
Silurian Hypothesis: Were There Civilizations on Earth Before Humans? (2018) - rfreytag
http://www.sci-news.com/featurednews/silurian-hypothesis-05921.html
======
Razengan
Seemingly everyone is talking about artifacts and lack thereof.

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.)

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpdlQae5wP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpdlQae5wP8)

~~~
paweldebik
One clue to there not being a civilization like ours in the past, is all the
oil that we found in the earth. Such a convenient energy resource would have
likely been used up before we arrived, had there been an industrial
civilization before.

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.

~~~
JPLeRouzic
> Such a convenient energy resource would have likely been used up before we
> arrived, had there been an industrial civilization before.

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?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_reservoir#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_reservoir#Formation)

~~~
paulryanrogers
Well the carbon in the atmosphere might build up to a point that it cooks most
life on earth. So probably still wise to leave it in the ground as much as
possible

------
rishav_sharan
I think a lot of us assume civilization to mean that the sapients must at
least be as technologically advanced as us right now. But there could have
been simple hunter gatherer societies which used materials like wood and other
organic stuff for their constructions.

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

~~~
bregma
It's true. We could define civilization as being consciously aware of the
state of Nirvana. It's possible that early pre-human civilians all transcended
long before discovering how to weave baskets or husband livestock.

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?

~~~
mkl
Civilisation is not a state of mind. That doesn't make any sense, because it
is completely at odds with how the word is used in practice, e.g. "Aztec
civilisation", "Western civilisation", "Modern civilisation". The actual
definition of civilisation is about structured culture and communities:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilization](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilization)

~~~
bregma
The wiktionary definition of "civilized" [0] is "Having a highly developed
society or culture" \-- developed into what, late Victorian era upper-class
British men, like the people who wrote the OED the definition was cribbed
from? The human species, especially those of highly developed society and
culture, have a long record of exterminating others of their kind on the
grounds that the others are "uncivilized".

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.

[0]
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilized](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilized)

------
hackerneys
For an artifact, how about a mountain that's over 50% iron?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk)

~~~
fit2rule
I mean, the perfect seams of the joints in various Peruvian ruins, the melted
rock formations, the unexplained techniques for constructing massive stone
structures .. I think there is definitely a case to be made for previous,
advanced civilisations, which we haven't quite yet understood properly.

But then again I could just be a victim of the Gaia spam and Grahama Hancock
interviews on JRE ..

~~~
WalterBright
> the perfect seams of the joints in various Peruvian ruins

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.

~~~
RikNieu
That sounds interesting, do you have a link? But then again, how do you "bang"
20-50 ton rocks together?

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, that's a bit glib. A lot of the joints and seams technology in Peruvian
ruins is unexplainable - even with modern industrial processes, we would be
very hard pressed to replicate the results of some of these structures. Like
it'd be very, very hard to do it as well as the ancients did, even with our
crazy construction technology...

~~~
pakitan
Well, given a choice between the 2 hypotheses:

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](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:Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n,_Cusco,_Per%C3%BA,_2015-07-31,_DD_27.JPG)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n#/media/File:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n#/media/File:Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n,_Cusco,_Per%C3%BA,_2015-07-31,_DD_21.JPG)

~~~
RikNieu
Or 3, some ancient people had better construction technology than we give them
credit for. No need to bring up aliens every time someone questions orthodoxy.

~~~
fit2rule
Yes, there are many theories that can be entertained. My favourite is the
mythos that, over a hundred thousand years, perhaps humans did evolve to the
point they had technology to leave the planet, tidying up after themselves as
they did, and its just us stragglers left behind that have been slowly
devolving the tools they also left behind .. 'what if' doesn't have to be
disregarded, just because its preposterous.

I mean, I never once mentioned two aliens in a UFO, but hey .. sure, why not.

------
colordrops
There are countless animal and plant fossils from as far back as 100s of
millions of years ago. Wouldn't we have found at least a few fossils of
constructed objects?

~~~
lazyjones
Here's a map that supposedly shows all fossil findings.

[https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/](https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/)

The ocean doesn't seem to be much explored in this regard, who knows what's
lurking there?

