Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? (theatlantic.com) 457
Adam Frank, writing for The Atlantic: We're used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you're only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization -- things like cities, factories, and roads -- the geologic record doesn't go back past what's called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It's "just" 1.8 million years old -- older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
And, if we're going back this far, we're not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn't make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. [...] Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we'd leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Mr. Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have published their research on the subject [PDF].
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization -- things like cities, factories, and roads -- the geologic record doesn't go back past what's called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It's "just" 1.8 million years old -- older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
And, if we're going back this far, we're not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn't make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. [...] Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we'd leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Mr. Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have published their research on the subject [PDF].
Yeah, dinasaurs (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yeah, dinasaurs (Score:5, Funny)
Layers and layers of compressed shoes.
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taste like crab... look like people...
Nah... Just a race of people who haven't found a cure for crabs.
Re: Yeah, dinasaurs (Score:5, Informative)
We were the first to mine coal, drill for oil, extract deposits of rare earths, and precious metals.
Citation needed.
Also, some things shouldn't go missing. Tracks on the moon
Why would they have necessarily gone to the moon, and even more importantly, why would one of our very few manned missions, or other landing craft, have landed in the right place to have seen those tracks? If we're talking about the scale of millions of years, wouldn't an impact on the moon be an obvious candidate for removing evidence?
orbital satellites
Satellites in a stable orbit for millions of years? The moon is not in a stable orbit when you're talking about geologic time.
undecomposable manmade polymers and alloys
I don't think we've made anything that would be considered "undecomposable" after millions of years. Moreover, even if we could, wouldn't they be buried after millions of years instead of sitting on the surface?
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I don't think we've made anything that would be considered "undecomposable" after millions of years. Moreover, even if we could, wouldn't they be buried after millions of years instead of sitting on the surface?
We've made cut gemstones. I'm guessing most of these would not decompose even after two million years. (I don't know if or how you could distinguish a diamond that was cut a million years ago from one that was cut a hundred years ago, but still).
And according to this chart, (https://www.des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/trash/documents/marine_debris.pdf) glass bottles take a million years to decompose.
Also, I don't know if decomposed plastic fully decomposes, even in geologic time. (No,
Re: Yeah, dinasaurs (Score:3)
The big one that's suggested to indecomposable are ceramics and specifically porcelin . There's a joke amongst paleontologists about a future lost human race that digs us up and the only remaining thing are toilets, leading to much confusion and speculation what sort ceremonial roles they , and the giant necklaces found around them (toilet seats? might have had
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Re:Yeah, dinasaurs (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone should craft and experiment to determine if shoes can become oil...
I'm guessing nobody got the Douglas Adams reference.
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I don't think dinosaurs needed shoes. But they did leave footprints here and there. A great many of them actually. Of course, it's conceivable that they heeded their mother's advice rather better than humans do and took their shoes off when they went wading in the Mesozoic mud.
No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:3, Informative)
Short answer? No. Not on any scale like our current civilization.
Evidence: the coal is still here for us to burn. :P And there's no plastic in lake and sea sediments. :P
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Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:5, Informative)
But where is the space-junk?
You are assuming they existed long enough to reach a space age. They may have just reached the age of steam then collapsed. The fact they they failed to do something about the incoming asteroid would support this clam.
There is another answer too. If they did reach the space age they might have simply been more tidy about space than we are. Plus a 70+ million years is plenty of time for all orbital space junk to fall back to earth.
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:5, Interesting)
But where is the space-junk?
You are assuming they existed long enough to reach a space age. They may have just reached the age of steam then collapsed. The fact they they failed to do something about the incoming asteroid would support this clam.
There is another answer too. If they did reach the space age they might have simply been more tidy about space than we are. Plus a 70+ million years is plenty of time for all orbital space junk to fall back to earth.
Maybe they made it off this rock and we are the descendants of some pets that got left behind to run wild.
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Maybe they made it off this rock and we are the descendants of some pets that got left behind to run wild.
Interestingly enough, this roughly correlates with ancient Sumerian "mythology."
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:5, Insightful)
We already had a steam age around 100 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But people that time had no idea what to do with them, they used them for "spectacular tricks" like "magically" opening huge doors of temples.
