The Silurian Hypothesis: What Traces Of Humanity Will Be Left 50 Million Years From Now?
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- čas přidán 11. 06. 2022
- The Silurian Hypothesis contemplates how long the ruins of a civilization would be detectable, on Earth or even other worlds, and if we could ever know if a world had once been inhabited by a technological civilization.
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The Silurian Hypothesis: What Traces of Humanity will be Left 50 Million Years from Now?
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 346a, June 12, 2022
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Editors:
David McFarlane
Graphics:
Darth Biomech
Jarred Eagley
Cover Art:
Jakub Grygier www.artstation.com/jakub_grygier
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.com/creator - Věda a technologie
As it happens, Lovecraft's version of Earth's deep history IS the deep backstory of Conan's Hyborian Age. It doesn't come up all that often, but Lovecraft and Howard knew each other (by correspondence, neither ever left their home area of the US and both died young at about the same time) and officially considered themselves to be writing in the same world, and Conan did reach a few eldritch abominations.
Facts
Wait seriously? This is so cool, what stories of Conan illustrate this best?
@@vansdan. Right, I need to know more.
Interesting
with a 65 million year head start on humans....tech-savvy Dinosaurs would have colonized the entire Milky Way by now🤯🤯🤯🤯
The Silurians greatest technological acheivements were in advanced biodegradability. They got so good at it that they had to move their entire civilization someplace lifeless just to get their paperclips to last through the week.
Man...That was awesome! Can I get some of what you are smoking? That's gotta be some good stuff! I mean Silurians don't even use Paperclips!
@@jasonwilde197 Clearly you meant to say their paperclips were and are still being made out there somewhere by the race of sentient Von Neumann machines that consider it the first commandment of their Silurian Creators to, essentially, go forth and leave a geologic layer of paperclips everywhere they visit.
I once used a cactus spike to pin papers together. It lasted longer than a week.
I predict some of our skyscrapers will be found in fossils. We might have left too big of a footprint not to recognize humans. I also predict cats will because super intelligent and human dumb current natural order flips but cats will think they were always “top dog” due to the Sphinx in Egypt.
That's actually a decent cosmic horror story: a civilization that becomes so efficient that're reduced to near extinction. Set it during those waning millenia where some are willing to embrace the unknown and preserve what they can while others are desperate to revert to older organic tendencies to propogate and expand.
Australia is the most geologically stable (inactive) landmass on Earth, as it is the flattest continent with many of the oldest rocks and fossils.......I propose building monuments for future beings to find in the middle of the outback. Make it so.
A Big Gold plated Titanium Time Capsule inside Ayers Rock would Last for Millions of Years unless it gets Vapourised by a Meteor impact..
Shouldn't we build them in the moon?
@@oliviamaynard9372 right? like a tungsten cube on the near side of the moon buried under 100m of luner dust? it would show up on ground penetrating radar but be safe from tectonics and a vast majority of meteor strikes.
@@npcthufirhawat9955 You would also need to bury with it a massive form of beacon, to show to intelligence there is something there. Say like something that is going to distort the local magnetic field considerably, so that intelligent and curious ones will dig down deep to find this strange source.
We could build a pyramid to generate piezoelectric power 🔋 as a sign of life
I loved how Arthur C Clarke tackled this issue by having the aliens bury an artefact on the moon. It would survive for millions of years and by design couldn’t be found until we were at a certain stage in our evolution. The man was a genius.
What I liked about 2001 at least (not the sequel) was that the aliens were transcendent in some way. Maybe the artefacts was a thing or a tool, or maybe just a manifestation like a portal required to engage with transcendent beings.
The plot about Europa spoiled it. Nothing transcendent about wanting to fire Jupiter up. We might do it at some point.
@pyropulse I didn’t know that. I thought it was Clarke as he wrote the novel.
@@Bbq7272 yeah 2001 was the best out of them all. I couldn’t even finish 3001 or whatever it was called. 2010 was ok, but nowhere near as good as the original.
Maybe the aliens have higher standards than the moon and hid some wild artifact in the ort cloud. Not only do we have to be better than apes sitting on top of repurposed ordnance, but we also have to be smart enough to find a needle in our solar haystack.
@@MU-oi1su apes on a bomb. So true lol.
I see cyborg dinosaurs: I get exited.
I'm a simple man.
The knock against any past techno civilization is that it was easy for us to find natural metals and fuels in the ground. Any previous civilization would already have taken the easy to get to materials.
unless it was so long ago, geologic processes recycled all the metals, or allow for all the plastic/hydrocarbon polymers we placed in concentrated locations (landfills) to become compressed and broken down back into its constituent hydrocarbons so as to make it seems as if it came from natural sources
You do know that divergent and convergent plate movement is a thing, right? Material is shuffled through plate tectonics. As far as the fuel, it's likely that the previous civilization is an appreciable contributor to the hydrocarbons we extract right now.
I don't think either are a good argument against it.
That assumes they would have used metal for the technology. It seems a no brainer that any advanced civilization would want to use metals, but if they somehow figured out how to use bioengineering instead of metals, they could accomplish many of the same things (at least many similarly advanced things) through wet computers and clever use of organic factories and such.
Or maybe our focus on the physical world is misguided and there's actually a huge amount of 'stuff' in some sort of metaphysical plane that we can't even comprehend at the moment.
Granted, these do sound ridiculous, but aren't impossible and should be explored I think.
@@elijahclaude3413 platonic idealism makin a come back!
Everyone makes this oil argument. Truth be told our instruments today couldnt detect our current 150+ years of hydro carbon burning 2 million years out. Any detection of it would be written off as volcanic activity or meteor impact.
To keep historical time just a bit in perspective, it is useful to remember that the Egyptian Pyramids were older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us!
Not actually true. The timing of the pyramids is inflated based on manetho who was criticized by other contemporary historians for being inconsistent and careless
Also, we struggle to even understand modern human history. We start taking guesses about what happened anything more than a couple thousand years ago. We've lost so much human knowledge - we don't even know how the pyramids were constructed much less why. Acting like we know what happened before humans were on this planet is ridiculous.
@@chronik2661 We know how they were constructed, and possibly why. People are too absorbed with Egypt, we know tons about them and their society. But what about their contemporaries in modern day Peru? The Andean people that built great temples and lived at the same time, yet receives so little attention. We know almost nothing about them.
@@chronik2661 dude, we're taking guesses about what's happening right now, or about what's happened a year ago. 20 years? Decision-makers start dying, things get blurry, information gets embellished, erased, lost... 100 years? That's basically the realm of historical myth. 1000? I don't think I can at all be ever certain that the officially accepted version of truth pertaining to events a thousand years ago can even be proven to be true. Not that they are, but that they can be proven to be.
Will Smith is coming for you!
The concept is much older than the 2018 paper. Back in the 1990's some archeologists studied the remains of US camps from world war 2 and found that even after 50 years they were largely overtaken and difficult to find, even when we knew exactly where they were.
This topic fascinated me. I know how unlikely it is but given that it took less than 10 million years to go from weak but clever animals to computers and space flight I can’t help wondering.
Everyone likes to act like human exceptionalism is a cardinal sin, ignoring how exceptional they are compared to any known thing.
@@nothingnobody1454 Actually humans are not exceptional anymore than any other species. Only 50 thousand years ago there were also neanderthals and denisovans that were able to breed with homo sapiens. There have been also homo floriensis. They were all very intelligence with arts, tool making and even burials for death. This means that intelligence in earth is not some one of kind very rare thing.
Actually, the issue is that no one knows how likely it is.
We are still weak and clever animals. Too delicate and squishy, and we are forced to devour other living beings to survive- it has to be destiny to become machines. Unless there are sentient beings powered by photosynthesis,or chemosynthesis
65 million year head start....if a species of dinosaur had gone hyper-tech, they would have colonized the entire Milky Way by now
One interesting theory for an ultra-ancient civilisation on Earth - and why we haven't seen evidence of it - is that it was based primarily around coastal areas, in deep time. If you think of Pangea, for example, the coastal areas of the super land-mass look like they would have been the most habitable, but also that they would have been subject to erosion and/or subduction - hence, no evidence survives (either eroded utterly away, or buried under 50 kilometres of rock).
I also think Snowball Earth theories give us the capacity to imagine life having all but ended with a limited array of microscopic life having survived for the regeneration. Giant ice sheets can also erase a lot of things
There could be a lot of explanations. Much of the earth hasn't been excavated, we are still finding the ruins of entire cities in the amazon.
An ancient advanced civilization also doesn't mean that civilization colonized the entire planet and had 9 billion people.
