Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Would it be possible to distinguish the fall of a pre-human civilisation destroyed by industrial CO2, from a natural climate upheaval?
A New Study Suggests There Could Have Been Intelligent Life on Earth Before Humans
Looking for aliens across deep space is great, but have we looked hard enough in our own terrestrial backyard—here on Earth?
Becky Ferreira
Apr 17 2018, 1:13am
One author of the new study, leading climatologist Gavin Schmidt, wrote a work of fiction to explore its findings. Read ‘Under the Sun’, which we published at Terraform alongside the following piece.
The human yearning to connect with other intelligent life-forms runs deep, and it has become the driving force behind a dazzling range of scientific pursuits. From the SETI Institute’s radio sweeps of the sky, to the discovery of liquid water on neighboring worlds, to the thousands of exoplanets detected over the past two decades, there have been major gains in chasing one of the ultimate cosmic mysteries—whether or not we are alone in the universe.
…
Outside of some science fiction stories and a speculative paper by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, little serious thought has been afforded to the possibility that we humans are not the first species to build an advanced civilization in the solar system’s history.
“It actually hasn’t been explored that much,” climatologist Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told me over the phone. “It never gets brought up as a potential thing that you want to look for.”
So, Schmidt paired up with University of Rochester physicist Adam Frank to co-author a paper entitled “The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?” The hypothesis borrows its “Silurian” title from the fictional reptilian species depicted in the science fiction franchise Doctor Who—these scaly Silurians flourished on Earth many millions of years before the dawn of our own society.
…
“There’s lots of things that are going well for [human civilization], but there’s a big price that’s being paid in the ecology and biology,” Schmidt told me. He emphasized that many of these consequences can seem to be “out of sight, out of mind” due to conveniences like sewage infrastructure and garbage relocation. But when considered in totality, anthropogenic activities really add up, and impact the geological record. “All of the waste and footprint is being hidden from us, but it isn’t hidden from the planet,” he said.
It’s unlikely that any massive telltale structures would remain preserved through tens of millions of years of geological activity—that holds true for both human civilization and any potential “Silurian” precursors on Earth.
Instead, Schmidt and Frank propose searching for more subtle signals, such as byproducts of fossil fuel consumption, mass extinction events, plastic pollution, synthetic materials, disrupted sedimentation from agricultural development or deforestation, and radioactive isotopes potentially caused by nuclear detonations.
“You really have to dive into a lot of different fields and pull together exactly what you might see,” Schmidt said. “It involves chemistry, sedimentology, geology, and all these other things. It’s really fascinating.”
…
The abstract of the study;
The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
Gavin A. Schmidt (a1) and Adam Frank (a2)
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095Published online: 16 April 2018
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.
Sadly the full study is paywalled, but I think we get the idea.
The previous referenced study was by Penn State Astronomer Jason T. Wright, which concluded that it might be easier to detect traces of any previous high tech civilisation by any technical artefacts they left on other planets or on Asteroids.
I’m skeptical of theories of past civilisations, because it is difficult to imagine an event or series of events which would completely finish off an established intelligent species, especially omnivores like humans, unless that species had a specific fragility which made it especially vulnerable.
Consider the hideous aftermath of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, plants dead or dying, rotting corpses littering the landscape, a bonanza for cockroaches and scavengers. If something similar happened today, the luckiest and most determined humans would more than likely survive; if all else fails, humans can eat cockroaches.
Schmidt has also written a short fictional account about the discovery of traces of a pre-human civilisation which destroyed itself through nuclear war.
If traces of artificial isotopes were discovered, as in Schmidt’s short story, such a discovery would not necessarily end the debate. The presence of artificial isotopes is not necessarily the fingerprint of the nuclear technology of an ancient pre-human civilisation. 1.7 billion years ago a natural nuclear reactor fired up in Africa, creating artificial isotopes as byproducts of an uncontrolled natural fission reaction.
UPDATE: Gavin Schmidt has posted about it on “RealClimate” here
And people take him seriously???
