Previous technological civilizations?

[Loren Pechtel]

The latest show I watched said there is archaeological evidence f organized cultures with technology like civil engineering and construction much older than previously thought, but nothing about a technological civilization.

Ancient fire pits with piles of animal bones have been found. We have a fossil record of evolution.
We know something about Neanderthals, but there is zero evidence o four kind of technology.

The fire pit is the hole in this silly idea. Advanced civilizations are built on metallurgy and even on a small scale, this requires a lot of energy in the form of fuel. Any fuel more powerful than charcoal requires a technology that scars the landscape on a geological scale. In the thousand years (give or take) we've never opened a coal deposit and found someone beat us to it.

Unless thy had lien technology that did not require the stuff e have today...or so cable TV shows say..

We see the remains of technology as it advanced and we would see the results of mining.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

A past intelligence would most certainly show up in the fossil record.

How so? I'm not saying that it wouldn't. I want some reason to suppose that that would be the case.

Like where I state that I think that bricks and cinderblocks and glass objects and ceramic objects will survive.

A species as roughly as widespread and numerous as ourselves is likely to show up in the fossil record. We have not yet found anything with sufficiently big brains. It would be odd for them not to reproduce in sufficient numbers for that: to develop a technological civilization they need curiosity, which will very probably result in exploration and habitation of most of the planet - and beyond, eventually.

If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.

But a question is: what are the odds that an industrial civilization will stay confined to Earth?
Seem to me they're very low. If, our civilization lasts for, say, 1000 more years, it is almost certain that it will leave considerably large structures, vehicles, etc., in places in which there is very little erosion, such as the Moon, Mars, or just orbiting the Sun in any of many possible orbits, or the Earth or Mars, etc., in orbits that do not decay, and so on. Moreover, it's hard to see how a civilization like that would be wiped out, other than massive interplanetary warfare, which again would leave traces all over the solar system - though that sort of war, too, is pretty improbable.

While we have only began to explore the solar system, the lack of any big structures found so far seems to also be good evidence against the hypothesis.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Even given the vast distances between stars, it's more likely that alien species visited out planet and left little behind of their having been here than it is we're missing technological civilizations that came before ours.

 

[steve_bank]

Unless thy had lien technology that did not require the stuff e have today...or so cable TV shows say..

We see the remains of technology as it advanced and we would see the results of mining.

I guess my attempts at humor are too subtle. Ancient alien technology is a developed area with followers.

 

[Bronzeage]

The latest show I watched said there is archaeological evidence f organized cultures with technology like civil engineering and construction much older than previously thought, but nothing about a technological civilization.

Ancient fire pits with piles of animal bones have been found. We have a fossil record of evolution.
We know something about Neanderthals, but there is zero evidence o four kind of technology.

The fire pit is the hole in this silly idea. Advanced civilizations are built on metallurgy and even on a small scale, this requires a lot of energy in the form of fuel. Any fuel more powerful than charcoal requires a technology that scars the landscape on a geological scale. In the thousand years (give or take) we've never opened a coal deposit and found someone beat us to it.

Unless thy had lien technology that did not require the stuff e have today...or so cable TV shows say..

I'm calling foul on that one. A hand full of LEM launch pads on the surface of the Moon is not evidence of a lost high tech civilization.

Actually, any scenario is plausible, if one concedes the existence of alien space bats, who have magical powers. Visitors who brought everything with them, stuck around for a while and then left, taking everything with them, doesn't count as an ancient Earth civilization.