Coastal areas of Pangea would have become mountainous as Ophialites acreeted to the coastline. Continental crust dose not subduct, this is a naive misunderstanding of plate-tectonics, the contenental crust is practically as old as the Earth itself. To have no evidence left the civilization would need to be like Aliens from the Abyss who live in deep ocean trenches where subduction is going to happen.
40% of earths population lives only 100 km from the coasts right now, when we are much less dependent on waterways. So yea you can definitely imagine the entire population spread around coastlines and the loss of all their objects. We don’t even know what’s at the bottom of our oceans and it’s a fact that ocean height was 460 feet lower than it is today only about 20,000 years ago.
Nope, I don't buy it.
I just don't believe there would be absolutely no trace anywhere of anything they had crafted.
Not even necessarily a physical or mechanical object like litter pollution, sunken watercrafts, or a plastic toy meant to float being found frozen in the arctic, there would be _synthetic chemicals_ still around, like today's pesticides and microparticles of plastics.
Even if they lived in a time before Pangaea, and all their territory had been subjuncted under our current tectonic plates and melted down back to the Earth's core, there would still be _Something._
The documentary movie Life After People asks the question: "If humans were to suddenly disappear, how long would evidence of human society last?" The movie concludes that everything would be buried within a few thousand years, with the possible exception of the faces carved in granite on Mount Rushmore. They might last a few million years since granite takes a long time to erode.
They ignored our satellites in geostationary orbit. Some of them will still be orbiting millions of years from now.
Keep in mind that people die in accidents and prehistoric people died in accidents A LOT. If someone falls in a cave and drowns in anoxic water, there likely isn't a rescue mission and fossilization becomes incredibly likely.
@william sands
I think his point is that even a race that deliberately completely obliterated their dead would still have dead that were unrecoverable. Bodies stay on Mt Everest because it isn't realistic to recover them.
Back in the 90's I played SimEarth. I was an undergraduate biology student and for me it was a wonder.
My personal challenge was to raise an intelligent race, "win" the game by having them fly their cities into space, then developing another intelligent race to do the same. It was hard because I have used up almost all oil reserves for the first race. Maybe energy production and dissipation is where we have to look out.
I mean, if their tech path included fire and metallurgy, not much of easy coal, oil and gas would be available, we would have to dig deep to find them.
That is the big risk for humanity too, I feel. Isaac is probably right that we don't really have the technology to wipe out humanity completely even now, but we do have the ability to wipe out human civilisation, in spades . Last reasonably-backed-up argument I heard was that just 6 modern nukes was enough to tip the global environment well beyond able to support current, or recent, human civilisation! If the (almost inevitable) survivors are kicked back far enough, there are almost no surface-accessible resources left to restart with, and those are needed to get back down to the deeper-buried resources we are largely relying on these days. Doesn't mean a rebuild/recovery is off the books, but it would likely require an quite different, probably slower and harder, path than the one we got.
I wonder about something similar. You know, EVs were among the first automobiles in the USA before oil was discovered in Texas (oil is a fantastic energy source). What if an early civilization (or late in your case) never had to deal with our heavy pollution era, when wood and animal fat wouldn't suffice, they just skipped straight to nuclear or some other advanced power source.
@@MU-oi1su I would call your's the chemistry pathway.
I am caught in a confirmation bias bcs I can't imagine a civilization coming of age without steel. Aluminium from Al2O3 is far too problematic to produce, as opposed to Fe2O3. Same as cement. All structural materials I can imagine need lots of energy.
The problem with chemistry / nuclear is that it needs structural materials.
Energy starved societies would put a high price on tools that can be produced only by burning copious amounts of fuel, slowing technical advancements, such as power hammers, foundries and steam engines.
Another confirmation bias I have is the intelligent population coefficient. 90% will have average intelligence, a few will be Beethoven, Gandhi, Madre Theresa and Einstein. The more breakthroughs needed, the more cities and bigger populations. But big civilizations need calories, joules and watts. To offset this we need lots of time, time that could be used to workout the chemistry for energy production and storage.
However I can't see how we get to PV or nuclear skipping power hungry structural materials.
Edit: come to think of it, CaO, NaOH, H2SO4 and HNO3, staple ingredients for all industry, also need huge amounts of energy to produce them.
@@BBBrasil Damn, that's true.
On a long enough timescale oil is renewable
Great topic! Key & Peele (paraphrase) “I became a vampire to see future cars”. I love to live +500y (healthy) to see Type 1 Civ
LOL love the healthy prerequisite.
As if it MIGHT come true so you had to sneak it in "just in case".
dude I can jump us to Type II with current technology
@@kingmasterlord You are misunderstanding what a Type I means.
With current tech we cannot control the weather, volcanos, earthquakes, etc...
You are FULL OF 💩
What about freeze your head to get resurrected in the future?
Good for 1 more vampier
We have a habit of hammering massive steel pipes tens of meters in to the ground in any village, town or city that has even a medium sizes building, as Isaac points out such things don't simply disappear from the geological record and would look exceedingly out of place even if all the iron rusts.
Pertwee's silurian episodes were some of the best stories. They were villains, but you actually felt bad for them after a while for the sheer loss they suffered from a simple mistake of not realizing the Earth may not warm back up enough to wake them.
I think one of the simplest ways to debunk this is coal seams. Large coal seams really only come from the Carboniferous period, as there was a relatively short time between when trees evolved and when organisms evolved to break down the lignin in them. So plant matter would just pile up in massive layers in the swamps of the time, which eventually became coal. Any civilization would be in massive need of energy, and coal is an intuitive, easily accessible start for that. With humanity's current coal consumption, we would only have a few hundred years of supply. So any civilization on earth millions of years ago would likely have depleted these coal seams, which would not be replenished to such a scale. Thus we would have a pretty obvious and worldwide lack of coal where there really should be some. It would be pretty ridiculous to assume an advanced species could arise before the Carboniferous as well, considering how simple most animal life was then (I mean tetrapods only came up to the land in the Devonian and were still relatively simple). And I highly doubt that any civilization would just ignore coal, after all fire is a very intuitive and important technology which helped launch humanity into civilization over thousands of years. Perhaps a civilization could have simply never made it to an industrial era but that kinda kills the point of this anyways.
Hmm, that’s a good point but consider this: What if there was another source of easy, consumable power that a previous civilization used which THEY depleted? And we don’t know about it because there’s none of it left?
The Archaean Hypothesis sidesteps this by placing the older civilization in the Archaean (that is, pre photosynthesis and oxygen atmosphere) Eon. No evidence because A) 2.5 billion years is a long time, and B) the durables weren't built to deal with an oxygenated atmosohere; it all rusted (or _oxidized,_ if you must.)
@@z_is_for_zombie7423 for example? What could it be? Why would they use it instead of coal? Why is there 0% of the putative source left? Note that until they developed nuclear and/or solar/geothermal/&c power they will be burning stuff in air and using the heat--what could this be that's easier to get and handle than coal, and won't change the isotope balance in the atmosphere?
Note that the source has to be easier to access than using a shovel to get coal to fit your supposition. :)
@@boobah5643 the biochemistry gets problematic for that one.
@@thekaxmax I dunno man. I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. Maybe they burned fossilized fairy farts of something. :P
I read a book to my nephew when he was little that was a fairly good story about a group of teenagers who go back in time 65 million years.
They discover two alien races living on Earth. One colony is conducting research on the flora and fauna of Earth and are interested in preserving it. The other colony is interested only in exploiting the natural resources of Earth, including the flora and fauna.
There is also a spectacular comet visible which considering what the kids know of Earth history is concerning. But the science team aliens assure the kids the comet will make a close approach to Earth in about a week, but there is a 100% chance it will miss.
There is a conflict between the two groups which the exploit aliens lose and they are forced to leave the Earth. However, on the way out the change the orbit of the comet so now, in less than a week the comet will strike the Earth on the north coast of what will one day be the Yucatan Peninsula. This location is possible the worst place on the planet such an impact could be. The biosphere will be badly damaged if not totally destroyed.
The kids assure the aliens that the biosphere will recover but everyone has to leave because the scientist aliens can't do anything to prevent the impact.
The scientist aliens take off and the kids return to their own time and everyone except the dinosaurs live happily ever after.
It was one of a series of books about a group of kids with the ability to turn into animals at will. It was a pretty fun series but I can't remember what it was called.
Animorphs? That would be a pretty huge plot for what I remember of Animorphs though
Good call! That's the plot of Megamorphs #2: In the Time of Dinosaurs. Those books are wild.
@@Rachel-im6yc I think that was it. I read a ton of them to my nephew. We both liked them.
I thought the idea of aliens living on Earth millions of years ago was pretty cool. As was the idea that the K-T extinction even was not an accident.