Science has found traces of the original tiniest lifeforms from billions of years ago. Science has determined that there were several life-exterminating events in the prehistorical early earth. Science has found evidence of the development and expansion of lifeforms from the tiniest one-celled creatures, through the Cambrian explosion, the first land animals, the huge dinosaurs and their extinction, right up to the modern day. But an advanced civilization could have existed that science somehow hasn’t been able to detect a trace of??? Gimme a break!
What would a 300 million year old civilization fossil look like?
Traces of human civilization can disappear very quickly.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/laser-scans-reveal-60000-hidden-maya-structures-guatemala-180968030/
The fossil record is very incomplete, with the preservation biased toward hard-shelled creatures (trilobites, bivalves, etc.). 24% of extant marine bivalves have not been observed in the fossil record. Preservation and resolution both degrade with increasing geologic time.
In my youth some half a century ago I read a book by Charles Fort, he spent his life collecting data about out of place objects and other anomalies. Much ends up in museums in a basement after a run in the newspapers of the time.
Worth a read and a think when things like jewellery and fully machined stainless steel objects turn up in coal.
That was a time when coal was mined by hand and delivered to homes to burn. That is just one snippet that comes to mind, Mr Fort had thousands in his book and a house crammed with things that should not have existed. Their was a Fortian society once, maybe they still exist.
“What would a 300 million year old civilization fossil look like?”
Ceramics are virtually indestructible, as are many metals. The native copper of the Keeweenaw Peninsula is about a billion years old.
Grind ceramic material up into clay to sand sized particles, wash them down a river and bury them in mud, cover with thousands of feet of additional sediments and apply 300 million years of tectonics.
hum… so you are showing traces of human civilization we found as proof these traces disappear…
“you see this relic? well, you cannot see it, because it disappears so quickly”.
You can’t actually see it. Without Lidar, you wouldn’t even know it was there… and it’s only a few thousand years old.
On the other hand, scientists found a 350000 years old axe in Atapuerca, Spain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atapuerca_Mountains
There’s a world of difference between 350,000 and 300,000,000 years. The oldest surface area of the Earth is less than 2 million years old.
This is a 350,000 year old axe…
Apply 299,650,000 years of geology and it won’t look like an axe.
Where does the 300 million year date comes from? Is it Gavin´s or yours?
Anyway, no animal had a brain evolved enough to develop technology 300 millions years ago.
300 million years ago (Pennsylvanian), the climate and atmosphere were very similar to current conditions. However, any time period prior to the Quaternary could be used.
The issue isn’t whether or not an advanced pre-human civilization existed. The issue is how well evidence of it would be preserved in the geologic record if it existed. The answer is at best poorly and at worst not at all… with quality of preservation degrading with time.
The Maya example from Petén is just plain wrong. The remains are very much there, but you can’t see them from the air because of the trees. Get down on the ground and they are easily visible. I know, having been there.
And here is another example of the things that can actually be preserved for a hundred million years from the same magazine:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-order-insect-found-trapped-ancient-amber-180961968/
Yes, the ruins are there. However, they were not known to exist until they were identified with LiDAR…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/laser-scans-reveal-60000-hidden-maya-structures-guatemala-180968030/
This is after less than 2,000 years. Within a few million years, there would be little trace of these ruins. Within 10’s of millions of years, there would be no trace of the ruins.
100 million year old fossils aren’t a novelty.
“The answer is at best poorly and at worst not at all… with quality of preservation degrading with time.”
True in principle, but under suitable conditions surprisingly ephemereal remains can be preserved for very long periods. A few examples from my own experience:
Laetoli in Tanzania where 3 700 000 year old human footprints are preserved.
Sihetun formation of Liaoning where e. g. color patterns of bird feathers 130 000 000 years old are preserved
Hallet cove at Adelaide where 300 000 000 year old glacial striations are preserved.
Of course such preservation, “Konservatlagerstätten”, is quite rare, but a technological civilization would leave immense numbers of artefacts, some very durable, and other traces behind. Some would be certain to be preserved.
Of course remains out in space would last best and longest. Read Poul Anderson’s short story “Memorial” for a fictional treatment of this theme.
