Silurian Hypothesis: Were There Civilizations on Earth Before Humans? (2018)
sci-news.com
sci-news.com
Maybe we should be looking for something else. Some different kinds of signs.
If -we- wanted something to outlast us, what would we build?
What can preserve information across literally millions, even billions for years?
Life.
The genomes, the bird songs, the designs some fish draw in the sea floor [0], that gland in octopuses that basically cause them to self-destruct within a short lifespan, but removing which allows them to continue living just fine?
Maybe even the growth rings of trees.
Could there be any clues encoded in those patterns? Is there no hint of genetic modification (I hesitate to say "intelligent design" because of its loaded implications related to religion) similar to what we ourselves are doing now?*
* (and have been doing for thousands of years, via selective breeding etc.)
Regardless, it's another interesting question: if another civilization bred and domesticated, and possible modified, other species 200 million years ago, what genetic traces would be left in the genome of current life?
So you'd look for things like sudden changes to respiratory complexes that seem to require a large leap, or essential amino acid codings, and try to correlate those changes via genetic clocks with the kind of thermal events described in the article. One thing that came into existence around the PETM was mammals, with all of their novel adaptations.
Still, it could be (is more likely to be) correlative, not causative - or causative in a different way - a changed environment could exert extreme pressure on forms, causing some novel mutations to take hold.
Life will find a way.
This paper on "biological SETI" made some noise when it came out and then disappeared, literally gone from arxiv, perhaps because the crackpot smell is too strong? I am curious if it merited either debunking or further study but didn't see much of either. If there is a signal there, it seems more plausible that prior inhabitants put it there than ET.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190925044740/http://arxiv.org/...
On the other hand, multiple correlating indicators could give a pointer about where to look. Alas, it's likely such a place either deep underneath the ocean floor or that it's buried under kilometres of rock.
Wait what? has this been tried? Can we make long living octopodes by just doing a small operation?
What possible code could it be trying to execute? Possibly something as fundamental as seeking the answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZLtcTZP2js
— The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: Deep Thought and ‘Earth’
what we've learned until now is that, if such an information processing device would have existed then any sufficiently advanced civilization would have been using it to mine crypto currency.
If a future intelligent species would dig around a hundred million years from now, they'd see traces of us in the form of a radioactive sediment layer.
Isn't the earth crust constantly moving, so new petroleum reservoirs are constantly formed and other destroyed as dispersed liquid hydrocarbons move and migrate in reservoirs?
So even if a civilization depleted its reserves, then new reservoirs would be available once the crust has moved enough?
On the point about oil, the paper points out that oil deposits have been created cyclically over large time scales:
"At least since the Carboniferous (300–350 Ma), there has been sufficient fossil carbon to fuel an industrial civilization comparable with our own"
There were three anoxic events, where the ocean was completely depleted of oxygen, in the Cretaceous period 132, 120 and 93 million years ago.
"these [carbon] releases often triggered episodes of ocean anoxia (via increased nutrient supply) causing a massive burial of organic matter, which eventually became source strata for further fossil fuels. Thus, the prior industrial activity would have actually given rise to the potential for future industry via their own demise. Large-scale anoxia, in effect, might provide a self-limiting but self-perpetuating feedback of industry on the planet."
Although, as the paper notes:
"Alternatively, it may be just be a part of a long-term episodic natural carbon cycle feedback on tectonically active planets."
This is only when you are expecting a civilization as current one. How about those who weren't dependent on technology ever - they may have chosen a route to discover about the nature, the universe and themselves drastically different from that of ours and hence we, enamored by a false sense of superiority, fail to even contemplate of such possibility let alone any chance of discovering an evidence of their existence.
What’s that?
By comparing genomes, you can construct a philogenetic tree of known animsls, and thier hypothetical ancestors the instances where a mutation popped into being making a species and it's defendants distinct.
You can slot genomes from near extinct species and amber trapped insects into this tree and confirm where they sat.
So genetic engineering would look like - fish genes suddenly appearing in the dog family tree or butterfly genes turning up in a plant.
This would be pretty detectable with just a computer and open data. Has someone done it?
We'll Return, After This Message by John Walker
or left :)
If 'Dinomen' existed, we may see it in the other dinos or plants via domestication. If they were carnivores, we may see dinos bred to be fatter or larger. If they were herbivores, then we'd see certain plants that were bred for food, and maybe dinos bred for labor or as pets. One of the issues with domestication is controlling the breeding/birthing cycles of animals. Chickens and pigeons tend to be easier to do this with because they are dinosaurs and lay eggs.