If we once had another civilization (there are plenty of plausible reasons, which I will explain in another post) then two thinks are most important to consider:
a) coverage of the ground with dust. The city Troy has about 9 layers of destroyed buildings and rebuild buildings on top of it. And that is a town just 5000 years old. When it was found it was more or less unrecognizable covered under earth.
b) Considering the last "ice age", sea levels where some 120m lower than now. E.g. Australia was nearly connected with Asia via a land bridge. A civilized nation most likely would have many cities at the coast. Today that would be hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the coast line. In water depths of about 120+ meters. And obviously, depending of about what time frame we are talking, last "ice age", or 6 "ice ages" ago, those areas would be covered with perhaps a mile of mud.
No one is searching dozens or hundreds or thousands of kilometers out in the sea in depths around 150m - 60m under a mile or hundred meters of sludge. If you would try to get funding for something like this people would declare you mad. Anyway, if another Schliemann shows up and gets enough funding I could imagine we find something (note: I said imagine, not that I'm convinced or believe there is something)
Here, two nice pictures about coast lines and sea levels: https://www.iceagenow.com/Sea_... [iceagenow.com] Note Japan, Indonesia, North America and Europe, the land bridge closing Spain with north Africa. The second picture has the outline of the coast lines during the last "ice age" as a grey frame around the green land masses.
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No simpler answer to the question than this. Rusty iron, preserved for aeons, not a problem at all. Sure the iron won't be there, but the rust will and in concentrations that would be wildly abnormal. Sure ice age settlements have been buried beneath the seas, after having been crushed and ground in the surf zone as sea level rose. Of course rapid rise, caused by periodic significant methane events, would help bury and preserve artefacts below rapid sedimentary discharge, but no real effort to plot ice age
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Hmm, while I don't know that I'd go as far as to promote the "flavor" or smell....the bearded variety are QUITE fun to play with....
Except their mandatory attached life support units can prove to be troublesome and quickly become not worth the effort.
I highly recommend changing clams often swapping them out before they go bad.
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" The fact they they failed to do something about the incoming asteroid"
ROFL. What could WE do about it?
With enough lead time, we could do plenty. The Chicxulub asteroid was about 10 km in diameter, or about 500 cubic km, and had a mass of a few trillion tonnes. We have surveyed earth crossing asteroids of that size pretty well, and would have months or even years of lead time. A series of nukes could easily knock it off course by a fraction of a degree, which would be enough to miss the earth a few months later.
Space launches take a long time, and a lot of planning and testing, but that is because of all t
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"A series of nukes could easily knock it off course by a fraction of a degree, which would be enough to miss the earth a few months later."
And if you manage to steer what was going to be a near miss into a collision?
You're gonna get sued.
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And if you manage to steer what was going to be a near miss into a collision?
You're gonna get sued.
That makes no sense. If it was on a trajectory that would miss, we would just do nothing and let it miss.
Or are you suggesting that we aren't quite sure how to calculate trajectories? Why would you believe that?
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Budget implies a consequence for spending money and money is predicated on future exchange.
1. There is no budget if there are no consequences for overspending
2. Nobody is going to accept money for work if they knew the end of the world was coming for sure.
So, I suspect the most likely outcome is to keep everything secret which makes it unlikely there will be lots of projects running in parallel because "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
Once the cat is out of the bag, throwing more money at
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:5, Informative)
There would be no secrecy. You maybe able to keep government source like NASA silent. You would still have to deal with all the university astronomy projects. But lets say you managed to keep the university programs secret, then you need to deal with the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers.
An these are only U.S. based projects. There are still 200 countries in the world, most with their own astronomy programs. You are not going to keep a extinction level asteroid secret for long.
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2. Nobody is going to accept money for work if they knew the end of the world was coming for sure.
1. The whole point of the work is to AVOID the end of the world.
2. What are they going to do instead? Take their family to the beach?
3. When facing near certain death, people are more likely to cooperate and work together, than to panic. Look at cities under siege, trapped miners, ships trapped in ice flows, Apollo 13, Flight 93, etc.
most likely outcome is to keep everything secret
No way. It would be impossible, but also stupid. Millions of people in critical industries would need to shift to 80 or 100 hour work weeks. That isn't going to happen
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You'd be better off just ramming a bunch of mass into it.
