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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Raises the question of what about our present beliefs and thinking should change as a consequence of discovering advanced civilizations that have risen and fallen not only independent of "us," but of our ability to have ever precived the possibility of their existence.

Makes me want to write a sci-fi story about predicting the reflection of coherent radio signals from distant planets that originated on earth hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the ML model that filters for candidate signals, as though it were more plausible that old civilizations discovered radio before they were wiped out than another advanced civilization inhabit nearby solar systems. Starts with capturing reflections of 1930s broadcasts, but then the method scales by applying it to further objects that reflect ones from further back in time.

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This is a hard subject to discuss because there’s a ton of fud and unintellectual nonsense (e.g. people who want hyperborea or Atlantis to have been real industrial civilizations.)

There probably wasn’t some industrial level civilization as we know it. But there’s 200,000 years of human history and the there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this time and they likely had societies we’ll never know about.

I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the universe.

My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes and superstitions.

I've often wondered... what is the most advanced civilization (human or not) that could have existed some number of years back and not left evidence, or the evidence was destroyed through natural processes, or the evidence would remain in places we can't/haven't discovered?

Conversely, at each known stage of human civilization, how long will it be before evidence of that civilization becomes unknowable through future archaeology?

These "jungle people" don't need to clock in to a single desk to get their food/do day to day, or have their leisure conversations captured by a friend-wielded listening device.

They seem like the natural frontrunner, in my eyes.

I wonder what they would think about my eyes becoming short sighted because I stare at a computer screen all day, or my neck aches because I sit in a chair in a room all day.

IMHO, any civilization that advances to the industrial era would be leaving artifacts all over the world. It wouldn't be confined to an island or a region in a continent.

We've recovered air trapped in ice cores up to 2 million years old.

Odds are if there had been an advanced ancient civilization of any size (and an advanced one is going to tend to be large) and for any length of time, they'd have done quite a bit of lead smelting (lead's really useful and super-easy to smelt... shame it's poisonous), and we'd see it in the ice core record.

Let alone something like fossil fuel use. Plus probably dozens of other markers of iron-age industry or later, that I don't know about.

I very much doubt any very-ancient humans/hominids got past Bronze Age tech, at best. If I had to place a bet on it, I'd bet against them having gotten past stone-age tech at all. I think we'd see evidence of it.

Any civ that discovers iron smelting leaves land scars that are easy to recognize.

Charcoal and iron mining is simply highly visible.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

> what is the most advanced civilization

What is "advanced"? Is it a property everyone would agree on? Is it a single scale or some multi-dimensional ordering?

If a civilisation has beautiful spoken-word poetry, while the other has a tradition to play a complex game with baskets and grass knots which one is more advanced?

To me advanced means has an caloric surplus through which they get separation of skillsets. Civilization arose from this.

There was clearly no civilization that routinely travelled between continents.

Because animal and plant species were very separated, until the "invasive species" phenomenon the last few centuries.

An interesting story of a surprisingly ancient technology is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haya_people#Archaeological_dis...

It's not as fantastical as radio signals, and not as truly 'lost' - it persisted in oral history, but it's still thought provoking.

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

The exact thing I was speculating about but with tons of prior art, thank you!

Most of the archeological and historical evidence on civilizations are quite frail, and the cards are regularly re-shuffled every now and then when a toe or a necklace or some ancient tools, are discovered (which is roughly every 10 years).

Gobekli Teppe recently also demonstrated that we really don't know much, and that the "official" theories are mere speculations which are very likely to be replaced by another theory in the future.

Maybe there’s a trick with Euclidean geometry and gravitational lensing where you fly one direction, turn ninety degrees and scan a supermassive black hole for signals.

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