The most likely telltales would be geochemical anomalies. It’s possible that only about 1% of the species that ever existed are represented in the fossil record.
http://pages.geo.wvu.edu/~kammer/g231/AdequacyFossilRecord.pdf
Either they were not initially preserved or the stratigraphic units in which they were fossilized are gone, through erosion and/or tectonic processes.
Human civilization, so far, hasn’t done anything that will likely lead to a significant “mark” in the future stratigraphic record…
http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/26/3/article/i1052-5173-26-3-4.htm#toclink5
A Silurian or Velociraptor “civilization” 400 or 70 million years ago wouldn’t have left much of a “mark” either. This, in no way, supports the notion that such civilizations could have existed… It just serves to put human civilization into a proper geological context.
They cannot exist. The brain of birds and reptiles was not as evolved as our brain nowadays to create a technological civilization. Not enough pyramidal neurons and not enough synapses among said neurons.
Where did you get the idea of a Velociraptor “civilization”?, from Hollywood?
The issue isn’t whether or not they could have existed.
The issue is how well or poorly evidence of such civilizations would have been preserved in the geologic record if they had existed…
It’s simply a “thought exercsie”…
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/04/the-silurian-hypothesis/
The “beauty” of this thought exercise is that it puts another nail in the coffin of the proposal to have the Anthropocene as a formal epoch on the geologic time scale.
Coal is billions of years old. Even stainless steel would have rusted away to nothing long before now.
Most coal deposits are less than 300 million years old…
http://epcamr.org/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/coalage.gif
There are some Precambrian graphite formations… But those aren’t really coal and not necessarily >1 billion years old.
What would a 300 million year old civilization fossil look like? To Gav, it would look exactly like what Dr. Mann told him to look for.
paul courtney April 17, 2018 at 10:50 am
Hockey stick preservation is unlikely. For one thing, most of the Phanerozoic Eon has been a lot warmer than now, so ice was rare. Of course, an advanced technological civilization could create ice rinks. Wooden spears hundreds of thousands of years old have been found, but generally require bogs to be preserved.
A truly advanced civilization would have figured out how to play bog hockey… /sarc
David,
A dry season variant of field hockey, perhaps. Crossed with golf.
LOL, nope. The scientific fact is that no animal species had a brain capable of developing a technological society 300 million years ago.
If you want to pose the question of how well preserved an hypothetical civilization that existed 300 million years ago would be, then that would be off-topic since that is not the subject of Gavin´s paper. It is fine with me If you want to go off-topic, it is not my blog. However, since you are a person who posts a lot as a guest blogger, I think you should stick to the topic. Yet, not my blog, my rules don’t apply.
It would also be science-fiction. It is more like wondering how the future would be if we could travel faster than light. Interesting but not real science.
That is the subject of Gavin’s paper.
You keep repeating the same Straw Man fallacy. No one is suggesting that any pre-human “animal species had a brain capable of developing a technological society 300 million years ago” or at any other time in the past 4.5 billion years.
Gavin’s hypothesis draws its name from the Silurians, a fictional civilization from Doctor Who. The Silurian Period was 444-416 million years ago, a time when land animals first began to appear.
The Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) suggested that the Silurians were misnamed and should have been called the Eocenes (56-40 million years ago). However, the fictional status of Silurians has nothing to do with Gavin’s hypothesis.
That is the topic of Gavin’s paper and this thread…
Gavin’s post on Real Climate…
300 million years ago falls near the middle of the pre-hominid Phanerozoic Eon. Although any time from 4.5 billion to about 6 million years ago would be applicable to Gavin’s hypothesis.
Once again, you revert to the same Straw Man fallacy. No one is suggesting that a pre-hominid technological civilization existed. The point in Gavin’s paper is whether or not evidence of such a civilization would be clearly present in the geologic record. Gavin did write a science fiction short story based on this hypothesis. The fictional pre-human civilization in Under the Sun existed during the Paleocene (66-56 million years ago).
Urederra writes: “It would also be science-fiction.”
I believe the article is about a piece of science (speculative) fiction.
