Were there previous industrial civilizations before humanity's?

[bilby]

How do you estimate the superiority of things made for very different purposes and in different contexts? It seems absurd to me, this ranking business.

There are a number of factors that distinguish an advanced artifact from a primitive one; But they all boil down to how well suited something is to the purpose for which it was intended.

The best designs achieve their objectives with the least cost, both in terms of effort and materials, to both the manufacturer and end user. As the purpose and context are both included as part of the definition of 'better' or 'best', this enables technologies to be ranked even when their use, purpose or context are very dissimilar.

Purpose and context is all important; A screwdriver is an excellent design for tightening or loosening screws, but is a poor design for opening cans.

A massive stone pyramid with small chambers and passageways is an excellent design for a monument and tomb that you wish to have last as long as possible; It's a very poor design for a grain storage facility (something Ben Carson appears not to have noticed).

An abacus is an excellent design for manipulating numbers; A cray supercomputer is, however, far better for that task, as it can handle much larger data sets, much faster. But an abacus is a better design for some purposes - lugging a supercomputer around a marketplace to calculate the prices of your purchases would be HUGELY inefficient.

So while you are correct to say that purpose and context are of vital importance, you are wrong to suggest that this renders ranking of technologies absurd, impossible or meaningless; It just means we need to think hard about it, and to have an understanding of purpose.

To abandon that hard thought and careful analysis of the context and purpose, in favour of simply ranking artifacts by durability would be lazy and foolish. To declare it 'absurd' is to embrace ignorance. We can work out how advanced a previously unknown technology is by understanding its context and purpose, and in fact we find that people are fairly good at recognizing quality designs and highly sophisticated technologies.

A neolithic hand-axe is a complex and difficult tool to make, but is performs a number of roles very well indeed. Bronze Age flint tools are less sophisticated; And Iron Age ones even less so again - because it is an important feature of good design and high technology that artifacts should be efficient, as well as effective. Why spend a whole day carefully shaping a flint so that it can be used both to chop down trees, and to prepare hides, when you could get an adequate flint scraper with a half-hour of work, and use a bronze or steel axe instead for felling lumber? The individual technology of flint tools degraded over time; But when we consider the entire landscape of tools and technologies, the Iron Age was far more advanced than the Stone Age.

That's not absurd; It's just not simple.

Reality rarely is.

 

[Peez]

What's so "primitive" about them, if they are obviously superior to our stuff?

Primitive: relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.

I don't see how calling something "primitive" necessarily suggests that it is inferior.

Peez

 

[Angra Mainyu]

How do you estimate the superiority of things made for very different purposes and in different contexts? It seems absurd to me, this ranking business.

I was asking you because you were making the claim, but if the question is about superiority (not about how primitive or advanced they are), I think a clear indication is how well they perform the task for which they were made. Still, they would only be superior for such-and-such task, not necessarily for others.

That said, the original point was about how primitive some structures were, not whether they were superior for the task they were designed for.

 

[Juma]

How do you estimate the superiority of things made for very different purposes and in different contexts? It seems absurd to me, this ranking business.

How well suited they are for their purpose.
If stone axes would be so great then why dont we use them today? Because a modern axe let you chop more wood, easier and the ace actually holds longer (As a functional whole).

 

[Jokodo]

ok, if we are talking 100 million years ago, we can count the presence of dinosaurs to disprove it. The rise of humanity led to a mass extinction of megafauna. Its hard to believe that a previous civilization wouldn't have done the same. Unless you are suggesting this civilization is responsible for the Cretacious extinction.

This may change, but until now, the extinction wave caused by humanity's rise is nothing like previous mass extinctions. In some of those, 90%+ of genera -- not species, genera -- have gone extinct. While we've successfully exterminated American horses and all but exterminated Eurasian wild horses and donkeys, equus is alive and well in the African zebra. While the aurochs is extinct and the banteng likely will be by the end of the century, the genus bos is alive and kicking in the wild yak and and the gaur (counting domestic cattle, it's faring better than it ever did before humans came along). And that's large land animals. Except in insular environments, we've barely touched small animals, or the seas.

 

[Jokodo]

While some areas have been redone there are plenty of old rocks around. Are we to think the civilization existed only in those areas that have been turned over? Why didn't civilization expand?

Sure there are old rocks around -- old rocks that 200 million years ago were covered by 800 meters of sediments that have since eroded, or old rocks underneath 800 meters of recent sediments. Since few of our mines go that deep, what you really need is old rocks that are/were at or near the surface both then and now.

Also bear in mind that every single atom of metal not sent out of the Earth's gravity well as space probes is still here. We don't use up resources; We just move them around.

It's a matter of entropy--we take concentrated sources and spread them about so thinly that mining isn't practical (except landfill sites.)

Except landfill sites, cities, bridges, factory sites, power plants,...
In other words, except all the places were we use them. 50 million years from now, the most enriched indium deposits will be former solar power plants.

 

[Jobar]

We have found fossils of megafauna that are as old as large animals have existed, I think. If bones get preserved for hundreds of millions of years, industrial artifacts would too, if any existed.