Nonsense. A standard American W78 warhead has a mass of ~ 350 kg and a blast of ~ 320 kT, or 1.5e18 joules. The same mass with a delta-V of 10000 m/s, used as a ram, would deliver 1.75e10 joules. So an explosion would deliver 10 million times as much energy, and eject far more inertial mass from the surface of the asteroid.
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According to some research, certain types of plastic could last for as long as 50 million years..
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According to some research, certain types of plastic could last for as long as 50 million years..
They should charge extra for that.
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:5, Insightful)
Glass rarely survives intact after even a century of neglect. After millions of years of earthquakes, hailstorms, wild-fires, hurricanes,etc,etc,etc - how would you recognize leaded sand in amongst all the other grains? Metals rust, plastics degrade. Hard stone is about the only thing we could reasonably expect to survive intact.
Mining tunnels would probably be one of the few things we could reasonably expect to find evidence of - and you'd have to be looking really hard to recognize the telltale geologic anomalies distinguishing a tunnel that collapsed millions of years ago.
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:5, Interesting)
Abuse, yes. Neglect, no. We have glass artifacts in perfect condition from the Mesopotamians (1500BC/3500yr). Glass is just a form of stone you know. And, if by "rarely survives intact" you mean down to unrecognizable as manufactured, then you're much, much more incorrect.
Re:No (evidence: coal is still there) (Score:4, Informative)
Why would you assume space junk would stay up for many millions of years? Anything remotely close to Earth would have long since deorbitted due to atmospheric and/or magnetic drag. Even out near geostationary, millions of years of perturbations by the moon's gravity and solar wind could easily have destabilized the orbits.
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"Plastic wouldn't stick around for eons when bacteria are quickly evolving to eat it up."
Plastic is a lot less biodegradable than wood and there is plenty of fossil wood -- some as old as Devonian (380 Million years ago--give or take) if you take the trouble to look for it along ancient-sea margins and in ancient lakebeds. Even if the plastic eating bacteria are efficient and anaerobic, any plastic objects entombed in mud would likely leave distinctive molds in the sediment.
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110 million years ago a dinosaur species with opposable thumbs and binocular vision begins to make stone tools.
109.5 million years ago discover agriculture
109.4 million years ago extensive city building, beginnings of metal use.
109.3 million years ago civilization wiped out due to climate change, or war, or any nu
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Advanced civilisation is curing the Kuru you get from a bowl made from a poorly cleaned out enemy's skull. (We ain't there yet)
Toilets (Score:2)
Creatures are pretty much universally threatened by their own excrement bacteria.
Any civilization would need to deal with shit. Porcelain is a technology ideally suited. It would be discovered and used. Ceramics were used by humans for chamber pots very early in our history.
The fossil record would contain a large number of intelligent dinosaur toilets, if they had existed.
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"the current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drilling sites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface."
Re: Toilets (Score:5, Insightful)
the current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earthâ(TM)s surface (Schneider et al., 2009), and exposed sections and drilling sites for pre-Quaternary surfaces are orders of magnitude less as fractions of the original surface
And yet we keep finding buried and hidden signs of civilisations in the middle of the Amazon, and fossilized remnants of long extinct species in the middle of Africa.
They're also ignoring that any reasonable civilisation would have been likely to build their urban centres in many of the same locations we have; near water. This isn't a cultural preference; it's a huge logistical advantage. Given that we've been doing a hell of a lot more excavating near coastlines than we have in the middle of the Canadian tundra, the odds of finding signs of a past culture are WAY higher than the stated 1%.
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Also near-water locations aren't static over millions of years.
The hidden signs of civilizations in jungles are found because they are on our present geological surface, and can be exposed with LIDAR scans.
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They implied wrong.
1% of the earth's surface is still a hell of a lot of area. It would be a much smaller fraction of the geological record, but we've taken _many_ millions (likely billions) of samples. You only need to find a one part of it.
Re: Toilets (Score:4, Insightful)
We already knew about a lot of the "hidden" Amazonian civilizations, it was knowing where to look that allowed geospatial tools to be used to notice how much larger the scale was. Even if you accept the idea that they were well-hidden, they've only been gone, what, 2000 years or so? What would finding them be like if they had been gone millions of years ago?