~~~
fhars
Not much, since the ocean floor tends to be quite young on geological terms.
For example, the oldest parts of the floor of the northern Atlantic ocean only
started to form after Laurasia broke apart 50 million years ago, and the floor
of the Pacific ocean is regularly recycled in the subduction zones of the
pacific ring of fire.

------
blackrock
Earth has an interesting property, where it’s got just enough gravity to hold
water and air in just the right amounts. And just far enough away from the sun
to provide heat and cold. And that special magnetosphere to protect delicate
life from being ionized by cosmic rays.

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.

------
sradman
Ian Morris has popularized using empirical evidence to compare historical
civilizations [1]. Energy capture per capita is the dominant metric.

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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Civilization)

~~~
jbotz
The question being asked is not "sensationalist". It is a perfectly legitimate
question of epistemology: can we know? If there ever was such a trans-ancient
civilization, would evidence still be identifiable? Or is deep time as, and
perhaps even more, unknowable as deep (relativistic) space?

------
Gatsky
Can’t believe the article doesn’t mention why it is called the Silurian
Hypothesis [1]!

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_(Doctor_Who)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_\(Doctor_Who\))

~~~
bregma
Long before Doctor Who geologists have referred to an era in Earth's history
as the Silurian. This is because it was originally identified from sedimentary
rock layers found in south Wales in an area where the Romans had encountered a
fierce tribe of natives named the Silures. One thing led to another and
British Victorian scholars being what they were, the rocks were named after
something a Latin master taught rather than anything locally relevant, like
the Welsh.

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.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Rift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Rift)

~~~
messe
That may be true, but in this case the term was actually inspired by the
episode of Doctor Who.

~~~
mkl
"We name the hypothesis after a 1970 episode of the British science fiction TV
series Doctor Who" \- The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect
an industrial civilization in the geological record?
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748](https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748)

------
bsenftner
"The Light of Other Days" is by novel written by Stephen Baxter, based on a
synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke, that deals with this issue as a "surprise" near
the end of the novel. Basically, the world is in turmoil for a series of
reasons worse than what we have going on now, and then it is discovered we're
the 2nd advanced civilization to evolve on Earth, with details of them and
their demise. Well worth the read for a number of good reasons.

------
psychoslave
What do we take for civilizon? We often are so humanicentric. Shouldn't we
count ants and termites as civilization? I saw there is a reference about a
book on ants in this thread.

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?

------
LatteLazy
The biggest arguement against this is that we know a lot of minerals (iron
etc) we're deposited before any multicellular life formed on earth. In a few
short millenia we've used most of those resources. By extension, if someone
was here before us, they'd have used the same deposits and we wouldn't have
found them.

------
Evidlo
I'm a little disappointed the article didn't go into more detail.

For example, what signs could archaeologists in the far future find of our
current civilization, and how far into the future?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
We already have a layer of radioactive deposits that's used as a boundary of
the nuclear age.

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.

~~~
DennisP
That's a proven one. A billion years ago in Gabon there were a handful of
natural nuclear reactors, and we found their nuclear waste.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Natural reactors were in my mind when writing this, thinking perhaps one can
engineer a reactor but it appear to be natural. The thought went no further.

Desert glass has fooled people before too I think.

------
anoniuyiu33412
I guess few consider feasible a "wakanda" hypothesis. Maybe these guys somehow
managed to survive in few numbers through the million of years since their
civilization decline, and they'are around us, hidden in plain sight.

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).

~~~
newswasboring
Yes, and if my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

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.

~~~
anoniuyiu33412
haha, I get it sounds really crazy, but we are talking about advanced genetic
engineering spanning millions of years in the future, so I though this other
crazyness couldn't be that much out of place.

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...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-
human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c)

------
SiVal
The problem people are complaining about in the comments is the tendency of
many science journals lately to use their articles as undercover delivery
vehicles for political messages in the guise of investigating something else.

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.