@@erictaylor5462 Well then, if you were a fan of "Babylon. 5", you may enjoy toying with the potential plot point that the Shadows had sent the asteroid that initiated the K-T extinction event. 😏
@@TheNoiseySpectator But that is not consistent with the Shadow philosophy. They promote strength through conflict.
Destroying a planet's biosphere would simply be a waste of time and resources.
Keep in mind, the Shadows are not evil. they don't destroy to just destroy.
Even if you don't agree with their philosophy they are no more evil than the Vorlons.
I like to think that even if everything we're made disappeared, we'd still leave our mark in plants and animals suddenly scattered across continents with no obvious way for them to have travelled that far.
Must drive returning Silurians nuts trying to figure that one out
Future scientists wondering how pug skeletons made their way all over
Retrovirus studies show that animals have traveled globally without human aid
@@cosmictreason2242 I think that's one of the biggest killers of the Silurian hypothesis, at least for an advanced civilization. Even if the civilization never domesticated animals, the freeloading animals like rats and cockroaches and outright parasites would show signs of expanding with the sapients.
There could still be evidence of old space farers in the asteroid belt, where old mining equipment is still there, covered with layers of dust, long powered down and inert, and orbiting with the rest of the rocks looking almost like them. Only being identified when they impact other rocks, with the metal, being composed of mined material, looking like just long buried rock to spectral survey, unless you look and see there are sealed spaces, and not natural concentrations of metals, there in places. Then looking to find the remains of long dormant machinery, and long dead reactors that are only slightly above background levels deep inside the composite rock layers.
Nice setting for a scifi story but for all the plotholes. Where are the abandoned moon & Mars colonies?
@@09Ateam Mars ones long buried under the polar ice, and lunar ones still undiscovered deep in the crust, buried for protection, and the entrances filled up by accumulated lunar dust and micrometeorite debris. We are talking millions of years, where even structures on airless bodies will erode somewhat, and all hollows filled with dust. Probably the only intact structures will be far out in the Oort cloud, basically almost at 3K, and with only interstellar dust acting on them to slowly erode and shape them.
Metal never 'looks like rock it was made from' under spectral analysis. Metal rich rocks hold thouse metals atoms in compounds of oxygen, sulfur or silicon which produce completly different spectral lines from pure metal. Your possibly thinking of isotopic analysis in which the metal still in raw ore would have the same signature as in a smelted piece of metal, but that analysis require pysical material to analize not just light. In any even a thin coatings of dust woulld easily obscure spectral analysis, and their exist asteroids with real naturally ocouring metal in them such as Vesta. So yes it would be very easy for artificial metalic constructs on their surface to have evaded notice.
Or, you could be feverish and hallucinating....get a hold of yourself.
@@lewis7515 He did say it was a fun idea to consider, not that it was something worth considering as a viable possibility, Lewis.😒
Do not be rude
I'm working on the marine works of a nuclear power station. We just finished the third of three tunnels, 2 of which will bring water in to the plant and one to let it out.
2 run about 3 miles out below the sea and one goes 1.5 miles.
The TBM's (tunnel boring machines) are not retrievable from a one ended tunnel and so they have been encased in concrete and left under the sea bed. I think these have a good chance of being around for geological time.
Well that's eerie and unsettling to think about. Thanks!
This is it with the orange cutter head. I fitted this cutter head by crane. It was 102,000 kg for the cutter alone.
czcams.com/video/BvozwNCpeJI/video.html
And they are one of dozens of buried TBMs. Three are buried in the middle of the channel tunnel for example.
The tunnels themselves will last millennia (even in a collapsed form).
I actually had this argument with someone on Reddit a few weeks ago. My position was "no way humanity's traces will last THAT long". You've just proven me wrong. Thank you, Isaac! Always good to challenge our own perspectives.
Maybe it was him. :P
A rare and exemplary instance of humility :) Good on you, friend. I’ll try to practice a little humility when I can today too.
20:50 He literally says he doesn't subscribe to the hypothesis but he also can't definitively rule it out, either.
@@paulrockatansky77 And I did rule it out, and that was my wrong. Not like I want to show off, but I think I know more about the discussion *I* had than you do.
There’s no answer either way. There are some scientists who do believe and have shown why human civilization wouldn’t be detectable after some amount of time. The further back, the less likely it would be detectable. After some time, continental drift will subsume most of the surface, with everything on, or fairly close to the surface being totally obliterated. Ice ages scour entire continents clean. Continents disappear underneath other continents and become molten. So a few tens of millions of years from now, it could be that nothing will be left to find.
So we can’t say one way or the other. It depends on the time scale.
Stephen Baxter, in his book Evolution, has a chapter that dispenses with the "advanced" part of the Silurian hypothesis of past civilizations. The characters are primitive by our standards, but simply more advanced than their contemporaries. Baxter's paradigm is far more plausible and intriguing. Truly unfindable. One of my favourite "what if" scenarios in fiction.
Does anyone remember a novel called "The Toolmaker Koan"? It's a bit dated now I'd imagine, but it's about an Alien AI that unwittingly causes the end of a dinosaur civilisation and then waits in the outer solar system (pretending to be Pluto if I remember correctly) for a new tech using species to evolve.
@John Grigg damn, these stories i need to see
One can imaging the sorts of heated and imaginative debates between future post-human scholars (and even the Sci-Fi community) reconstructing our civilization from very meager remains!
Much like the debates we have today about "lost" civilizations, or mythical civilizations that might just be true. Places like the underwater ruins around Japan, or the underwater city they've found off the coast of India that's referenced in the... Ramayana, I think?...and is mentioned as being over 10,000 years old. Given that cities could only have arisen in these places during the last Ice Age when the global sea level was a couple hundred feet lower, and couple that with the fact that humans tend to build their largest cities next to sea coasts, it really makes you wonder how many cities - or even whole civilizations - were lost when the glaciers melted and forced people away from the coast and into new, possibly hostile, lands.
"what's the meaning of this piece of high art? There are no fossil records of this strange species of rotund, green-skinned humanoid. Yet they appear again and again in pieces of digital arts..."
A poor neo-Corvus scholar tearing out his own head plumage over the an ancient Human relic, not knowing that his research fundings and career progression depended heavily over his understanding of dank Shrek memes.
@@khango6138 The ancients believed in reincarnation which their theologians called either "sequels" or "reboots!"
@@Zebred2001 Shrek 5000: An Unexpected Star Trek Into Darkness
The fun thing is wondering what will make us exceptional. Will it be our satellites and desire to know what's beyond our world, even at great cost and risk? Will it be how crazy we were about k-pop? *Will it be our weapons,* and just invested we were in war? We might appear to them as an ancient civilization that seemed to always be centuries ahead of their own in integrating its latest technologies into weapons far beyond their reckoning, for reasons that someone unfamiliar with our brains and culture would not understand.
Call me morbid, but I think it's pretty damn cool imagining a startled alien discovering our existence by coming upon one of our greatest battlements, eroded and near reclaimed by the elements. And then seeing that even in this state, it was engineered with an intent and intelligence recognizable as hostile, and far beyond what they've ever been willing or capable of putting toward a weapon of their own. Or maybe they'd be blissfully ignorant of what it's like to fight with their own kind, and think a battleship was some kind of celebratory boom launcher to commemorate our ancestors.
"Missile detection computers? ICBMs? Tracking instruments? What else could they be for but a carefully choreographed sea festival? What a beautiful fireworks display that must have been, if only those humans were still around for us to see it."
I think I'd prefer that on principle, but who knows what may find us, or even if?
I used to think I was weird for loving concepts like this, but after I discovered your channel, I was so happy.
Heh yeah... I only just discovered this channel today, and I fully agree with you
It's nice to know that you're not alone
Cool topic! The Giants Causeway _is_ natural according to Roger of "Mudfossil University", he asserts that the reason the stones are hexagonal is because they're scales. Giant scales on a massive fossilized beast. Check out his channel if you're into pareidolia because that is literally all it is. Rust on a stone because of the iron content? Nah! It's dried blood from ancient creatures! It's hours of facepalming fun!
I've watched Roger. Thought about setting up a gofund me to pay for someone to make sure he takes his meds. At the very least to find out what he did with the rest of that poor bird!
@@mherndon lol
Nothing about a silicate lifeform?
Isaac: It feels like a stretch that we wouldn't have at least one fossil that stuck out like a sore thumb.
Hallucigenia: You rang?
that has context now, though.
Thank you for the always amazing content! My fav channel on CZcams!
Thanks John :)
Same; keep it coming Mr. Arthur!!
Same 😁
@@isaacarthurSFIA Cambridge University Press published a research article "Planetary biotechnospheres, biotechnosignatures and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence". The article discusses in detail what artefacts an ancient non-human civilization could leave behind and explains how some of the artefacts could still be functional. Interestingly, the U.S. news outlets are somehow forbidden to mention this article.