Building near water is obvious, but this assumes that water has always been where it is now. Wild rivers change course dramatically on a nearly annual basis, and over millions of years they may have radically changed course in addition to their flood planes accelerating the destruction of any evidence they once existed. Cities on oceans would have had millions of years of exposure to erosion, storms, tidal action, etc.
I'm glad you're so sure of your conclusions. Maybe you could write the paper's authors and share your analysis and relevant research experience.
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Re: Toilets (Score:4, Insightful)
Since they're talking about civilizations that may have occurred tens to hundreds of millions of years in the past, the likelihood that THEIR "near water" is not only not the same places as OUR "near water", but it's unlikely that their "near water" is even on the surface of the Earth.
Do note the part about the oldest surface currently existing on the planet is less than two million years old....
And this ignoring small, recent things like sea level changes. Just in the last million years, sea level has changed by many meters, many times, what with the advance and retreat of the glaciations that are part and parcel of the Ice Age we're still in (yes, technically, we're still in an Ice Age. An Interglacial in the Ice Age, but an Ice Age nonetheless - until the continents rearrange themselves so that the Arctic Ocean isn't, we'll be in an Ice Age)....
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Define civilization? Pottery is one of the first technologies, not absolutely first, but very early.
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Reminds me of a scifi book i just read... (Score:2)
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The rule of headlines (Score:2)
If the headline is a yes/no question, the answer is "No".
If the answer was "Yes", then the headline wouldn't be a question. By making it a question, the headline writer gets to have the headline be truthful while being much more interesting than the equivalent statement.
A Great Game and Movie Idea (Score:2)
There are those who believe... (Score:5, Funny)
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans, that they may have been the architects of the Great Pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to surviveâ"somewhere beyond the heavens!
Re:There are those who believe... (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah... (Score:2)
They were called the Krell. Had this big project, creation without instrumentality. Their own flaws consumed them overnight once they turned on their big machine.
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Antarctica mountains (Score:5, Insightful)
The place to look for civilizations that pre-date us is, of course, Antarctica. We really have not done much exploring of the Transantarctic Mountains. Who knows what might be found there.
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Madness
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Re:Antarctica mountains (Score:5, Funny)
No, there is nothing to be gained by exploring the Transantarctic range. There is nothing but madness in those mountains.
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The place to look for civilizations that pre-date us is, of course, Antarctica. We really have not done much exploring of the Transantarctic Mountains. Who knows what might be found there.
I've got a few fiction recommendations along those lines...
Check out James Rollins' [wikipedia.org] novel Subterranean [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps not his best work, but it was the first one of his I read and got me hooked on him and I've enjoyed his other action-adventure novels, including his SIGMA Force series.
A good military action-adventure read is Matt Reilly's [wikipedia.org] novel Ice Station [wikipedia.org] -- which I'm still hoping someone will make into a movie. I've enjoyed Matt's other novels as well.
Don't think so big. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the more interesting variation of the question isn't, was there a civilization like ours.. industrial, nuclear, "advanced". Most signs point to no... but were there any pre-industrial civilizations that didn't make it and died out? They wouldn't have used up the earth's resources like we have. They wouldn't have produced advanced materials that would survive millions of years. They wouldn't have left a layer of radioactive material to be preserved in the fossil record.
A pre-industrial civilizati
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well if we can still find fossils of dinosaurs many millions of years old that were not "crushed to dust" wouldn't a city leave some trace?
I find both the Drake equation and this hypothesis to be faulty.
The Drake equation outputs whatever you decide to plug into it. It is a fine mathematical example of manipulating non-scientific people since the input to the equation is the supposition. Any faulty supposition gives an erroneous output. We do not know what the input should be. Therefor we do not have an accurate output.
The supposition that an entire city would leave *nothing* when the bones of ancient animals can be found is a faulty presupposition.
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Fossilization of remains is a pretty rare occurrence. Such preservation requires very specific conditions. As another poster mentioned Dinosaurs were around for longer than they've been extinct, tens of millions of years ago. Yet finding new deposits of fossilized dinosaur remains is newsworthy. Then you have things like the Coelacanth that we thought went extinct with the dinosaurs because we couldn't find newer fossils. Turns out Coelacanth's are still around, they just weren't in the right places to leav
We would know it. (Score:4, Interesting)
If there was a global industrialized civilization like ours 1,000,000 years ago, we would know. Even if all their foundations had long been covered by eons and crushed to dust, we would still see the impact of the civilization in our geology. Humans in the last 100 years have permanently changed millions of square miles of millions of centuries of geologic record. If a species before us had that kind of impact, we would know.