We see this in our own mammalian species like cows. Their bone structure is (slightly) different from wild cattle and certain breeds have massive horns because us humans just like it. Dogs too, we've made a lot of breeds of them that all look very different. I'd imagine that a lot of the world should be covered in cow and dog bones of a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
Come to think of it, the ceratopsids (like triceratops) have a large variety of head crests, there were tons of them about, and they were pretty fat and muscular. Hmmm ...
I think assuming that all civilizations must live in a concrete jungle like us is as likely to be wrong as to assume that all aliens must look like us, or that all life in the universe must only exist in a temperature range of 0-60'C
If your species only needs to spend half a day foraging for food and the other half lounging under a tree contemplating the nature of existence, why bother with the grind of technology when you could jump straight to the endgame?
Civilization is purely a state of mind. A species that achieved enlighnment before inventing the wheel or harnessing fire can be no less "civilized" than one that will engage in intraspecies mass murder for the right to enslave other members of their own species. I would argue they are more civilized, in fact.
But then again I could just be a victim of the Gaia spam and Grahama Hancock interviews on JRE ..
I remember the 1970s, when people concluded that the seams were so perfect they must have been done with alien technology.
Then an archaeologist showed how to make such a joint in about 30 minutes by banging a couple rocks together.
http://precisiongranitecn.com/info/how-to-make-granite-surfa...
And then, there are the fused-rock glasses found on some monuments which defy explanation. Lightning? Perhaps, but then there's that corona eruption theory ..
Someone was melting rocks. Maybe with microwave resolutions.
Last time I checked it, it was concrete. Forms for blocks are made from animal skins. Cement was made in kiln. At least one kiln has pretty modern look.
1. Lots of people with lots of time on their hands did something that we'd be currently hard pressed to do but no one has really tried yet.
OR
2. Two aliens land on Earth and one of them says "Hey, how do we help out these poor savages to advance their civilization? I know, we'll teach them to build really cool walls from stone!"
...I know which one I'll pick. The wiki article doesn't offer any suspicions of extraterrestrial origin. In fact, a contemporary account suggests it's just hard work:
"to save themselves the expense, effort and delay with which the Indians worked the stone, they pulled down all the smooth masonry in the walls. There is indeed not a house in the city that has not been made of this stone, or at least the houses built by the Spaniards."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n
EDIT: Do you have a reference for the 0.005mm precision claim? Some of those walls look impressive but the pictures I'm looking at, definitely don't suggest such God-like precision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n#/media/File:...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n#/media/File:...
I mean, I never once mentioned two aliens in a UFO, but hey .. sure, why not.
And some modern techniques seems unreal [1]
[1] 1920s skyscrapers builders without safety ropes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDN4c2wnx3E&t=55
It's not dissimilar to how telescope mirrors are ground to perfection, and how to make a perfectly flat steel surface.
I am curious about the perfectly flat, right-angled interiors of the 50+-ton (always empty!) basalt boxes in Egyptian mausoleums. We have a plausible story about cutting the outsides using copper saw blades with gems embedded in the edge, but no similar one for the insides, particularly the inside corners.
We also need to understand why the tech for working the biggest rocks was lost before the Inka took up building. The late work always uses much smaller rocks, and is relatively crude.
Because they didn't use tools. I've watched telescope mirrors ground to incredible precision by hand, no tools.
> Or the lack of embedded shells.
Use rocks without embedded shells.
> inside corners
Use drills, clean up with files or blocking. Remember the Pharaohs had essentially infinite resources to do that for one box. He would have used the best masons, paid them well, and gave them the time they needed.
> why the tech for working the biggest rocks was lost
We can't know why, but the most plausible explanation is one that accounts for lost technology everywhere. People didn't have writing or didn't bother to write it down or lost the books.
> Because they didn't use tools. I've watched telescope mirrors ground to incredible precision by hand, no tools.
Good one. That doesn't work on non-convex polygonal shapes. Notably, the faces are not just identically curved, as one would get by interfering faces. They are both flat.
>> Or the lack of embedded shells.
> Use rocks without embedded shells.
The rock faces in the quarries have embedded shells. Only the cut faces of rocks from those quarries lack them.
>> inside corners
> Use drills, clean up with files or blocking. Remember the Pharaohs had essentially infinite resources to do that for one box. He would have used the best masons, paid them well, and gave them the time they needed.
Infinite labor doesn't help in a box. Only one or two masons would fit. We know what their rock drills were like; they had a minimum radius measured in inches. And, again, no tool marks.
You don't get to define out the unknown by inventing excuses to ignore it; that is the same as inventing aliens. It takes actual work.