I read a hypothesis that if we meet our demise and intelligent life evolves again on Earth in a few million years, they could never have an industrial revolution because the easy to access hydrocarbons have been used up already, by us.
Truly aincent intelligent life that occurred BEFORE easy to access hydrocarbons had formed is an interesting hypothesis as well. They could have been every bit as clever as us, yet been limited to a hunting and gathering lifestyle by plant availability and/or limited to basic agriculture based on lack of available energy to industrialize.
I think that is slightly flawed, because humans have not changed very much in that time. All that changed was a steadily growing centralized databank of knowledge. If we met an ancient human we would be very much the same, except my basic understanding of science would blow the top minds out of the water back then. But the physical mind has barely changed. My point being, that a civilization's access to energy might actually be the main factor of what we see as intelligence, and really a lot of life might be just as "smart" as us, but just cannot manipulate tools/ energy.
@@clintonleonard5187 not to mention literacy and overlapping generations. Take away the inherited data and humans become fast running plains apes
I think the hydrocarbon problem is provocative, but most of the oil and natural gas reserves we have now are due to the lush biologics from that time period decomposing. so it's not entirely a finite resource. even if it were there are other avenues of energy production uncoupled from the hydrocarbon chain, nuclear, tidal, atmospheric, solar, current life fats like whale oil for humanity in the late 19th century etc. the ore quandary is more of a delema but the limited amount of oxide encased ore only formed geologically recently (within the time frame of an oxygen rich atmosphere) a minority of ore bodies are sulphide entrapped but their enrichment is more energy intensive. figure all the iron we have mined and have currently exposed will return to oxide ore within 10000 years our junk yards may look like rich deposits of oxide ore bodies.
But then the counter-argument is just as easy: We are the ones limited by hydrocarbons because more easily accessible and efficient sources were depleted before us.
That also assumes that technological development is a straight line like if it was a video-game.
Following our tech path no, but technological development isn't a straight line or even really a line.
Egyptian and Mayan pyramids are most probably analogous to convergent evolution: people with roughly similar capabilities finding similar solutions to similar problems (the pyramids in Nubia are a different story altogether).
Yeah when folks talk about how "weird" it is that the Mesoamericans, Chinese, and Egyptians all built pyramids it's pretty clearly convergent. After all, what's the easiest shape to build really tall? A pyramid or a mound. That's what you get when you pile up a lot of rocks or earth in a stable fashion. Not to mention those pyramids don't even serve the exact same purposes or have the same specific shapes. It's a good reminder that when noticing parallels between societies it's worth just asking "could this just be the path of least resistance to doing X monumental architecture?"
all three are very different in construction and purpose, and the Egyptian and Mayan ones have a thousand year gap between their constructions times. The convergent evolution is 'what is the only solution to wanting a construction more than 2 stories high at this time? A hill!'. Add Silbury Hill to that list--same desire, same solution.
@@thekaxmax It doesn't need to happen in same time to be convergent.
@@TheScourge007 I don't recall the Chinese having pyramids…
Another thing: the Mesoamericans were surrounded by volcanoes, mountains that are rather conical/pyramidal. So it stands to reason they were already well familiar with the shape.
@@John_Weiss Yep they do. Mostly around Xi'an (a really ancient capital of Imperial China) and the biggest is the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang. Folks don't talk about it much, maybe because it's a mostly earth pyramid that looks almost like a natural hill. The pyramid itself is unexcavated but the area around it is where the famous Terracotta Warriors are.
Read a short story (decades ago) based on the Silurian Hypothesis. An engineer was discussing the concept with a paleontologist. The engineer asked if they found a dinosaur fossil that had steel tool(s) with it, would they notice? The paleontologist had to admit that after 65 million years they probably would not. The tool(s) would have long age been reduced to rust stain. Nobody was looking for such a thing.
I doubt it would even be rust stain. We bury people in dirt and mud. Soft soils that are easy to dig and extremely porous. Water flow over time would just wash away all the iron.
@@chazdomingo475 If there was such water flow the entire fossil would probably be gone.
I’m really intrigued by this idea. If the civilization died out in hunter/gatherer we would probably not be able to detect them
Yay! I love getting notifications for Isaac! What a great topic.
This is a concept that really interests me, since I’m using it as a premise for my own novels. There are a lot of intact and functional Precursor remnants lying around in my setting, but all of them are things that were meant to survive - monuments, grave markers, and sealed facilities - and the Precursors left drone systems that have been meticulously maintaining these sites (sometimes scarring the landscape as they relocated remnants in danger of being swallowed by the ocean or erased by a volcano.
A few thing to consider;
1 - While we have a rough idea of what any state size area of land could’ve been ten million + years ago (desert, sea bed, grass lands) we have less of an idea of where the good building sites for townships or cities would’ve been the further you go back in time. We ourselves with exceptions, have chosen to build near fresh water sources and coastal lands until the more modern era.
2 - There’s nothing saying that these hypothetical archaic-human or pre-human civilizations had to have reached anywhere near the size or complexity as our’s has been over these last two millennia or so.
We would be more likely to find the equivalent of smaller classical or pre-classical townships buried in strata half a kilometer dead out in the middle of the desert or farmlands or a forrest, than we are to find their street signs, cars, cell phones and roads sticking out of the ground in a field near Philadelphia or sticking of a cliff face in the Grand Canyon.
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And no, nobody is going to be able to tune-in to watch the original airings of I Love Lucy 70 or so light years from here. At least not without a massive antenna aimed at and listening to where our system was 70 years ago at the time when the signal passes and with pre-digital TV and radio/tv station equipment and expect to translate it into signal strong and clear enough to be intelligible. The universe is too noisy for that.
However there have been a few efforts to send a strong and simple enough signal out, aimed at specific points in the sky that should be able to reach that far and beyond.
If you want to know how fast roads deteriorate, you should have been in Saskatchewan about 20 years ago, when the province decided it didn't need to maintain secondary roads. You might still find pictures of naked people paddling canoes in the potholes (it was a protest.)
How would the archaeologists of some future species (say, rats) be able to distinguish human cemeteries from dinosaur mass gravesites? Both would seem like natural, long-term deposits, I'm sure. Or maybe hadrosaurs were sapient.
Also, Technology IS "natural". It is the nature of H. sapiens to use technology, because that's the survival path the species specializes in. It's just a life strategy, open to any species predisposed to it, and forced to use it because of incompetence in every other possible life strategy. A city is exactly as natural as a beaver lodge and pond complex, or a termite mound.
True but artificial natural objects don't look like non artificial natural objects.
@@jasonkinzie8835 However our definition of non natural is based on our own observations. So if a society developed with remnants of prior civilisation around they may not realise they artificial and assume that that was natural particularly given likely effects of long term decay and erosion.
Human cemeteries wouldn’t leave fossils, the conditions are designed to permit decomposition
Chech photos from Pripiat - the town next to Chernobyl Nuclear plant.
Roads are simply changed into forrest.
I use the term 'environmentally incongruent', when someone says, unnatural. If anything of super, supra, or otherwise outside of nature, and yet we are able to see and study it. This would make it natural. Nothing supra about it.
Arthur, I love your self-deprecating sense of humor in regards to your speech. It makes me glad you're able to take life and it's relative misfortunes and joke about it.
It's definitely how I try to approach things, given that we are just stardust taking itself really, really seriously. Haha!
Keep up the good work, my friend.
Aw man, your pronunciation is spot on and your gentle voice is one of the main reasons I keep coming back here. The material can get really dense sometimes and I def couldn't keep up with a either a more manic or dull voice. You prolly speak clearer than most other people BECAUSE of your impediment, because people like you and me (who also had an impediment) had to learn how to properly enunciate as well as we could (kinda like a language's SOL learners vs. native speakers). Please don't think your impediment is anything bad. You're voice is warm and inviting, and you kick so much ass. Thanks for the channel!
Honestly I love this content and will always be immersed by the idea of the "What if"s and the marvelous optimism that Isaac has, but you actually sold me on Audible and I haven't watched any of these videos in a few months. I've been immersed in Orson Scott Card's works, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven King. I'm thinking of becoming a long haul trucker just to listen to more audio books while I work. So thank you Issac, for actually supporting a good sponsor that supports you.
Never underestimate nature's ability to reclaim just about any space on Earth over long enough timescales. That 6 lane highway Arthur was talking about would be 100% completely gone and undiscoverable in time frames of millions of years. The concrete cracking, the upthrusting of vegetation and the sinking and infilling of all paved surfaces would take less time than that I would imagine.
