
If We Weren’t the First Industrial Civilization on Earth, Would We Ever Know? - shadykiller
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/04/20/143758/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/
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jjk166
Our civilization, and presumably any other industrial civilization on earth,
utilizes huge quantities of steel reinforced concrete. While the structures
may only last decades, the material would be recognizably unnatural for
hundreds of millions of years. There is no natural process which would produce
limestone with veins of high concentration iron ore running through,
nonetheless produce it everywhere on earth in a huge variety of conditions.
Further, all the deposits of this weird mineral combination would form at the
same time, and this period would be a blink of an eye geologically speaking.
While there may be theories other than industrial civilization put forward,
but it would be obvious to everyone that something incredibly weird happened
at the time that civilization existed, and detailed investigation would
certainly find other technosignatures once they knew where to look.

~~~
m463
Here's a thought experiment.

Could you have a very high-tech civilization based on biological manipulation?

Biological structures are extremely efficient and strong and hearty at the
molecular level.

It might not be "industrial" in the mining/cement/roads sort of sense.

~~~
jjk166
Biological structures are very efficient, having been refined by many millions
of years of evolution, but in absolute terms they are not especially strong or
hearty. Wood for example is a great building material for many cases, but a
wooden beam is never going to compare to a steel girder. While you probably
could make most things through some sufficiently convoluted biological
manipulation, any high tech civilization would recognize that there are much
easier ways to achieve the same goal. Any advanced civilization would
inevitably be composed of beings who evolved to be intelligent, and evolution
would inevitably favor those who use their intelligence to choose simple and
effective solutions to their problems. Any civilization that actually arose
naturally would - in broad strokes - look similar to ours because they are
governed by the same forces of nature as ours.

The only exception would be if for some reason they could not follow our path
of technological development. For example if a marine species developed
intelligence, they obviously could not easily utilize fire, which in turn
would make any advancements in metallurgy nearly impossible. If you can't
readily smelt large amounts of steel, of course you can't produce large
quantities of reinforced concrete. Under such a circumstance, biological
manipulation may be the only way to produce many things we take for granted.
However this would require the devlopment of biological manipulation
technologies without utilizing those other "conventional" technologies, which
very likely isn't possible in practice.

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klyrs
This certainly tickles my fancy:

[https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-
phenomena/ancien...](https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-
phenomena/ancient-nanostructures-found-ural-mountains-are-out-place-and-
time-002046)

I tend to think that these weird helical structures are the product of two
metallic crystals being extruded from a rock under pressure, at serendipitous
angles to take the form they do... but it's way more fun to think about
aliens, time travellers and prehistoric civilizations

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melling
Lots of comments at the initial release of the article.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22150137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22150137)

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Merrill
There are some open pit mines that are likely to last quite a while. The
largest is 4 km wide by 1.2 km deep and even if filled in by drifting sands,
it would be unmistakably artificial.
[https://blog.iseekplant.com.au/blog/5-largest-open-pit-
mines](https://blog.iseekplant.com.au/blog/5-largest-open-pit-mines)

Dams are also likely to be detected. The dams themselves may have disappeared,
but the artificial sediment beds in the valleys upstream will likely persist
for a very long time.

~~~
foepys
That list doesn't include Tagebau Garzweiler, a 66km² (Garzweiler I) plus
48km² (Garzweiler II) large coal mining area in Germany. It's home to Bagger
288 [1] and Bagger 293 [2], some of the largest vehicles on earth.

The English Wikipedia article is surprisingly short but the German one is
pretty long [3].

Starting 2030 Garzweiler will be filled with water until the year 2100 and
create a 74km² large lake.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288)

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_293)

3:
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler)
(use DeepL if you don't speak German)

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rightbyte
There should be artifacts of cut diamonds or goldbars around in the ocean
floor. Artifacts on the moon.

~~~
beamatronic
I like the idea of putting artifacts on the moon, just for this purpose. And
also on any comet or asteroid that happens to wander by. The reasoning is
this: The golden rule. Perhaps we can answer the question, for some other
future intelligent civilization, long after we are gone. At least someone can
know, they were not alone.

~~~
aeternum
A space probe like Voyager might be our best bet. It's easier to detect an
object traveling through space than one on a planet. Something on the moon
will eventually become buried due to impacts.

~~~
Someone
Is the life expectancy of Voyager in deep space really higher than when it
would be placed on the moon?

I wouldn’t know. On the plus side, in space it doesn’t have the moon’s gravity
pulling stuff towards it, and doesn’t run the risk of matter already on the
moon being thrown towards it from near direct hits.

On the minus side, in space it isn’t shielded from direct impacts from at
least half of all directions (≈ half by the moon, a bit more by earth, if
placed on the earth-facing side of the moon)

~~~
aaaxyz
IIRC the Voyager probes aren't on the eliptic plane, they're less likely to
hit debris. Plus once they reach the interstellar medium there is not much to
worry about besides cosmic rays.

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jbotz
Size matters! I think one of the key factors here is that a civilization that
produces our level (or greater) of advanced technology has to be really big,
in terms of numbers of individuals... an ancient city state of 100,000 -
1,000,000 people isn't going to develop quantum mechanics. You need a _lot_ of
people doing science to be able to figure all of this stuff out. And when a
civilization gets this big, like ours, it _does_ leave permanent marks, like
some of the other comments here have correctly pointed out.

~~~
rm445
Not people. Dinosaurs, intelligent crocodiles, industrialised trilobites,
whatever it might be. So many millions of years ago that there may be no such
thing as permanent marks.

You possibly could be thinking about an Atlantis type of scenario, the idea
that relatively advanced prehistoric _human_ civilisations could have risen
say 100,000 years ago and fallen without a trace (especially if they literally
fell into the sea). Which does have some level of possibility, but indeed
there isn't much chance they could have developed advanced sciences.

The thing is, though it seems far wackier, it's interesting to think that
there literally could have been populations of millions of intelligent lizards
(or whatever) for hundreds of thousands of years, and for the fossil record
not to reflect it. It would be amazing if one day a cliff collapsed and we
found an intact fossilised dinosaur airliner or whatever, but this article is
about whether less direct evidence of such a civilisation, if it ever existed,
would persist.

~~~
ncmncm
The realistic Atlantis scenario is not sinking, but being engulfed as the
water level rises. 20,000 years ago, sea level was hundreds of feet lower. If
any industry was confined to coastal lowlands, it is all deep under the sea,
now, and under tens or hundreds of feet of mud, besides.

Off India, there are mile after mile of large buildings under 60 feet of
water. They were last above water ~7000 years ago.

There are many, many thousands of square miles of recent land between
Indonesia islands, more between Australia and New Guinea, and between Britain
and northern Europe. The Black Sea was mostly dry remarkably recently.

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ta17711771
Ambient radiation has its origins in previous nuclear warfare, and all
societies that have spawned since have had the proper tolerance.

Maybe.

~~~
Communitivity
Is it possible to come up with an unprovable/undisprovable scenario of a past
civilization many years ago? Yes: they lived >55 millions years ago so
artifacts are gone due to a full tectonic convection cycle causing all the
artifacts to get melted. They also could have developed organic technology,
and used it to erase the non-organic waste of their past.

I love the idea, it's amazing to think about. And it might be true.

However, we can't prove it, we can't disprove it, and it has no bearing on our
current state. In the absence of evidence I've got to try to apply Occam's
Razor, so the simplest of competing theories should be selected as the one to
go with until/unless evidence shows otherwise. Which means we should consider
humans the first advanced civilization on Earth until other evidence is found.