“…but not real science.”
Nothing prevents the use of real science, whatever exactly that is, in science fiction.
Yes, you are. Here:
You want to “win” by exhaustion.
This one is a keeper.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/995/415/b30.jpg
Good fracking grief! Learn how to read.
Gavin’s post on Real Climate…
I’ll actually support Dave here. How could we know if there was a sentient, technological dinosaur? The primary evidence I would use if that was the case would be evidence of total world domination. One mass species over the entire planet, subduing all other creatures.
As for other evidence, stone or metalwork wouldn’t really last over eons. Ceramics might, but I’m not certain absence of evidence is sufficient over that span of time. Even artificial atoms from nuclear tools or weapons wouldn’t mean much, as they might be from uranium deposits and would half-life away.
Another idea: One of the longest-lasting artifact of our technology will be our graveyards. The dead, if they manage to fossilize, clearly uneaten by scavengers, arranged neatly in rows (or in logical groupings, for those that use tombs), placed in the same position. Of course, this doesn’t work for any civilization that practices cremation or air burial. However, looking for a graveyard would probably be our best bet. It certainly requires fewer assumptions than SETI’s search.
Because we know enough about the structure of the brain, how it works and how it evolved to rule out the possibility of a sentient, technological dinosaur.
“How could we know if there was a sentient, technological dinosaur?”
just a (singular) sentient, technological dinosaur? we probably wouldn’t. Such an anomaly could easily pass under the radar. a whole society of sentient, technological dinosaurs? there would be artifacts pointing to their existence. That we haven’t found any such artifacts suggests there never was such a society. Unless they were isolated to some remote corner of the world that we haven’t explored yet, it is highly likely that they never existed.
Urederra, I am a firm believer in the ignorance of experts, especially those claiming to know about functions of internal organs from only the bone structure and circumstantial evidence. Do I think it likely, no. However, this asks the question. How could we tell?
John, now you are being ridiculous as well as ignoring the question. What artifacts could have survived multiple eons? No plastics or woodwork, definitely. Metalwork would have corroded, and stonework or ceramics would have eroded. Even canals might have been destroyed by plate tectonics.
Come on, guys, if we’re going to do thought experiments, at least try and play the game.
Ben, I am not a computer expert but I know enough about microprocessors to discard the possibility of playing Fortnite on a Sinclair Spectrum.
Here is the same problem, dinosaur brains were not evolved enough to create a technological society. And I am not talking about brain size, but about their internal structure. Looking at bone structures is only one of the tools used to study evolution, but there are many others. For instance, molecular phylogenetics uses genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominately in DNA sequences to build phylogenetic trees.
That way we can build a timeline of the evolutionary history of life, which goes from simple unicellular organisms to pluricellular organisms, from simple tissues to more intricate ones. The most developed organ is the brain, and the pyramidal neurones of the brain were one of the last subtypes of cells to appear in evolutionary history. You need a large amount of those highly interconnected neurones to have a brain capable of develop a technological society. That type of brain only appear on late mammals.
Ben, by your own logic since bones don’t survive eons (they would erode) we should have no remains of dinosaurs at all, and yet fossils exists. By that same token fossilized remains of artifacts would also be recoverable, if such a civilizations ever existed. No such artifacts have ever surfaced.
Does this guy really gets payed by the American public?
Amazing.
And that is exactly it. He is looking for another way to stay on the public payroll once his climate alarmism fades away. You’ve heard of diversifying your investment portfolio? Well he is apparently trying to diversify his grant application portfolio.
What is with these stupid little men and their stupid little beards?
http://exonews.org/mars-was-destroyed-by-interplanetary-nuclear-war-in-battle-described-in-bible/
He’s obviously been reading “evidence” elsewhere, plus what ex Brit isn’t a Whovian ?
So what about all the underground cities that abound in Turkey, Italy, Spain and the ME?
These show evidence of both great antiquity, and the signs of being dug out using sophisticated excavating machinery.
For example, check out the lost city of Petra in Jordan.