Also, there is a lot of unexplained melted rock all over Peru and Ecuador and so on. Somebody in the ancient world either had a light sabre, or .. it was aliens.
These all have things we need to look into, before we make big leaping conclusions about how primitive other cultures were and how things proceeded to the superlatives of modernity.
I'm prepared to learn that the rock cultures used hand tools and it was all just a lot of back breaking labor, but I also would not be surprised to learn that a laser-cutting device was discovered in a temple somewhere, and which 'explains everything' without any hand waving alien haircuts - albeit opening too many doors.
Er... the peruvians was an advanced civilization. Certainly advanced enough to fit stones snugly. That we don't know the exact techniques used for various ancient buildings does not mean they couldn't have built it.
In any case saying "maybe someone else did it" explains absolutely nothing. You just have a new hypothesis with zero evidence.
https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/
The ocean doesn't seem to be much explored in this regard, who knows what's lurking there?
You’ve gotta wonder if lava and plate tectonics has melted away all traces of any previous civilizations. Like, the entire crust would have to become an inferno.
Maybe when the moon formed, from another planetary body colliding with the earth, that this cosmic event destroyed all previous civilizations on Earth, and made the planet inhospitable for a million years.
And maybe if that civilization became space faring, if they left technological artifacts elsewhere in the solar system. Like on Mars. Or in the asteroid belts.
Or perhaps, they were able to see the incoming collision, that they jettisoned from the solar system, and went to another star system in search of a new planet to call home.
I’m not sure that speculating about civilizations older than 1 mya is anything but sensationalism.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Civilization
Incidentally, the Silures lived in the part of Wales where the city of Cardiff is located. There is a known active rift in the space-time continuum under the city of Cardiff [0]. This could also explain much.
The same is true for advanced galactic civilization: we are so ignorant of it, of what life is and what should or not qualify as living being. What is intelligence and wisdom? Recognition of plant communication is so recent, what lesson do you take out of it? How many dimensions actually encompasses us and how do they interact?
Take the Fermi paradoxes. Let's say your are some kind of very advanced civilization so advanced you know how to deal with all your civilization need to ensure perpetual sustainable forcastable needs of your civilisation. Let's say you manage to do that in a parcimonic way, avoiding to reveal your existence to other potentially hostile exogenous civilisations. Let's say that you are on top of that able and willing to explore other civilisations. At least in a first time in a way most likely undetectable. So your exploration project lead you to earth in a way like the hologram guy in code quantum. Would humans be the most interesting topic of interest for you? If so, would you see them as species you would think that you would label as wise, intelligent? Would it worth to decipher their language and try to give them some advises, with which chance that they would be followed? Given the way we treat each other and how we treat the rest of the biosphere, what opinion would you have of our species, seriously? Then, wouldn't it some form of wiseness to not reveal yourself until the species proves able to overcome the challenge of leaving peacefully and in harmony with the rest of the cosmos, or goes extinct, or destroy it if it seems to evolve toward a possible form of threat? After all, for such an advenced civilization, spawning a distinct civilization far less advenced such as us, or other forms of life/entity should be a peace of cake, so this would be no big loss, would it?
For example, what signs could archaeologists in the far future find of our current civilization, and how far into the future?
If The Event happens now then I imagine nuclear waste dumping sites (which often try to account for deterring far future exploration) and plastics in regular rubbish dumps would be indicators of our civilisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
Desert glass has fooled people before too I think.
* http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1115
If I had no agenda other than looking for evidence of pre-human technological civilization, I would focus on artifacts, as most people would. That is how we have found almost all ancient civilizations. You can't have even a slightly advanced civilization without creating big, hard objects such as rock or concrete or metal. Even a rather poor SE Asian town of 100,000 people out in the jungle will leave some fossils where their cheap, concrete buildings stood that, a billion years from now, may still exist and appear clearly non-organic (fossilized basements with pipes, for example). And if the civilization was "technological", it was probably populated enough for many such towns to have existed, at least one of which would probably have exposed fossils somewhere.
Of course asteroid strikes and plate tectonics could have buried it, and it's an interesting question where you might look for a city built a billion years ago, but there would probably be a lot more column inches devoted to solid artifacts, fossils, and questions like these than to climate change if the only thing on these scientists' agenda really was the question they claim.
An ancient civilisation might have existed for only a few thousand years, less than the blink of a geological eye. Unless you were to look at exactly the right strata at exactly the right layer you’d miss them completely. As a result it makes much more sense to look at environmental level effects, massively expanding the scope of your available evidence.
