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Comment by cheese4242 | Hacker News Reader

To take it even a step further, there could have been advanced industrial civilizations on earth before us: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-f...

I don't think it likely, but like the article says, we wouldn't have any clue if there were.

Likewise, if our civilization collapsed, and in the far future another advanced civilization arose on earth, they wouldn't have a clue about us if enough time had passed.

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Toilets!

Ceramic toilets can last for millions of years in the geologic record. Our midden heaps will contain billions of them. That could be enough to ensure our place in archeological history.

The Porcelain Throne culture. I wonder what sort of mystical/religious purpose they'll think we might have used them for!

Too right. If future archeologists are anything like current ones, toilets will be described as a “ritual object”.

It probably had something to do with collecting the blood of all our animal/human sacrifices.

I am pretty sure there were no industrial civilizations and the reason is pre-industrial availability of raw resources. Things like coal, oil, tin, etc were basically lying around on the surface of the earth.

Wouldn't that make an ever stronger case for a previous civilization? An advanced civilization would build things, use them day to day, and eventually they would just collapse again on the surface of the Earth.

That's a great question and google hasn't yielded any useful answers. Would the materials we have extracted and refined such as metal, return to some sort of easily mineable state in a million years?

lmilcin raises a great point that many surface deposits of material that help "jump start" a civilization would have been consumed, but would the decay of our civilization return those same materials back into the surface, ready for the next round of civ to extract it?

Even today, most of the iron we produce is recycled. I could certainly imagine that a post-apocalyptic civilisation would get basically all of its iron by scavenging from the giant hulks of rust we'd leave behind.

I'd imagine elements that end up being used in very small quantities would be trickier. Reclaiming materials from phones isn't economically viable even with our tech today.

So how do you exactly propose that pieces of coal materialize themselves along with prints of plants that vanished hundreds of millions of years ago? Or how the oil materialized from thin air.

I think any industrial civilization will not hesitate to use things that are lying on the ground. It is the definition of "industrial" to be efficient with what you are given.

It is possible we had other "types" of civilizations the way we had a dozen ancient civilizations exist akin to false jump starts like some kind of experiments but never reaching industrial level.

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