Petra was never a “lost city”. And it’s not really that old, only about 2,000 years.
The underground cities you mention are also not that old, hundreds to thousands of years old.
If you have evidence that they were dug out with anything other than shovels and picks, please present it.
I notice the paper was in the Journal of Astrobiology. Schmidt was one of the 2 authors. Government money must have been spent on this. He has now gone one step too far . This will be his downfall. Once the public finds out that the head of a division of NASA (that has been putting out scare stories about global warming) is actually searching for the remnants of aliens on this planet, the true firestorm will begin and it it wont be warming that will heat his ass.
The editors of the Journal of Astrobiology and the reviewers are the true fools here, letting this drivel be printed.
Why would you assume that an advanced civilization would be the same as ours?
Suppose that a civilization became expert at biological processes. They would develop trees that would automatically grow into the shape of buildings. link Their food production and recycling could be accomplished in a square yard per ‘person’. They might be very healthy and happy, completely self sufficient, and because of advanced recycling, leave almost no trace of their existence.
a perfectly acceptable thought exercise. what evidence would you have to find to falsify or disconfirm
the hypothesis that humans are the first technologically advanced civilization on this planet?
All evidence can be doubted ( because evidence is never proof; it is evidence), but it’s a good idea to sketch out what would make your change your mind about the conjecture that man is the first intelligent technologically advanced creature to inhabit this planet.
How to find answers in questions:
“what evidence would you have to find to falsify or disconfirm the hypothesis that humans are the first technologically advanced civilization on this planet?”
The answer, of course, is advanced technology that can be shown to precede the appearance of humans.
Wow, did YOU just say that?
“All evidence can be doubted ( because evidence is never proof; it is evidence), but it’s a good idea to sketch out what would make your change your mind”
And no evidence is enough for you to keep pushing the manmade global warming fantasy? While rejecting every skeptical argument against CO2 as a climate driver because there is no evidence of AGW and therefore no disaster looming?
You really are a true believer. You are living proof that AGW is a religion.
Mosher is just a contrarian, what ever someone says he goes the opposite way. He might be better off if he went both ways.
“He might be better off if he went both ways.”
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
MarkW: Good catch. We do not want to offend the contrarians who present as silurians. And vice-versa.
A graph that had not been adjusted would be enough to convince me. And if it had error bars…well, it would indicate true silurian-ness.
a perfectly acceptable thought exercise. what evidence would you have to find to falsify or disconfirm
the hypothesis that humans are the cause of catastrophic climate change on this planet?
Fixed that for ya Mosh.
“because evidence is never proof”
Never thought I’d see you admit that.
This is the QED in the disproof of AGW… The fictonal Anthropocene and the entire set of anthropogenic fingerprints are functions of resolution.
We don’t even break out of the Cenozoic noise level.
For Schmidt’s and Frank’s hypothesis of CO2 destroying early humans to be correct that would mean it happened around 50 million years ago. The problem is that they couldnt have come from outer space as the distances are just too far.
Based on the CO2 and temp graphs that is when both were high. The dinosaurs appeared 240 million years ago. Man could not have appeared before that time cause evolution takes a longer time period than that. They could not have existed during the time of the dinosaurs (T- rex being one big reason why) Dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago so it couldnt have happened before that. So they had to evolve between 50 and 66 million years ago. 16 million years is not long enough to start from scratch to develop a society that was so advanced as to emit that much CO2.The fossil records do not show any mankind before 7.25 million years old. And yet we have good fossil records of the dinosaurs. So based on that logic the null hypothesis cannot be rejected. Therefore the whole idea is one unbelievably bad science study.
They aren’t hypothesizing that CO2 destroyed early humans or even that a pre-human advanced civilization existed.
The hypothesis is that little or no evidence of a pre-human advanced civilization would be preserved in the geologic record. For the first time in his professional career, Gavin is right.
The quality of the fossil record of dinosaurs is unkowable. We don’t know if we have discovered fossils of 90%, 50% or less than 1% of dinosaur species.
https://m.phys.org/news/2015-08-good-bad-fossil-dinosaurs.html
Interstellar travel looks possible at least in principle.