Now, if there was some species of dinosaur at some time that lived in small mud-hut villiages, I can't see that we would ever be lucky enough to find evidence of that.
Re:We would know it. (Score:5, Informative)
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The paper addresses this geological impact paradox. For the signal to be obvious in the geological record, it has to be sustained, but for a civilization to persist long enough to be obvious in geological time scales, they have to be in equilibrium with the environment.
If you're talking about bronze age or even iron age civilizations sure. But the summary mentioned industrial civilizations, perhaps something technologically equivalent with ourselves, in which case they're going to use a lot of resources, and that's going to show up both in the weird stuff deposited into that geological layer, but also the stuff they mined from lower layers.
I did a really brief skimming of the paper, they seemed to think that if an ancient advanced civilization was out there so would the e
Paleoclimatologists would have found it by now (Score:2)
We have easy direct evidence from ice cores accounting for last 3 million years and numerous direct and indirect proxies going back at least 2 billion years.
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oh the 2.7 million year ice cores were found at the end of last year, but were they analyzed yet for civilization's traces? I think not
Depend on their tech level (Score:2)
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No, that mining evidence would have been crushed away too. We don't mine that deeply, 2.5 miles is a limit we've never crossed
Re:Depend on their tech level (Score:4, Interesting)
You are quite wrong.
We basically have no evidence for anything we did not explicitly look for.
Consider the last "Ice Age", North America under an ice shield of about 3 miles thickness. Glaciers flowing outward to the oceans. If there was a "modern building" made from concrete and steel it would have been grinded to dust, it would been smeared over hundreds if not thousands of km of landscape. There is not real a chance in hell to find anything from it.
If there was a civilization on the level of ancient Egypt or even steam age UK before the previous ice age, in the area of the ice shield, then absolutely nothing, except lost tools in a cave, would have survived the ice age. I doubt a WWII battle ship, like Prince Eugene, which survived several nuke strikes, swimming, would have survived getting dragged by a glacier 3000 miles far to the sea under giga tonnes of ice.
A modern city like Las Vegas would have been smeared to dust. Nothing left. A city like New York would be somewhere 1000 miles out in the sea in minimum (originally) 150 yards deep water, probably covered by 50 yards of sludge or more (and grinded to pieces as well).
On the other hand, we found Oezi ... a stone age man inside of a glacier when he got spit out he probably was about 10k years inside (but was not on the ground and got grinded)
So were could we find something? Somewhere where there was no ice shield. But then again, about 1000km out in the sea, modern water depth about 50 or 70 meters, 50 to 100 meters under the sludge that has deposited there.
Good luck in searching there, I doubt we even know how to look below such deep levels of sludge, you probably need detonations and acoustic methods like in oil exploration.
Of course there was one (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like they had a triumvirate headed by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. They had some ministers for water (Varunan) or fire (Agni) etc. The head of the cabinet was Indran. Lots of detail of their biographies are available.
Interesting Question - No Simple Answer (Score:2)
I think it's fair to say that more has gone on in terms of civilizations than what we understand today.
There are many ancient architectural and scientific mysteries that suggest greater levels of sophistication than we believe their creators could have had.
Along with that, nature is a lot more destructive than we can imagine - I remember the first time I saw an actual Ulfbrerht sword/made from the finest steel, but reduced to basically flakes in a thousand years which suggests that time will eliminate trace
High Pure ConcentrationsRare Ore (Score:2)
Fort Knox and nuclear power plants should leave behinf
Re: High Pure ConcentrationsRare Ore (Score:2)
Typo. Nuke plants and Fort Knox should leave inexplicably large and pure concentrations of lead, uranium, and gold.
Re: High Pure ConcentrationsRare Ore (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would an ancient civilization use nuclear power?
Because it's a clean, reliable, and safe means of generating electricity for a technologically advanced society to use. Assuming they don't have a bunch of smelly fucking hippies get in the way of developing into such clean, reliable, and safe source of power.
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Jesus Christ, I'm pro-nuke and even I think your post is completely slanted horseshit.
