Why not super-intelligent, ocean-dwelling algae? What artifacts might they produce, and how would we find them at the bottom of the ocean? We can see right now how algae blooms deprive the ocean of oxygen, and we can see several instances in history where there was almost no oxygen in the ocean at all.
The article and a number of posts here talk about ceramics and plastics and fossil fuels, but those may all be uniquely human approaches to civilization. We may not have the right receptors to detect a proper civilization, even when we’re staying at several feet of it right in the fossil record.
Pretty well trod SF territory. Was de Camp the 1st? All cliches start with an original idea at one point. My favorite of this is Niven’s Protector origin.
What interests me more than a prehistoric society with all our attendant flaws and destructive habits is the possibility of beings that had our depth of memory and imaginative faculty, language, art, all of it–except because of the climate of their age, they never really had to bother with burning fuels and never became the kind of synthesizers/makers that we are, so they left no discoverable footprint.
There’s places in America where you can still find flint arrowheads lying around in the woods.
And maybe lying around is the key point there. What would 50 million years of wind and rain do to a flint arrowhead? I have to imagine it would be reduced to a smooth pebble, if not sand and dust. Most of our tech is made of iron and steel, and that barely survives for a few thousand years before crumbles into rust, even in perfect conditions.
Certainly it seems likely that some of this stuff, if it ever existed, would have been preserved in tar pits or silt or any of the other mechanisms that gave us dinosaur fossils. But would we have found it? Dinosaur fossils are pretty rare, and they lived and died for almost 200 million years. For a species–even a prolific, successful species–that thrived for a mere hundred thousand years, the number of artifacts that were (a) preserved (b) in a place that we’ve tried digging up would be statistically tiny.
Even so, it seems unlikely, as the study author says. But it’s not so easy to definitively rule out.
Ray Nelson and John Carpenter got there a long time before Icke perverted the idea into his own anti-Semitic fantasies, as did the show V. I don’t think we should give him even the slightest amount of credit for it.
I was once attacked non-ironically here for using the “lizard people” trope. I think there are people who associate it with Icke, and highlighting whenever appropriate that he hijacked it might help deprive him of credit.
But not all things get worn down to dust - by definition, fossils are remains that happen to have been well preserved through hundreds of millions of years. We don’t just have fossil bones but also leaves, insect wings and bodies - all kinds of extremely delicate things have managed to luck out and been preserved here and there.
Think about the sheer quantity of artefacts that we have littered the Earth with. It doesn’t make sense that none of the artefacts from a dinosaur-age civilization would have been fossilized. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking stone tools or microchips, in the right environment anything can be preserved. If sapient saurians existed and made hard tools, at least some of those tools would have survived. It doesn’t make sense that none of the places where fossils have been preserved were places where the sapient saurians ever went.
What a lode of crap. We can find fossils of something as fragile as dinosaur eggs from up to 190 million years ago, but we somehow missed an industrialized society?
The argument isn’t necessarily that none were preserved, but that few enough were preserved that we haven’t found any yet.
The earth holds many more living humans right now than it ever did living dinosaurs, but the total number of dinosaurs that ever lived is far greater than the total humans that ever lived, just because they were around for so much longer. That means many more chances for them to win the double lottery of being both preserved and discovered.
So a few basic problems with the paper, basic but fundamental. First, and this is more an aside, but it’s a core irritation of mine, the Drake Equation has no relevance. It may be well known, but what appears to have been entirely forgotten is that Drake himself repeatedly reminded people that the equation was just a thought puzzle and had no validity when it came to actual statistical modeling. It’s painful to watch people evoke it like it meant anything more.
Secondly, while the essay does allude briefly to a small handful of industrial chemical products, it gets nowhere close to dealing with the true impact industrial civilization has on the chemistry of the world. Iron alloys alone create unique signatures that can easily last millions of years. If we took the city of New York right now and pulverized it, I mean completely reduced it to dust, then just swirled that all in with the surrounding soil and the like then even after several million years of erosion and such, a modern geologist could sift through some resulting layer of remains and still be all, “wait, what the hell is this?”
And that’s before we even look into low orbit. While most of the space trash will eventually fall back or drift away, depending on events, it all won’t just magically vanish. Had there been a civilization anything like our industrial notion, when we started moving out we would have also started discovering the remains of the earlier round. The idea that anyone else ever industrialized this planet and somehow managed to have every single trace of it covered up is extremely far fetched.