To wipe out all signs of human civilization on Earth would take something like the Late Heavy Bombardment some four billion years ago. So we can be certain nothing approaching our level of sophistication has ever existed here.

I've read, too, that nuclear weapons testing will be detectable to any civilization capable of measuring radionucleides for the rest of the lifetime of the Earth. So we can be positive there have been no beings capable of manipulating matter at the atomic level before us, at least on Earth.

Perhaps there were dinosaurs that made a few stone tools, in very limited areas. But I would be quite surprised if even that were so.

 

[phands]

We also found fossil bacteria that are 3.2 billion years old just recently, in South Africa. That indicates 2 things - a trail back to when the planet was just coming out of being formed, meaning that not all the evidence got destroyed in geologic time. And 2, there couldn't have been time for life to begin and evolve to civilization before 3.2Billion years ago and then vanish without trace. This thread should be over, and shouldn't be in Science...it should be in Wooooo.....

 

[Jobar]

Oh, I don't know. The question has been pretty definitively answered by science for most of our lifetimes, but it's still worthwhile to tell how we came by those answers.

 

[Politesse]

We also found fossil bacteria that are 3.2 billion years old just recently, in South Africa. That indicates 2 things - a trail back to when the planet was just coming out of being formed, meaning that not all the evidence got destroyed in geologic time. And 2, there couldn't have been time for life to begin and evolve to civilization before 3.2Billion years ago and then vanish without trace. This thread should be over, and shouldn't be in Science...it should be in Wooooo.....

I agree about the implausibility of this one, but you don't make science by refusing to ask questions, or even to revisit old ones. I find that when someone has a question I consider off the wall, a frank answer as to why is a much better response than mockery and dismissal.

 

[Jobar]

The phenomena which lead Frank to speculate about civilizations in deep time are real; the evidence for ancient episodes of swift global warming does exist. But I feel sure that the real explanation for those is more probably geological or astrophysical, than it is biological or technological.

 

[Cycad]

To wipe out all signs of human civilization on Earth would take something like the Late Heavy Bombardment some four billion years ago. So we can be certain nothing approaching our level of sophistication has ever existed here.

Not certain of that at all.

According to this far future timeline from BBC,

In one million year even glass will have disintegrated and all monuments will be gone (maybe pyramids left).

We will have passed an ice aged which most likely will have scraped bare the topsoil.

We dont need billions of years or heavy bombardment, time will wipe out all traces of men very fast.

 

[lpetrich]

This may change, but until now, the extinction wave caused by humanity's rise is nothing like previous mass extinctions. In some of those, 90%+ of genera -- not species, genera -- have gone extinct. While we've successfully exterminated American horses and all but exterminated Eurasian wild horses and donkeys, equus is alive and well in the African zebra. While the aurochs is extinct and the banteng likely will be by the end of the century, the genus bos is alive and kicking in the wild yak and and the gaur (counting domestic cattle, it's faring better than it ever did before humans came along). And that's large land animals. Except in insular environments, we've barely touched small animals, or the seas.

Some people are back-breeding approximations of aurochsen for introducing to wild areas: Wild supercows return to Europe - CNN

But Bos and Equus species are not a good example, since they are at least potentially  Charismatic megafauna, the sort of species that tend to attract many people's attention.

 

[Jobar]

To wipe out all signs of human civilization on Earth would take something like the Late Heavy Bombardment some four billion years ago. So we can be certain nothing approaching our level of sophistication has ever existed here.

Not certain of that at all.

According to this far future timeline from BBC,

In one million year even glass will have disintegrated and all monuments will be gone (maybe pyramids left).

We will have passed an ice aged which most likely will have scraped bare the topsoil.

We dont need billions of years or heavy bombardment, time will wipe out all traces of men very fast.

After a million years, most of the smaller artifacts will be gone, I don't doubt. But there will be places where we have sculpted and changed the very surface that will still be plain even from space, even after many tens or even hundreds of millions, I expect. Large reservoirs and freeway systems will leave obvious marks for a seriously long time. And beneath the surface... no way to prove it, but I'd bet there will be fossilized Coke bottles that last long enough for the planet to lose all its water, and plate tectonics grinds to a halt. Even supervolcanoes, large igneous events like the Siberian Traps, and asteroid impacts won't erase all the continental plates before then.

Maybe something like a collision with a ballistic extrasolar planetoid would melt the surface to a depth sufficient to make our civilization vanish completely. But even then, I suspect there will still be radionucleides which would tell an alien investigator with advanced tech that we existed, even if very little else could be determined.

And I haven't even mentioned Voyager and Pioneer, and other such far wanderers which will speak volumes to any intelligence which might chance across them.

 

[bilby]

I think there is some talk here at cross purposes; It is undoubtedly true that a civilization such as ours will leave behind detectable traces. The question is not whether that will happen; But whether, given that it had happened at some time in the distant past, it is possible that we may not yet have stumbled across - and recognized - any of these.

I think that is quite possible. To find such things requires that someone with the understanding to distinguish them from natural features should go to a place where they are to be found - and many of those places may be deep underground, or under the ocean. Even if some surface feature remains that bears the unmistakable hallmark of a past technological civilization, the chances are low that these will be recognized.