~~~
simonh
I don’t think you can dismiss the problem of plate tectonics so easily. Vast
amounts of the former surface of the earth are now several kilometres under
our feet. That’s not something you can wave away. Also it’s not reasonable to
compare species fossil hunting with artefact hunting as equivalent. T-Rex as a
species existed for 18 million years, with total cumulative population numbers
estimated in the trillions or thousands of trillions across huge geographic
areas and time spans. We have fossil fragments for only 50 individuals. That’s
a staggeringly minuscule sample for a species spread out over a considerable
span in both time and space.

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.

~~~
hutzlibu
But enviromental effects billions of years ago could have be by any cause.
They might indicate something, but much more solid would be real artifacts.
Structures. Chemical compounds, etc.

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?

~~~
ganzuul
Moon landers.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
In a micrometeorite environment, they'll last a million years at most. All
that will be left after a million years is a curious and anomalous
concentration of metallic particles. After a billion years it will be buried
and very easy to miss.

~~~
hutzlibu
And probably hard to distinguish from a old meteor with the right metal
combination.

------
zmkzrk
Cixin Liu's latest book "Of Ants and Dinosaurs" explores this topic in a very
entertaining way:
[https://headofzeus.com/books/9781789546095](https://headofzeus.com/books/9781789546095)

~~~
rishav_sharan
Is it any good? I just love the Dark Forest to death, but I dind't care for
the 1st and 3rd books.

------
jakeogh
Mesmerising yt chan: vlad9vt, just pictures of artifacts and structures set to
music [https://youtu.be/EHFe10dp0L4](https://youtu.be/EHFe10dp0L4)

------
d883kd8
Can someone explain the units on the vertical axis of those graphs?

~~~
simonh
I think they are superpositions if two types of graph. First the left hand and
bottom graphs. The blue graphs are concentrations of 13C isotope from various
sources in the ecosystem. The red graphs are estimates of global temperature
in degrees centigrade. Both types of graph are shown as deviations from the
long term mean.

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.

------
TMWNN
Several of the best SCP Foundation entries are about relics that are from
civilizations before recorded history.

* [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1115](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1115)

* [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-4001](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-4001)

* [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1050](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1050)

------
jasonbourne1901
Would evidence of an ancient advanced civilization on earth be cooler than
dinosaurs?

~~~
ganzuul
I'd put it on par with extraterrestrial life.

------
kingkawn
Too many presumptions about the inherent logic of how we structure things
prevents us from seeing those who were not subject to this logic and it’s
blind spots

------
newsbinator
Is it possible there are dead satellites from past civilizations in a
graveyard orbit we haven't noticed yet?

~~~
jl6
Seems plausible that a sufficiently small and dim object could remain
unobserved by humans, but if we’re considering objects from millions or even
billions of years ago, I’m not sure the orbit would have remained stable.

~~~
qayxc
There's no way for a satellite to orbit the Earth over geologic time scales.

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).

------
stephc_int13
This kind of bait and switch articles should not be on the first page of HN.

------
earthscienceman
ok. so. the article was mildly interesting but what I want to know is what is
with that dumpster fire of a comments section?

~~~
cosmodisk
I imagine archeologists digging up some ancient texts, written in a very
sophisticated language,which eventually get translated and it turns out to be
:" 101 social media tricks you can use to boost your business".

~~~
chrisco255
Yes, I'm fairly convinced that at some point some ancient civilization even
more advanced than our own existed...then they invented social media and it
all collapsed.

~~~
rbanffy
I get those Forbidden Planet feelings often.

~~~
dredmorbius
Tell me about it.

------
tia4tia
The article is bullshit.

1\. The question is answered by Occam's razor

2\. Regarding sustainable energy [https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-
scale-energy/](https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/)

So pure intellectual mastrubation

~~~
qayxc
So basically you call the article bullshit and your second "source" reads -
and I quote verbatim -

    
    
      Let’s laugh in the face of thermodynamic limits and talk of 100% efficiency (yes, we have started the fantasy portion of this journey).
    

So much for your own credibility, champ.

