once it reaches the crust and starts getting compacted.
The more time you add, the better the odds we’d find this evidence lost.
And if this wasn’t a global, but more localized pre-human civilization, the evidence would be thinner still.
Which is why this isn’t a scientific hypothesis really. It’s more showing you the limits of scientific inquiry into the deep history of Earth.
I think this is it: the point of this argument is to inspire some awe in the listener, making them realise how vast Earth's time is compared to our horizons.
But in practice, the argument is wrong. A dead animal's skin is expected to lasts weeks to months- and yet we have fossilised specimens. A footprint typically lasts hours, and yet we have ones that are hundreds of millions of years old. Even if the expected lifespan of our artifacts is nothing in comparison with these timespans, a small percentage of artifacts will either be preserved or leave recognisable traces- exactly as it happened for soft tissues and footprints. It's extremely naive to think that none of this will leave traces.
The counter-counter argument is that while we’ve been here for a comparative blink of an eye, we’ve left behind 4 orders of magnitude more stuff than just nests, bones, and a feather or two.
I do find it difficult to believe that we would not leave enough fossil and mineral evidence for future paleontologists to find. I get that the surface will churn, but layers of rock routinely become exposed, revealing the geological history of the area. No tea cup shards, no impressions of rusted cars in the mud, no concentration of metal in strangely rectilinear formations that suggests skyscrapers?
While there would probably very little direct evidence of humans after millions of years, there would probably be at least some anomalous evidence someone could find.
So current human population is 400 thousand times the maximum T-rex population at any one time. A few decades are enough to produce more human individuals than the entire T-rexes history. We also have the ability to go (and die) pretty much anywhere, so there will be human skeletons in every crevice, depth and environment on Earth. We also produce an absolutely staggering amount of artifacts of all kinds, from plastic straws to giant tunnels and artificial caves. There are zero chances an advanced civilisation on Earth won't be aware of us in 400 million years.
Plastic will be gone in ~1000 years,
https://www.activesustainability.com/environment/waste-plane...
tunnels and artificial caves in a few million years at most as they are compressed by the weight of the rocks above them ("tunnel squeezing").
If humanity vanished today, in 1 million years almost all of our artifacts would be gone or burned under miles of subduction.
In 10 million years there would literally be nothing left.
That is completely incorrect. We have sedimentary rocks from 100 M years ago on the Earth’s surface right now, that never underwent any kind of subduction.
Subduction only occurs at plate boundaries and is not nearly this fast. Continental plates float on top like foam and do not get subducted. It's the oceanic plate that is created at mid-ocean ridges and gets subducted at the margins.
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.
As such it seems impossible for life to have reached interstellar travel anywhere in the Milky Way before at most a few million years ago, otherwise we would see it.
Which is weird because life surely can’t be that rare in the entirety of space time.
Of course the galaxy could be teaming with non interstellar life, but once you reach mankind’s level of sentience and technology it dormant seem a massive jump to interstellar, and once that happens there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
This is what I always say to "Why haven't we found any aliens yet??"
Hell, we wouldn't even have known about the existence dinosaurs, lifeforms on THIS VERY PLANET, if we hadn't chanced upon their remains.