Concrete would crumble. But the remaining debris would be detectable as Concrete.
@@icecold9511 it would be a fine powder spanning millions of years. We aren't talking 200 years here. Crumbling concrete would happen after the age of the birth of the United States. I get that concrete is not biodegradable, I understand that....but time and pressure are more powerful than turning streets into chunks of rocks.
but fragments of concrete would remain. Note that we can find footprints of dinosaurs 63 million years after the last ground-bound ones died. Nothing wrong with finding human traces after the same time from now.
@@thekaxmax Yep, the fossil record is very hard to dismiss in this case and that dates all the way back to 3.8 billion years ago, to some of the first ocean dwelling cellular life.
So where are all the fossilized reminants of this ancient advanced civilization?
It's not just bone, wood and shells that can become fossilized, quite a few other things could become fossilized, when placed in the right circumstances. Even everyday items and junk that we use in our life's today, might eventually just end up becoming fossils, in the distant future. Like you said, even indintations like footprints, that where left long ago in sedimentry sand and mud, can and did become fossilized.
@@Mr.Deleterious Then explain all the concrete Roman ruins we have.
Thanks for the Sunday-Surprise, Isaac!
Really enjoy these episodes. Appreciate the upload and hard work.
Cool, I had just learned of this hypothesis a couple days ago. Made a note to look into it, and here we are w a fresh video.
Don't forget, all gold and silver coins, bullion bars, and jewelry, especially cut gemstones like diamonds would basically last forever unless subducted back into earth's mantle
None of the metals would last, as jewelry or coins or bars, in sedimentary layers. Gold and silver are soft metals. Cut diamonds would last, but how common would they be?
I have a love/hate relationship with Dr. Arthur's channel.
I love the information and the learning process and he is incredible at teaching.
I hate the fact that every time I listen to him I realize that even though I THINK I am intelligent I am actually at the shallow end of the gene pool... And there's too much chlorine.
Pyramids were so widespread in ancient civilizations for the simple reason that they tend to be very stable and durable structures.
Fantastic episode, Isaac, thank you! 😄🙏🏽
How timely. I was just thinking about this today.
If an ancient civilization moved off earth into colonies, say before the last planetary extinction event, and perhaps with knowledge of it, wouldn't we find them among Earth's Trojan satellites, or at Earth's other Lagrange points? I kinda wish you had talked about floods and partial or full ice ages and how they might affect remnants of a civilization. Perhaps another aspect would be language that still survives as a remnant of a prior civilization, as in the spoken language of a different animal than man.
Or, on the moon.
If they did travel out into space, did they just skip over building any structures on the moon, traveling to it, and walking on it or using equipment that would leave tracks?
Nor even leaving any kind of exploration probes there?
Even if their technology did decay away and /or get destroyed when the former continents were subjuncted back into the Earth's core, relics would remain on the moon and Mars, and maybe also the planet Mercury.
As to what you have said about non-Homo Sapien language, that is also a very interesting idea! 👏👏👏
Have you ever heard of the idea of the "Nostratic" language, which would be _the first for real_ language spoken by humans before, or as, they spread out of Northern Africa throughout the world?
I consider it to be entirely Lemurian, but what if it were real, and we could trace the history of languages all the way back, past Indo- European and other "great grandmother languages"?
We might find that variations of vocabulary had seeped into its offshoots from somewhere and someone else.
Perhaps the vocabulary of the regional tribes of Neanderthals, and Homo Erectus, and other premodern hominids could be detected, and even sorted out of the later dialects of Nostratic!
Sorry for taking so long to get to the point. 😞
Why aren't there natural asteroids in the Trojan and Lagrangian points? Or simply a stable orbit closer than the Moon? Because this did happen.
Pluto, with 17.7% the mass of the Moon and a satellite 1/8 its mass, has comet satellites too. So what pushed them off Earth and Venus orbits?
I don't think it's entirely implausible to consider a civilization may have reached the heights of ancient Greek technology far earlier than history suggests. If that civilization built a majority of it's culture on coastlines, all evidence would be unobtainable today.
"To be fair."
I genuinely love how subtle you can be at times.
Thinking about the conclusions we come to about ancient human civilizations that weren't even that long ago like Rome or Egypt or the sumerians it'd be really interesting to see what future aliens who discover us after we wipe ourselves out think based on the little bits of our various cultures that are left.
Like imagine they find a lone reddit or 4chan server and have to piece us together based on that and a few structures scattered all over the world.
Yeah its both impressive what we can get from scattered and probably non-representative clues and also just how many things we probably have way wrong or are attributing to an entire civilization one small splinters habits or opinions.
Oh god please let reddit be the last things aliens discover from us 😭
@@Splaccemttv Nope.
@@Splaccemttv Can think of worse things they can find that being twitter and tiktok.
@@MrKillswitch88 no thing would be worse than twitter as a representation of humanity lol
I love your pronunciation, it’s idiosyncratic, nothing wrong with that. I like listening to your voice and when I want to relax your channel is one of my go to channels (along with closer to truth, of course). Thanks for your hard work, I hope you get want your want from it. It’s top class.
Finally you have touched on this fascinating idea. Love it
You should definitely come up to anywhere in Canada and see how quickly roads degrade with a lack of proper maintenance.
This is interesting; for quite some time I've considered/contemplated how to create *passive* markers/beacons that are 'functional' (in a *passive* fashion) for at least dozens of eons, preferably multiple (as in, dozens or scores of) mega-years.
There seem to be two primary constraints/considerations involved: if on a planetary surface, something that is 'too big' may be problematical. My first thought has usually been to create a geometric shape made up entirely of equilateral triangles (60 or 80 sided, or whatever), and then make each such triangular face an internal reflection-corner.
Such a concept can be also used in space, where attempting to maximize effectiveness will tend to lead to either _very_ *large* objects, or to a *great* _many_ objects.
For space-based objects, the larger it/they are, the more the longer wavelengths can be taken into consideration as part of the 'visibility strategy'!
On a planetary surface, this 'go large!' strategy carries less force/impact. On the surface, environmental/climactic consideration need to be carefully taken into account. A 60 or 80 sided object that can be exposed to a variety of surface conditions (& which will quite possibly have those conditions changing significantly over the course of multiple eons, and which are virtually *certain* to change - possibly drastically - over the course of 10s of mega-years) will certainly need to be as close to indestructible as possible - at least, to _any foreseeable_ circumstances/conditions. An alloy that has approximately equal amounts of tungsten and osmium and iridium meets that requirement. It will be *very* tough and resistant to fracturing, and with an extremely high melting point it could literally be engulfed by lava and remain un-harmed. It's naturally high surface hardness could be augmented/enhanced with titanium nitride &/or tungsten carbide &/or amorphous diamond coating(s).
The problem is that this alloy has a density of around 20g./cm.³ ... this is multiple-times the density of almost any 'normal' rock! (As an example, a cube of 'WOsIr-alloy' that was about 20 in. [~50¾cm.] on a side would weigh about 3 tons!) If left sitting on any kind of soil/sand (or soil-&-sand combination), it would literally sink completely out of sight to whatever depth it took to 'settle' onto a solid layer of rock! And this would happen more quickly, the larger the object was. Also, if it was displaced downhill, it would, eventually, settle on a creek/river-bed. *Eventually* it would settle on the bottom of a pond or lake, where the process of sedimentary deposit would commence, eventually resulting in it being covered/buried/encased by sedimentary rock!
So if at all possible the material should be (on a planetary surface) as low-density as possible, while still remaining as nearly indestructible as feasible. An alloy that was approximately ½ aluminum, ⅓ titanium, ⅐ beryllium, and the remainder being scandium, should - generally - meet those requirements. It would be fairly light-weight, have good strength/toughness, and surface-hardness would be enhanced by the mentioned coatings of titanium nitride, tungsten carbide and amorphous diamond.
Other possible materials would be what are called 'high-entropy alloys' ... one such would be one composed of equal amounts of lithium, beryllium, magnesium, aluminum and titanium. This material has *very* high strength & toughness and a fairly high melting point. Plus, it's density is only about 2¼g./cm.³ - lower than almost any natural soils! An object made of this material will be unlikely to be buried, under any kind of 'normal' circumstances. In fact, constructing it so that it is hollow, and ⅔ of it's interior is hollow and filled with helium, brings it's over-all density down to less than that of water, so it would float!
A fascinating topic for consideration!
Srsly tho, the inevitable Raccoon vs Sea Lion battle for this planet millions of years from now will be fire.
Nah it’ll be Ants v Crows
It's been a joy...keep them coming brotha. Josh
SO nice to hear your voice again in this video.
Been waiting for a video about the possibility of Earth being inhabited by intelligent life in the past for a minute. Thanks Isaac!