In the 1950s the Manhattan scientists developed Project Orion, a space ship propelled by atomic bombs. The most powerful design considered, the momentum limited H-bomb version, would have been capable of accelerating to a few percent of the speed of light then decelerating at the end of the journey – fast enough to travel to another star system in less than a human lifetime.
A few tens of millions of years of this kind of technology would be long enough to colonise the galaxy.
Eric if intelligent life came here from a distant system then they would have colonised as they went along, in a similar way to the Pacific islanders .
I have observed a UFO travelling at a speed beyond anything humans have built, obviously I have nothing more to say.
If there is no evidence that would be preserved then why would you bother looking for it?
Alan Tomalty “If there is no evidence that would be preserved then why would you bother looking for it?”
To confirm your assumption that no evidence was preserved. But it might just be an excuse to get out for a weekend of adventure.
The following is a direct quote from the paper.
“Some similarities would be expected if the main effect during any event
was a significant global warming, however caused. Furthermore, there is evidence at many of these
events that warming was driven by a massive input of exogeneous (biogenic) carbon, either as CO2
or CH4. ”
Schmidt is trying to pin the huge amounts of CO2 in the past record to man. The problem is that there were too many different ages when CO2 was large. Gavin’s next thesis will be that there were many times when mankind disintegrated all caused by an advanced civilzation emitting too much CO2. Schmidt has now gone around the bend. Madness has set in. Ted Cruz should be alerted by this new development.
Whilst this all seems (very) unlikely, we are looking at the idea of past civilisations as a replica of our own. In that resect we imagine them to have cars or computers or other physical items which would leave traces of their existence.
Tales abound of places like Atlantis and if the peoples were mostly agrarian and life revolved round art rather than building advanced physical objects, then few traces may remain especially if we are talking about pre ice age. Mind you, for their not to be any traces would insinuate we are talking about a relatively few places and relatively few people.
Do bear in mind that Gavin was a student at Oxford University and would have been exposed to many British sci fi series including Doctor Who and places like Stonehenge and Avebury are just down the road.
tonyb
Heck, I grew up on Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee)… and I’ve only been to the UK once in 2006.
Looking for the Silurian demon industrialization-caused-failed-civilization…kinda’ like waiting for
greenhouse in reverse. Why not look instead at the -on-the-record social-catastrophe due to
famine, compounded by low energy, low tech means of production, Gavin?
Famine throughout history has been a widespread and common occurrence. Wikipedia has
collated a long list of famines from way back. There are the great famines of India, 1022-1033-
1052, fer example, that wiped out entire provinces, the 1064 famine and outbreak of the plague
in France which killed 100,000 people.In Europe in 1816-17, the year without a summer, 65000
people died, and as recently as the 1840’s, four famines in China killed 45 million people.
Check out the last famine in the West, post the Industrial Revolution, Gavin.
Wow, too soon after the passage of Art Bell. “East of the Rockies we have Gavin S with confirmation of aliens from the Pleiades galaxy populating the earth long before the epoch of homo sapiens “
+10, lol
Indeed, I left a similar note above.
Although Art Bell tended to only have guests with three names, so Gavin A. Schmidt might have to fill out a bit, i.e., Linda Moulton Howe:
http://www.earthfiles.com/
I think that the postings above have not really thought this all the way through. (Naturally, I attribute great insight and analysis to myself.)
Imagine a civilization on earth three hundred years from now.
What buildings from the present era would they see?
If they went into a library, (if they still exit), what books from today would still exist?
If they were to consider out current history, what would their source of information be? Would they believe CNN or Fox?
Or would they be looking at old hard drives, wondering what they are, and what they were for.
The point is, that the further we are removed historically from events, the more their “reality” becomes based on speculation and interpretation of dubious bits of information.
So in this context, maybe earth was once colonized by Martians; how would we know? What evidence would still exist to prove it one way or the other?
“What buildings from the present era would they see?”