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Jesus Christ, I'm pro-nuke and even I think your post is completely slanted horseshit
Oh I fully admit that it's slanted, it's slanted as hell. But it isn't horseshit. I wish it was but it isn't. In fact if you stretch it out you can almost tie every problem we have today from climate change to wars in Africa right at the feet of the '60s hippies.
You see, the anti nuke movement didn't just stick to protesting nuclear weapons. They protested everything nuclear, fucking thing. From nuclear weapons, to nuclear medicine, right down to peaceful use of nuclear energy. But they didn't limit
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That's REAL tenuous
It's not at tenuous as it looks if you think it all the way through. Sure, I admit that a lot of very iffy and there are a lot of different directions that we could have went with this.
I don't hold any thing against the hippies that just protested nuclear weapons, that was a good thing. Even some of those that protested peaceful use of nuclear power did raise awareness of some of the issues. But what gets me the most is they continued to protest nuclear research.
If nuclear research would have contin
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clean as chernobyl? reliable as three mile island? safe as fukushima?
Three Mile Island was over blown by the media and was caused by human error. The safety systems in place worked exactly as designed. No significant level of radiation was attributed to the TMI-2 accident outside of the TMI-2 facility
Chernobyl was a old style reactor designed in the '50. It was a cluster fuck waiting to happen.
Fukushima actually proves my point. Fukushima was a design from the '70. Since the fucking hippies had shut down all research into new nuclear systems there wasn't anything
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An your just a smelly hippie that has not concept of history.
Fukushima was a originally build General Electric which meant that it was a U.S. designed reactor. You, know one like your smelly brethren decided to protest the design of?
So, yes, if people like you, hippie, had kept your yaps shut and stuck to protesting stuff you know about. Mainly badly made bongs, then Fukushima would have more than likely been ether replace with a better design or build from the ground up with better technology.
So
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You started it, hippie, I just ran with it, hippie. You know how I know you're hippie? Because you where the only one that responded with butt hurt, hippie.
An yes, Fukushima would never have happened if it wasn't for your smelly hippie groupies. So are you an original hippie or one of these new generation of hippies?
The mice are still here (Score:3)
Would be fine if there had been (Score:3)
Beware what you look for.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One word: Glass (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One word: Glass (Score:5, Insightful)
Glass doesn't rust but over time environmental forces will turn glass back into its sandy components.
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Dinosaur bone fossils are not made out of bone.They are made up of a variety of inorganic minerals through a process called mineralization. They are basically rocks.
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Oldest ceramics? Around 20K years. In other words, as long as we've been making it.
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Look up topics like "out-of-place artifacts", tools and manufactured items found embedded in coal rock, or unexpectedly found at great depths during construction or mining.
I'll just leave this [wikipedia.org] here. TLDR, proponents of out of place objects are either seeing what they want to see, perpetuating a hoax, or have an insufficient grasp of relevant scientific or historical topics.
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Yeah, my wife does this.
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nonsense, we know the earth had only single cell life for most of its history. Only 600 million years ago did multicellular life appear. And in 300 million years the earth will be too hot for multicellular life due to expansion of the sun. So, in the universe life might be rare, multicellular life might be rare, and maybe most planets that even had life get roasted before anything interesting evolves. conclusion: we could well be alone
Re:It was an interesting thought... up to this poi (Score:4, Insightful)
no, you spew in ignorance.
any metal tools or walls would be pushed into the earth and crushed over the timescales mentioned. that's how plate tectonics work.
fossils are rare and hard to find, including any kind of tools even for less than one million years.
all the objections people make here are done without even reading the paper, they are addressed
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There's a lot of stuff we produce that doesn't rot or corrode away with the passage of time.
I think you underestimate the effects of Deep Time. If humans all disappeared today, in 10 million years the only things left *might* be some fragments of space probes and a thin geologic layer with some odd chemistry.
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Deep Time? What does that even mean?
Deep time is time scales on the hundreds of millions of years, up to the billions. Time scales so huge that entire contents can be subsided and reborn. Your gold coin tossed in the dirt would be slowly crushed and molded by forces over millions of years. So much so that it would be broken back up into is component atoms eventually.
We still don't know how life got its start on this planet alone. Not to mention other planets. We have a good working theory, but its just a theory. Who really knows. Our
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