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Comment by me_me_mu_mu | Hacker News Reader

Really dumb question, but one I must ask after reading this article and then your post. Could it be possible that humans had some pretty awesome technology even farther in the past than we know (beyond earliest recorded history), but due to some extinction event all records of society from that time were wiped out?

For example if we had some crazy extinction event, the dark ages that would follow are pretty scary to think about. I would feel like the researchers trying to understand what I'm looking at, and they mention there's some sort of user manual inscription. If we are reduced to small tribes again, with no access to internet, electricity, running water, etc. I can't imagine us actually recovering to the current state without thousands of years. Most people have no idea how anything works, we just buy it on amazon and it arrives tomorrow or stream the latest movie. Just thought I'd throw my dumb question out there lol.

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We can be reasonably certain there were no such civilizations on Earth prior to modern human history, otherwise we'd see evidence in the archeological record or even fossil record. I don't mean finding silicon chips in a fossil or anything so advanced. I mean very simple things like ceramic chips or bits of worked glass that would survive for millions of years.

The only way a civilization at least as advanced as bronze-age humans existed 100k+ years ago is if it was visitors from a parent civilization on another world that died out. That's the only way you get advanced technology on a small enough scale that we wouldn't be able to find any clues because the clues would be localized to a tiny area we just haven't stumbled across yet (to be clear I don't think any such civilization ever existed).

> archeological record or even fossil record

The Earth may (I think it likely) have been tectonically active for long enough to destroy any such traces of an advanced civilization arising during its first couple eons (oldest macro-fossil: 800m years; Earth: 4.5b years).

Better disproof is perhaps the absence of evidence in the geologic/atmospheric record. One imagines that a geologist in the deep future could detect a long-forgotten humanity via the record's abrupt spike in CO2 output, just as present geologists know of the Great Oxidation Event.

No at all a dumb question :) It's actually a fascinating question!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

Look into Graham Hancock, he writes a lot about possible lost civilizations. He gets lots of hate and I have no idea if any of it is true, but super fun to read.

What'll really bake your noodle is the fact that we most likely couldn't tell if there was a pre-human civilization on earth, even around industrial levels. What we have now will easily last a thousand years - but not a thousand thousands years.

And my favorite hypothesis: Antarctica. If there ever was a species which flourished there, it's a lot harder for them to colonize the rest of the world than it is for us to visit Antarctica. Clothes you can just wear, and heating is pretty straightforward - but having to venture in a place where portable aircon failure means death will pretty much guarantee you don't build a lot far from home. Which puts a pretty high limit on how far a civilization could have gotten there and still have all traces hidden in the ice.

I doubt this is really true. We've identified many traces of life from millions of years ago. You don't think we could find some bricks or beams from an industrial civilization?

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