Hell, we can even detect mere holes from Stonehenge, you think in 300 years a civilization won’t find our cities, foundations of our building, subways and huge hole in mountains were roads are running, etc. ? If it doesn’t, it isn’t a “civilization”, then.
We don’t know how to read “linear A”, but we can recognize it as a writing. You think in 300 years or even 300 000 years a civilization won’t be able to do that?
Life leave traces. Bones, ceramics, dung… So does civilization and colonization. If some alien form space came, we would know by now. We would be one of them, actually, as no primate who mastered fire a few millennia ago would had been a match against a space-faring civilization.
So this then would go to my previous comment: what is the story about the vast underground cities?
Apparently some of them have been dated to hundreds of thousands of years old.
Caves of Steel.
William, I call BS on your claims. Please cite evidence.
William April 17, 2018 at 4:15 am
No underground city has been dated to hundreds of thousands of years old by any valid method.
Chimp:
No date in either archaeology or geology is reliable. The most charitable thing we can say is that such dates are the best guess based on wild speculation.
As you are probably aware, archaeologists, geologists and egyptologists are still in wild disagreement as to the age of the Sphinx.
Having said that, I have seen hollowed out granite mountains with attached staircases. Assuming that the granite weathered at around 2mm per thousand years (my estimate with absolutely no scientific foundation on my part), and the staircases started as square and horizontal, I have measured erosion as being around 45,000 years. I have measured window ledges at around 150,000 years and erosion channels in walls so badly degraded I couldn’t get any consistent measurement.
Similarly, I have seen vehicle tracks imprinted in what must have been soft mud at the time, and is now hard granitic type rock. (harder than sandstone, but softer than granite using my knife to scratch it) The tracks show clear evidence of a vehicle passing by and pushing the mud up over the side of the channel as it passed. Some of these tracks show a bulldozer type tread pattern. I have no idea how to date these tracks.
If “The Greens” and “PETA” get their way then THAT is EXACTLY what will happen !
“Humans are a cancer on the planet”………. apparently !
ANNiHILATION and OBLITERATION is the least that can be expected !
300 years of “Pol Pot” ( Cambodia or Khmer ) type LEADER-SHIP should do it nicely !
9 billion is obscene ! 500 million is about right ! Any volunteers ?
Intellectuals die first ! Followed by anyone else that may be useful or valuable to a society.
Then BREED from the remnants of THAT and see what sort of “civilisation” you end up with !
In 300 years time they wouldn’t know their knee from their elbow and questions about a previous
civilisation simply would not occur to them ! So it really becomes a non-event !
MarkW:
You could start with this link:
Then go to Youtube and search on “ancient underground cities Turkey”; you will get over 65,000 hits.
These are in addition to the ones I have visited in Spain, Italy, and Turkey.
The difficulty about the PETM as a big extinction is that it wasn’t. Practically nothing went extinct except some benthic foraminifera (bottom living micro iorganism).
Contrariwise most life-forms proliferated and spread like never before or since. A surprisng proportion of all living animal groups first show up during the PETM.
Gavin Schmidt, Bob Brown, what is it with these fanatical Green froot loops and aliens.
Green …the color of their god ….MONEY !
If an alien species that was technologically advanced enough to cross space from somewhere else ever arrived on Earth the question might be why did they leave or what happened to them? My theory is that they were living out the last days of their civilisation after their eco-loons persuaded them to give up technology because of climate change (sarc) on their home planet and a few last desperate refugees from this madness managed to escape in their vegetable fibre spacecraft to Earth, promptly to be wiped out by (take your pick) Toba, asteroid, boredom etc. Perhaps Schmidt should be careful what he wishes for.
Of course it is true that most museums do have some very odd things that turn up from time to time. But don’t forget the wicked students in the 19th century who made some crazy fossils to play a practical joke on their professor, who sadly completely fell for it to his acute public embarrassment.
William – Petra is not a lost city and we know exactly who lived there and when – it wasn’t alien life, just a people called the Nabateans.
It would be great to find some real evidence for alien contact and great fun speculating, but nothing convincing has yet turned up. At least, just to add to the general paranoia, nothing we’ve been told about…but it’s no good being paranoid, they’ll get you if they want to….