But yes, the question is, what trace would our civilisation leave, if abandoned today, in a billion years, if the tectonic plates move in those timescales?
Though I couldn't find an answer on whether those are stable on geological time scales, Earths only Trojan has been there for thousands of years but that isn't 60 million either.
Nobody is saying that carbon release by itself just as a single undifferentiated data point proves anything. Of course there can be other explanations, those possible explanations are discussed in the paper. These criticisms are clearly well known to the authors, addressed in the paper and contextualised by the evidence. But it's only one dimension of evidence, and I don't think dismissing it is so easy or useful.
Now, I'm just using a billion years as a huge stretch to make it harder to find the artifacts I'm talking about. Anything within a 100M would be leaving fossils of all sorts of junk. A fossilized piece of an obviously artificial concrete building or bridge would be solid evidence and clearly Plan A compared to arguments about the cause of ancient CO2 fluctuations if you are purely interested in evidence of ancient civ.
Most of the skeletons of the ancient Egyptians aren't found, but their pyramids are very much in evidence, and this was a civilization far too small and unsophisticated to leave obvious traces in the form of global warming.
I don't think we can rule out the possibility that past species used tools and communicated in ways which resemble human language, but if they'd been numerous and advanced enough to disrupt the climate with their Industrial Revolution, one can reasonably assume remnants of some of its products more substantive than evidence of temperature fluctuations or nitrate residues would exist.
Easier to get excited by false positives by widening the search space though: the same geological forces capable of disappearing nations are surely capable of causing temperature anomalies.
It seems that every non-trivial modern construction project leaves behind a pile of dirt somewhere, usually as an unintentional side-effect rather than an end in itself. And these piles of dirt it seems stick around for a really long time if no one goes out of their way to flatten them back out.
I remember once reading about someone, I think he was a bored meteorologist in the wilderness of Alaska with a bulldozer and a lot of time on his hands. The story goes that he used the bulldozer to write something offensive (I don't think the story said what, exactly) and the local legislature chose not to do anything about it because then the offensive message would be part of the official records of the legislature. Maybe it's an urban legend; I wasn't able to find it with a quick google search. But I'd like to think his message will be visible from space long after most modern constructions have been torn down or destroyed by the slow process of time.
Around 1400, a giant base - thousands of "old" people - in the middle of Greenland or Antarctica would have been almost 100% unreachable / undetectable for that moment's human technology.
Right now there could be a giant space station around Neptune or somewhere in the outer ring of the solar system and we could barely notice it as an asteroid doing funny stuff (lights with no sunlight reflections!), if we got lucky enough to get a blurry image somehow.
Maybe those out-of-the-solar system visitors are here not for us at all (no scouting), but they are here in their regular interchange with our older - highly advanced - cousins.
Think about it, didn't we try to do the same with some primitive human tribes in the Amazon? We just tried to left them alone as far as possible, to do their stuff and we thrive in our own civilization, far away from them.
A more advanced civilization of this solar system could be doing the same with us in Earth.
We say "out there is fully inhabitable" just as we said that about Siberia or Alaska, or the Sahara. But now - with some technology help - there are thousands of humans living in those places (even if we have no NY city like settlements).
Honestly dude, we barely have evidence for existence and you just invented a interplanetary civilization out of thin air. While it might be amusing to some, its slippery slope we have already fallen down and found anti-vaxxers down there. Please refrain from making these wild assertions, and if not at least put a disclaimer about where you got the theory from.
You're quite right about the sources, tought
Just my imagination.
I've been inspired by an article I found here sometime ago.
We as species got almost wiped out several times. But, we managed to recover and we rebuilt everything from scratch.
What could have happened if in the meantime of our recovery, some other species could have evolved (that's somehow happened with the Neanderthals)?
How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
So what they show is that as 13C isotope levels drop, global temperatures rise. The drop in 13C concentrations is presumably because carbon from fossil fuels has extremely low isotope content because it mostly decayed, so as the proportion of fossil fuel carbon in the ecosystem rises isotope concentrations fall.
For the right hand graph red and blue are both isotope tracks, one is carbon the other is oxygen, which is being used as a proxy for temperature.
Even geosynchronous and geostationary orbits degrade over time (though time scales extend to ten thousand years and longer).
Micrometeorites would shred any satellite to pieces and decay from thermal stress and radiation would basically turn satellites to dust over time (again - think millions of years).
1. The question is answered by Occam's razor
2. Regarding sustainable energy https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
So pure intellectual mastrubation
Let’s laugh in the face of thermodynamic limits and talk of 100% efficiency (yes, we have started the fantasy portion of this journey).