The way this dude speaks is ASMR to my ears
Watched/listened to this last night on Nebula while prepping food that would be cooked later today.
Even with the rather silly title in my opinion you created yet another informative and interesting video explaining the concept. Learned a lot of things I would not have considered otherwise.
Great video as always Isaac.
Really great video!! Glad I came across it
Nice use of giants causeway in the giant highway part
The Part about not being able to kill ourselves was surprising. Didn't they build Cobalt bombs which would lead to massive amounts of long lasting radiation killing most live on the Planet for centuries?
They did but were likely never on the books given the politics of the cold war and the same goes for neutron bombs.
Cobalt's half life is 60 years so no.
Now, i dont know how deadly Cobalt Radiation is in the first place. But if its deadly, then 60 years is a long bloody time and after that its still half as deadly for another 60 years so thats Centuries to me.
@@adrenjones9301 the recovery operations at heroshima and it's present state is a good example of humanities ability to deal with ultra long lived fission daughters and lots of hazardous fallout.
@@npcthufirhawat9955 Is that comparable to Cobald Bombs? Obviously we dont have examples about dealing with those kind of consequences yet.
An upper bound for the strength of convergent evolution between aliens and Earth life is to look at two similar niches on Earth and see how different the organisms are.
So, nonhuman apex predator of Africa nowadays is the African Lion.
Apex predator of Africa during the cretacious if Carcharodontasaurus.
They are both well-suited to their environmental niche. But it's hard to imagine anyone would confuse one for the other, and likewise, nothing mistakeable for a lion existted then and nothing mistakeable for a Carcharodontasaurus is alive today. Even some tiny fragment of vertabral bone would be enough to discriminate a lion from a large therapod dinosaur.
Awesome channel with awesome content and great quality as always say 🌍💯
Isaac, I appreciate your insight and your perspective.
Makes a person think..🤔
I'd encourage people to look into the Younger Dryas theory to get an idea as to why we can never truly disprove this sort of thing. It even comes complete with actual real conspiracies of entrenched academia working overtime to block any actual study into it (mostly because a cartel of tenured archaeologists don't want their work being questioned at all)
Heck, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Tartaria theories are about a civilization which was still here a few hundred years ago, who was replaced by our civilization, and has proof like photos of buildings being built before their official date, massive cities being built from scratch using horse-and-buggy technology in a few years to being filled with massive buildings made of brick or stone, no paper traces of large-enough quarries nor paper trails of how the quarried materials were turned into red bricks or were chiseled into large bricks, many buildings using bricks which weigh tons to tens of tons, "antiquitech" (tech ahead of it's official timeline) being present in some ruins and being observable in old photos of buildings but not in the buildings nowadays, some of the antiquitech only recently started making sense, as we have made new discoveries in the field of science, and the same story being all over the world.
Heck, there are even native american elders telling stories of how they once lived in the kinds of buildings we see in the official history as being built by the colonizers, before the native americans were forced to leave their homes and live where they ended up and of how those native americans who tried making high-tech afterwards were hunted down. Then we have native american totems which were carbon-dated to be from hundreds of years before the europeans colonized it, totems which show the faces of all major racial traits, including native-american, european, east-asian, indian, african, and I think I'm forgetting one more major racial trait.
There is a lot which could honestly be true, just as it could be fabricated lies to get the people who are the most open-minded to be busy with "conspiracy theories", so they can be called "conspiracy theorists" and discredited, in order for the current leaders to not be challenged by open-minded people who could honestly get them to lose their positions and make the world a better place.
The Younger Dryas theory is just a theory about ancient Humans being more advanced than academia currently believes. It's not about a different species.
@@chazdomingo475 It's depressing how far people will go in slandering scientists just so they can cling to their childish fantasies.
@@maltheopia I know, right? I knew people researching the Younger Dryas back in the 1990s!
People get their "information" about who scientists are from movies and TeeVee. In reality, actual scientists are very, very chatty. Even ignoring the publish-or-perish pressures in modern academia, people with PhDs *_LOVE_* to share knowledge. They're not going to remain silent.
Besides, the Younger Dryas isn't a theory, it's an _observed_ reversal in the end of glacial conditions 12,000 years ago, a reversal that only lasted a millennium before "unreversing."
And in case anyone doesn't know, the current model of _why_ this happened goes like this: A glacial dam holding back one of the large glacial lakes that formed in the northern US/southern Canada failed. This sent millions of gallons of fresh water down the St. Lawrence River (well, its predecessor) into the North Atlantic. That much fresh water going into the North Atlantic would shut off the deep-water-forming "pump" in the North Atlantic. Now, that, "pump", which pulls surface water down to the ocean floor, also pulls the Gulf Stream further north than it would flow otherwise, bringing warm water to the western end of Europe which in turn keeps Europe warmer than it would be otherwise. That last sentence, BTW, isn't a hypothesis - we see it happening today. And we also know how the deep-water-forming "pump" in the North Atlantic works. Which is why we know that a huge pulse of fresh water would _definitely_ shut it off.
Anyway, Europe 12,000 years ago suddenly going colder would prevent or at least slow the retreat of the European ice sheets, causing that 1,000 "reversal" in the retreat of the ice sheets that we see in the geological & paleoclimate record. _Again:_ the geological & paleoclimate record isn't in question here: we _see it._
That's the Younger Dryas, that signature in the geological & paleoclimate record. _And it was already _*_very well researched back in the 1990s._* I knew fellow grad students who were working on researching it, looking for more data that might help disprove various explanations for us. Because remember: science *_doesn't_* "prove a hypothesis". It attempts to _disprove_ as many hypotheses as it can until only one is left.
I absolutely love this concept
One of the longest lasting and obvious indicators of us would be the gold reserves of countries.
Everywhere gold is well distributed but then there are giant blobs of gold that will take geology millions of years to distribute.
Awesome job, loved this video‼️💯
Good subject. I think about this a lot. How long does it take a civilization to completely disappear? 1000 years? Obviously not. 10,000 years? Maybe... 100,000 years It depends. 1,000,000 probably.. Even plastic breaks down in 1,000,000 years. If I was an archeologist looking for evidence of a previous technologically advanced civilizations, I would look for something like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, or Chernobyl. Nuclear waste leaves a hell of a scar. You find isotopes in strata where it shouldn't be and bingo.
Now if the Cold War ever went hot It would be detectable as an entire world wide layer of radioactive carbon. Hell, just the atomic tests of the last century have rendered future carbon dating problematic. That's a good place to start. Look for noise in the carbon.
We also rely on corn which is a C-4 carbon fixer. Most plants are C-3 carbon fixers, but corn is a C-4. C-3 and C-4 cause a difference in isotopes of carbon. It's significant enough that you can take a blood sample from someone and see how much corn they eat. Our modern world relies heavily on corn as a staple crop, so that's going to be a marker a well. Again look for noise in the carbon data.
1,000,000 from now, all that's left of us will be a layer of radio isotopes.
I would search for strange explosions of lifeforms that suddenly go from living in specific localized areas to being worldwide in a very short amount of time. How likely is it that no one of all of our animals or ourselves doesn't get fossilized? And with how many of all those vertebrates there is compared to wild ones, well....
This means some sort of arthropid or soft bodied creatures would be silent, but even then a few fossils that seem like a worldwide distribution in a layer otherwise dominated by extinction of lifeforms would seem suspicious.
Oklo in Gabon is such a site, old reactors that were there billions of years ago, and which decayed in the interim. They could have been a civilisation that used nuclear reactors, like we used fire, seeing as the concentration of U235 was high enough then, that simply having enough uranium together would make a reactor work. Heat seeming to come out of plain rock, with it working for decades, with nothing but keeping it wet to make steam.
@@SeanBZA I have heard that theory, it may have inspired this subject, but the current theory is that it is 100% natural. It's a favorite of the Ancient Aliens crowd, but there is a naturalistic explanation for that one.
Still It inspired some of my favorite sci-fi fiction.
@@rayceeya8659 Yes exactly, could be natural, or just a really ancient civilisation that left nothing else behind.
ok you are missing a very important point in the video, that we are making so many large-scale rectangular structures that it is basically impossible for all of them to get erased. The buildings may be gone but the groundworks stay there until completely eroded, which may never occur if its in a geologically stable region. Those can last hundreds of millions of years unaltered, billions if you count altered traces. So no our isotope signature wont be the only thing that someone could find.
It's hard to grasp how deep time really is. I mean, the t-rex lived closer to humans than it did to the stegosaurus by at least 10 million years. Could it be normal that intelligence waits so many ages to arise? No way to tell 😵💫😵💫😵💫
Excellent, new IA episode. You just made my sunday
Life After People did a fantastic series on this.
and book.