My reference to Petra relates to the fact that it is estimated that less than 1% of the site has been excavated.
It is known that the constructions go several stories underground, and extend over several square miles; not just the piddly bit that is shown to the tourists.
Nobody knows who constructed these buildings; however it is known that they were occupied by several waves of settlers over the millennia.
Furthermore, examination of the interior surfaces show the characteristics of power saw cuttings, angle grinder smoothing and rotary excavator digging. Assuming a rate of erosion of exposed surfaces of 2-3mm per thousand years, these buildings at Petra could be hundreds of thousands of years old.
Folks are confusing technology with intelligence. Humans have domesticated fire. Largely to compensate for our weaknesses. It is unlikely we will see Dolphins domesticate fire no matter how smart they are. Yet they appear smart enough to never have invented debt and taxes.
Is there intelligent life at GISS, is a more appropriate question!
Good question.
“Imagine a world now lost to us…” in Rod Serling’s voice.
Why assume the advanced civilization was carbon based. The most abundant element on the earths surface is silicon. The same stuff we make solar panels and computer chips out of.
All that sand you see on the beach. It is the remains of a vast civilization of solar powered AI robots that once inhabited the earth. Look no further the evidence is everywhere hiding in plain sight.
Because silicon can’t make the complex type of chemicals needed for life.
What is it about crustaceans as a vanished civilisation in contemporary fantasy fiction? Pratchett had Crabs, while Fforde has Lobsters…
Darnit, darnit, darnit. I warned them Silurians. I begged them. I said: “Get yourselves some CFLs and some carbon credits, and we’ll settle this whole thing down.” But did they listen? Nooooo. So now they have cooked their young lizard selves, and nobody is the wiser.
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You can see where this is going, can’t you? If they can find the slimmest, tiniest, merest fragment of an intimation that this wild theory of Silurian environmental suicide is true, then they will use it to justify their current set of fantasies: “See, it happened before, and now we’re doing it again . . . we’ve GOT to do something . . . if nothing else, then to prove we’re smarter than lizards.”
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Frankly, I wouldn’t be astonished to discover that what we’re witnessing here is the afterglow of a “three pipe problem” . . . and I’m not talking tobacco.
There would be some evidence surely? No, no! It’s ok, no evidence required, Gav is a climatologist.
He has a model that shows a couple of extinction events that couldn’t be due to anything else (someone suggested asteroids but we put the DOJ on to them). It projected that we would find ancient writing that showed far superior technology than today and the evidence found so far is within 95% CI (now that we are 95% certain rather than 90%). We should find the remaining evidence long after I have died from obesity on a Bermuda beach.
My BS metre just went seriously off FSD. i want some of what they are smoking.
Please, don’t mention Dr Who. He has been turned into a tranny by the SJW running the BBC. They should never have been allowed to reboot the show, which was killed off originally in 1989.
Of course there were previous civilisations that exceeded our own in development! Otherwise we would not be finding out of place artifacts. OOPART it is called.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/17-out-of-place-artifacts-said-to-suggest-high-tech-prehistoric-civilizations-existed_1767391.html
Some existed so long ago all traces of them have disappeared due to the way the Earth recycles its continents. Given the number of tools found in coal mines and limestone, the default position has to be that such civilisations existed. CO2 will not have wiped them out because CO2 has too little influence on the atmosphere. It is far more likely a nuclear incident or asteroid was the cause of their demise.
And who is to say that the ‘aliens’ are not in fact people who departed this planet for other worlds long ago?
The idea that ‘Man” evolved a few tens of thousands of years ago is incompatible with the physical proofs of earlier well-developed technological civilisations. The Texas hammer and the Oklahoma iron pot are very unlikely to have formed underground spontaneously or by someone brought here using an Improbability Drive.
I hope to heck that you are being sarcastic and haven’t been taken in by that nonsense.
What the heck is out of place about a 2000 year old battery or Chinese earthquake detector.
Most of the rest are easily explainable geologic processes. I couldn’t force myself to go all they way down that list of nonsense.