@@piotrd.4850 Oh I didn't know that. I'm more of a video kind of guy. Did the book at least have lots of photos? Or colouring ;-)
There's a Star Trek Voyager episode where they come across intelligent space faring dinosaurs originally from Earth!
This episode is just about as fanciful. 😀
Distant Origin. Voth
@@piotrd.4850 yeah good episode
The fact they never surface again made me sour. It was a hint of what voyager could’ve been, instead of an episodic plot reset every week
This channel and The Why Files are so underrated. Great work fam 🍻
I love this!! So much story potential!!
Iron lasts surprisingly short time in the soil due to oxidation. Iron swords pulled from the ground are usually in very poor shape, often almost completely eaten away and those are barely 2 millennia old. Modern concrete is even worst it disintegrates in decades in changing seasons if they include freezing and thawing. Plastic will be detectable only in molecular form just couple hundred thousands years from now, not physically as an object. Unless something fossilize or creates an imprint in fossilized mud or lime rock formation, it will be gone just few millions of years from now. Gold and other nonreactive metals and objects made out of them might be only artefacts left on earth unless they get mangled, smashed or grinded to dust by glaciers or other geological processes. Our best bet to leave any lasting artefacts are geologically dead places such as Mars and the Moon.
This hypothesis is a little too fanciful for me to buy into. It's basically the plot for H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountain's of Madness. That was published in 1936, so the idea is an old one. It's fun to think about. Needs more Shoggoths, though.
Are you discounting a hypothesis just because "it was a story?" That's like saying "cell phones can't exist because I saw them in movies first."
Its likely you are unaware just how pathetic our fossil records are especially when it comes to nonvertebrate animals or perhaps just how insanely long the time periods discussed here really are. It is entirely possible there was a large continent in which an extremely advanced race could have existed billions of years ago and our odds of finding any trace of them, even if they were far more advanced then us is virtually zero. If it fell below the waves then never would we stand a chance of finding ANY evidence and any we did would at best appear as a slightly odd natural formation.
Guy's comment was never meant to be taken at face value:
> so the idea is an _old one_
Nice subtle pun there. Make Lovecraft, not Warcraft!
@@urphakeandgey6308 The thing about stories is that they care more about internal consistency than external consistency, and are willing to warp the latter in service of the former. Therefore, you should be extremely suspicious of stories that are supposed to describe reality, because it's very likely that the story isn't hinting at some kind of external insight; rather, the story only exists because external reality was tortured/ignored enough to allow it.
It's a huge red flag. We're not just saying it to be mean.
In Three Body Problem, human civilization tries to think of ways to preserve information for millions of years, and the best way they come up with is large characters carved deeply into stone. Everything else will disappear with time, even the rock will. Eventually, they develop the ability to make pocket universes outside of time, but that causes new problems.
Put the stone in orbit, just past the asteroid belt. That will preserve it basically until the sun dies, and probably past then
@@kahlzun They put it on Pluto.
@@clintonleonard5187make a space station And put it in a asteroid and Fill every possible information you have in it possible And Make Archives on every single Celestial body 1 light day form Sol
People never seem to consider that a technologically advanced civilization is going to make use of, and consume most of, the easily accessible energy sources first (like we did). This would be surface petroleum. Pitch and asphalt have been used for over 4000 years by humans. When we began to find uses for this in kerosene lamps, chemical synthesis and transportation, these easily accessible surface deposits disappeared in less than 50 years. We were drilling and now we have to extract from more difficult deposits using fracking or off-shore drilling. If a civilization at our level existed before us and after the dinosaurs, all that easy to access surface petroleum would not have existed for us to use.
If we disappeared tomorrow... a companion subject would be if we still existed as individual conscious entities in 50 million years, which would be mind-stretching in a different way...
Wouldn't glaciers basically raze everything on the land into the ocean over the course of 50m years?
didnt for the dinosaurs
wouldn't make it disappear, would just slide it around and possibly break it into smaller fragments
I think that models predicting what our sedimentary layer will look like to paleontologists are the most telling. There are varied hypotheses, and ALL of them paint a layer RADICALLY different from anything else in the geologic column. When we try to predict what those paleontologists would see from looking at these layers, they don't always suppose correctly but the fact that people were making enormous changes to the surface of the planet is the most obvious thing about it all.
Elements are another thing which make their mark. Humans have re-distributed several elements such as iron, silver, lead, etc. and those elements will remain in our sedimentary layer in anomalous ratios no matter how degraded their forms are.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness But would those ratios seem anomalous to future beings for whom those ratios are the norm?
@@KinseySwartz Yes. The sedimentary layers won't change. There will be one really obviously different layer where we lived.
Something we don't see covered is the consideration that non-high-tech pre-human civilisations arose on the planet. ie non-human civilizations in the equivalent to the classic/medieval era. This is something I consider quite likely, and itself is important to the fermi paradox.
The civilisations could have risen to the equivalent of the classical or medieval level millions of years ago, then become extinct and left precious little evidence. They would likely have needed to be close to water, so sea level changes and river flow could have long washed away much of the evidence...or left their ruins in locations far beyond where we would think to look. Unlike humans these species may not have been global, which would futher reduce the chances of finding them as their remains would be far more localised and make them far more suseptible to regional disasters such as volcanic eruptions and climate change.
I don't think the current lack of evidence is evidence against this being true either. We locate new sites from our own recent past all the time, including uncovering entire lost civilisations...in locations that have been near continually inhabited from pre-history to the present day...so if such a civilisation existed in remote locations ten million years ago then it could easily be overlooked. Add to this a bias of looking for artifacts that are within the recent past, in locations we inhabit, and that fall within human timespan and evidence could easily be overlooked...which is an important consideration when it is likely to be vary old and vary scarce to begin with.
I cite other species as examples of why I think this to be likely;
- There are multiple species currently in their 'stone age'
- Ants developed complex societies and agriculture millions of years ago
- There are multiple species that are very intelligent now, but are trapped by biology, ie whales, dolphins, etc
- Humans did not kick off the era that modern humans live in...pre-humans did...it is also entirely possible that some of our innovations come from extinct branches of homo that are unrelated to ourselves.
That modern humans are the only species to advance to the level of 'civilisation' I think is rather unlikely, that view privilidges humans as unique when that isn't the practice of evolution, especially over geological time.
I think your underestimating how durable old technology is. Stone tools & stone foundations don't wear down quickly. Neither does simple monolithic construction or paved roads which the medieval & classical periods by quite a lot. Similarly if the crossed into the copper &/or bronze age their statues, armor, & tools would last eons in recognizable form. Even if they somehow corroded all the way they would have some pretty unnatural elemental compasition.
So the only situation where i could that working out is if their range was restricted only to places that have gone underwater or under crust which you wouldn't expect from even the most primitive intelligent peoples. We were coloning accross oceans & continents long before we even had writing so i can't imagine why they would stay in such a limited range.
@@virutech32 there are multiple possible ways a civilisation might not expand as much as we did. Maybe their biology would only allow them to live in certain biomes, for example if they had an amphibian lifestyle. Maybe they lived on an isolated landmass, and their biology prohibited them from seafaring, or they didn't have any reason to even contemplate seafaring. Maybe the other animals of the period were much better adapted to competing with them, and didnt get drastically outcompeted like animals in our history, so prevented them from settling/ developing in certain areas.
And there might be other possibilities we just can't imagine due to the timeline of our own developement but you have to consider that humans are the single most overpowered organism that we know of, and the only one that caused a mass extinction. Other civilisations may not be nearly as powerfull in comparison.
@@patrikspajic5600 I suppose you're not wrong. One can always come up with some contrived pathway to justify a preferred outcome, but at that point your piling assumption on assumptions. We have only one example of a general intelligence in this cosmos so until we have more data it's fair to assume we're a fairly typical example of evolved intelligence. At the end of the day i feel like the hypothesis with the least assumptions is the more plausible & scientific one to go with. Given that we have no evidence to suggest that such a thing happened or is even plausible assuming that our preferred hypothesis is correct would just be an unscientific approach. Especially since if they really did leave behind nothing then that is basically unfalsifiable & no different from a religious claim. Untestable, unfalsifiable, & irrelevant.
@@virutech32 I understand what you're saying, however I believe you're too human-centric with what technology they would be using, though tbf to you I did say stone age when I meant the equivalent...I should perhaps have said tool age.
Paved roads and monolithic building isn't a given. There are plenty of human cultures that have done without either and I don't believe they would be classed as any less of a civilisation having lacked them. Even then, monolithic structures are not instantly obvious. Gobleki Tepe was only uncovered late last century, even though it is a massive structure in the heart of the old broze age civilizations and has had continual inhabitation for thousands of years by large empires. That is only a few thousand years. Millions of years worth of change would be even more hidden by the ginding passage of time. That is compounded further if they intentionally hid their great works, such as the Terracotta Army, which was hidden for millennia in lands governed by the worlds most advanced civilisation.
Another good example of where we are lost in our own relatively recent past is bronze age europe. The Tollense Battle was only uncovered recently and it suggests a level of cultural and societal development far more advanced than previously expected for the people in that region at that time yet we know nothing at all and had not found any evidence for such until that one chance find...again that is in an area continually inhabited and yet there is basically nothing left that we have yet found.
I also think you're underestimating the impact of us not knowing about their existance would have on our ability to find them. A lot of what we have uncovered about our own past is due to us both knowing humans exist and having ancient sources giving an indication to the possibility of these places. Oral & written history or tales, references by other civilisations, trade items, known migration patters & habitation, lingustic patterns. None of this exists for a pre-human civilisation to even give a hint at where it could be, if one were to have existed at all.
A good thought experiment would be to take our own ancient civs and place them in 20 million BC, then see if we would have found them by now when accounting for the grinding passage of time and 20 million years of geo-shifts . What work would have been required to uncover their existance if in their current location, then look at how many locations on earth have been subject to that intensity of excavation.
It is worth baring in mind that there has only been 11,000 dino fossils unearthed at present, from 150 million years of life and over a century of global obsession. Had there been a civilisation as we would understand it arise every 20 million years covering that same period that would only leave 10 or so civilisations to find evidence of...in effect the equivalent of finding one specific species dino...we've simply not been looking long enough, or well enough, to rule it out.
I don't agree that being intelligent requires migration. It did with humans, and many other species migrate too, but there are also many species that are found only in one place and no other.
As stated I think it is likely that a very primitive culture, perhaps more than one, has emerged in earth's past. If that culture got so advanced as to be a civilisation I am less certain, but even a culture with societal organisation, communication, art, stories, etc would have massive ramifications for the fermi paradox. If Earth has produced multiple cultures, each evolutionarily independent, then that could mean the galaxy is full of intelligent life, if not technological to our level.
@@mykelhedge7299 I can't deny that we haven't found all there is to find. Fact of the matter is that most of earth surface, even what used to be dry land, is under the ocean these days & we've just barely begun exploring that part of the world. To say nothing of of the antarctic which really hasn't been explored at all on account of kilometers thick ice.
The thing i take issue with is that a whole intellgent species would stay so localized as to be completely wiped from the record. Migration is not a human or mammalian trait. All life from the most basic single cell, through insects, & all the way up to higher mammalian life seeks to expand. The only thing that keeps them in check is environment & predation. General Intelligence basically stops either mechanism from being all that relevant. The most simple animal fur/hide clothing let hominids evolved only for hot humid african forests & eventually hot arid savannas, permanently inhabit near-arctic regions. Even completely unintelligent creatures raft accross oceanic distances. So i don't see how anything with even the most basic General Intelligence wouldn't be able to do the same & given that there are no examples of life choosing to stay localized when it was capable of easily expanding i think it's quite a leap to expect intelligent life to do that. Even more of a leap to expect most or all intelligent critters to take that clearly illogical & unbiological approach.
It's one thing to not find any evidence of one small tribe of critters localized to one small patch of forest & it's quite another to not find any evidence on whole continents or globally. While i can see an argument for a lack of transoceanic colonization(not much of one but for the sake of the argument lets just say it's plausible), to assume that those intelligent critters wouldn't expand at all seems like a leap that requires some kind of empirical precedent. And not just an example of localized creatures but an example of critters who can expand but choose not to. At the very least I'm not aware of any such example.
love the ideas discussed here; my uncle was a watcher of the doctor who shows--sometimes i liken my cat Oliver to the doctor as a joke, because my roommate and i found it cute to call him Dr. Mistur Oliver 'Ollie' D Cad
Don't joke too doctor who he a gid
4 minutes in, you gained a subswiber. Still guessing your herritage, as a Dutchy, I would have to guess central Alaskan or north Texan. Please tell me how far I'm off!? Your info is priceless history, your "speach impediment" gives it all the charm it needs!!!
No, he’s from Ohio, as per his video where he says he worked as a poll worker
The strata of the Anthropocene will be distinct, and most curious.
Question is, will intelligent life ever claw its way from the mire again to be in a position to appreciate the phenomena?
This is going to help me with my kind of meta fanfiction of Stargate SG1 where the Ancients and ascended beings are real in the real world. My story's main core is that a small rouge group of Ascended beings planted the idea of the Ancients and their history into the head of the writers of Stargate TV series without the writers knowing about it.
Sg1 sorta did that already. A civilian and oneill had a mind sharing device that was used on accident. The civilian s family and friends thought he was crazy while oneill enjoyed watching it.
Stargate too great. Nive😅
Never seen this channel before. It’s super cool!
Thanks SFIA :)
If such a civilization has ever existed they could possibly leave one kind of trace. Let's say that they like us manipulated the genes of animals and plants to serve their society. Whether it's the direct manipulation of the genes using techniques like crisper (or more advanced versions of it) or selective breeding.
We could look at the genomes of plants and animals to see if we see strange patterns of genes that don't help you survive but would help a civilization in some way.
If such civilization has existed and has changed the genome of animals or plants and those organisms have survived, it might be possible to find evidence for them.
Actually, we do have fairly quick DNA and RNA changes in a few specific plants, which could be a mark of that. Namely rice, wheat, and I think corn and/or potatoes. There are stories from where the grains first appeared, that they were given to them by the gods, or something like that, which could genuinely be a sign of either interference, or of a more advanced civilization which caused those changes. Of course, another theory for that, is that those naturally appeared because those grasses grew near some temples which had radioactive materials in them, and the ionizing radiation causing changes in those grasses, so after enough time some mutated versions spread with traits which are beneficial to the early humans (like larger grains, for rice and wheat and corn, for example). For potatoes, for example, we do know that the mayans and/or aztecs and/or inca civilizations selectively bred a lot of plants, most of which were purposefully destroyed by the colonizers to make room for cash-crops like wheat. Only some of them survived, like corn and potatoes, likely by growing in the wild and by people who grew them keeping them as aesthetic plants or weeds they cannot get rid of.
I thought about this a lot as a kid, I never really took it seriously then either, even then I was sure there would be SOMETHING to prove dinosaurs built skyscrapers and also worked 9 to 5s, though who knows, maybe they spoke dutch?
If they spoke Dutch, then they were probably building dikes and dams instead of skyscrapers.:P
I really like how you really reiterate how little we actually know. Too often modern media likes to overemphasize how much we as a species know paleontologically, anthropologically and scientifically in general.
I commented on a PBS Eons video on evolutionary biology of certain plant species a while back that it was all fascinating but remember to maintain the perspective that this is all just an educated guess. Fascinatingly a few hours later someone replied “no it really isn’t”.
It amazes me, honestly. I know science and religion have always had a paradoxical, abusive, codependent relationship but it feels as though it has accelerated massively in recent decades.
To be fair, you probably got that kind of reply because evolutionary biology, and science in general, is under near constant attack by religious fundamentalists whose muttonheaded misinterpretations of scripture are not supported by the observations that science is based on.
Another problem is that the late-19th Century German definition of the word, „Theorie“ does not match the 21st Century popular-use definition of the English word, "Theory." The latter means, "wild guess," the former describes a conceptual model being tested against observation. Thus the constant attack of, "It's just a theory," by the same religious fundamentalists.
Fazit: When you use a phase like, "educated guess," you are basically priming your readers to think you fall on the, "It's a theory," side.
It is, however, important for everyone science-minded to remember that science deals in best-fit models of nature, not proclamations of Laws of Nature. Quantum Mechanics is still called a Theory, even though it's the most tested, most verified Model of Nature ever devised by the human mind. (And that's because everyone _hates_ it so much, they've been trying to come up with experiments to break it, experiments that keep coming back verifying it further.) In fact, it's the collective dope-slap that Quantum Mechanics gave to the ego of physics that caused it to move away from calling things "Laws." We really should be renaming all of those "laws" of physics to "axioms", "postulates," and "rules of thumb" - they're things we haven't _yet_ managed to disprove, but work well enough to let us do more science.
You have a very smooth vocal pattern. I enjoy your narration alot my guy.
Awesome
Not to be confused with the Slurrian Hypothesis whereby Aliens reach the technological ability to distill alcohol (or their biology’s equivalent) and just sit on their foobas getting bleeble-faced.
Astonishing episode, great ideas to change the mind
Older than dirt, could be literal on the timelines your channel can handle :D