We dig up millions of tonnes of ore worldwide, but we look at almost none of it. Who knows that a tell-tale ceramic insulator from a 200 million year old civilization didn't go into the crusher with the rest of the ore yesterday, somewhere in the world, without ever being noticed by anyone?

Sure, there may be microplastics in the ore from a particular mine - but is anyone who would recognize such things in the habit of looking at those ores with a microscope?

Sure, some uranium ores may contain an unusual isotope profile - but who is doing isotope profiling of uranium ores? There's very little uranium prospecting happening at the moment. And most ores are yet to be found.

I have no doubt that an ancient industrial civilization would have left traces behind. I have grave doubts that we would have found and recognized such traces should they exist.

With regards to finding fossilized remains of an intelligent species, we have an incredibly small number of fossils with which to work:

Regarding the number of skeletons found to date – this is a great question since the number of complete components is relatively small (the average dinosaur has about a hundred different bones). Currently it is estimated that around 2,100 “good skeletons” have been found, and the number of known species is several hundred (300-500). Therefore, even without an entire skeleton, but with other skeletons from the same species, we have a good chance of completing the full picture. In addition, researchers often rely on the bone structure of contemporary reptiles and birds, which are the descendants of the dinosaurs and therefore their distant relatives.

(source)

Many dinosaur species are known only from a few teeth. Is anyone going to bet that the 500 or so species identified are the complete set of all large animals from the entire period for which dinosaurs existed? We could easily have missed an intelligent species - or found it but not enough bits to recognize its unusual cranial development (if any - brain size does not appear to be as strongly correlated with intelligence across genera as it is within them).

Many of the fossils we do have are from unusual situations - animals caught in tar pits, marshes, or pyroclastic events. These kinds of traps may be more readily avoided by an intelligent species, leading to lower fossilization rates - and fossilization is a rare enough event to begin with.

It's unlikely, sure. But it's not even CLOSE to as unlikely as most of the pseudoscience that we see daily. We have pretty comprehensive reasons to say that aliens have not visited us in flying saucers; or that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist; or that the ghosts of dead people don't haunt old buildings. Our reasons for rejecting the possibility of a long gone industrial civilization are far less comprehensive and compelling. Which is not to say that one is likely - but it's not, IMO, a closed question, nor a pseudoscientific one.

 

[Kharakov]

Deception technology (which includes psychological and social manipulation) far outpaced the production of useful technology during the great wars for utter domination.

That's the reason those in charge now (the cons, politicians, etc.) still need farmers, builders, maintenance workers, etc. to do all the shit work, while they live the good life. If they had focused on producing production technology, rather than deception technology, they wouldn't have a huge, stupid, useless populace.

 

[steve_bank]

Deception technology (which includes psychological and social manipulation) far outpaced the production of useful technology during the great wars for utter domination.

That's the reason those in charge now (the cons, politicians, etc.) still need farmers, builders, maintenance workers, etc. to do all the shit work, while they live the good life. If they had focused on producing production technology, rather than deception technology, they wouldn't have a huge, stupid, useless populace.

A book Propaganda was written in the 1920s before the negatves became attached to the word in WWII. The term propaganda was used in advertising and marketing,

The author makes the case that in a modern complex sciiety forms of propaganda are required for stability. What some may consider a negative in terms of polical persuation may be a necessity. We see the political chaos developing in real time, with no concensus in sight.

Ancient cultures used myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)

Chapters one through six address the complex relationship between human psychology, democracy, and corporations. Bernays’ thesis is that “invisible” people who create knowledge and propaganda rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response.[4] “Engineering consent” of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy.[5] Bernays explains:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”[6]

Bernays expands this argument to the economic realm, appreciating the positive impact of propaganda in the service of capitalism.[7]

“A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.”[8]

Bernays places great importance on the ability of a propaganda producer, as he views himself, to unlock the motives behind an individual’s desires, not simply the reason an individual might offer. He argues, “Man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress.”[9] Bernays suggests that propaganda may become increasingly effective and influential through the discovery of audiences’ hidden motives. He asserts that the emotional response inherently present in propaganda limits the audience’s choices by creating a binary mentality, which can result in quicker, more enthused responses.[10] The final five chapters largely reiterate the concepts voiced earlier in the book and provide case studies for how to use propaganda to effectively advance women’s rights, education, and social services.[11]

 

[bilby]

Deception technology (which includes psychological and social manipulation) far outpaced the production of useful technology during the great wars for utter domination.

That's the reason those in charge now (the cons, politicians, etc.) still need farmers, builders, maintenance workers, etc. to do all the shit work, while they live the good life. If they had focused on producing production technology, rather than deception technology, they wouldn't have a huge, stupid, useless populace.

Wrong thread?

 

[Jobar]

I think there is some talk here at cross purposes; It is undoubtedly true that a civilization such as ours will leave behind detectable traces. The question is not whether that will happen; But whether, given that it had happened at some time in the distant past, it is possible that we may not yet have stumbled across - and recognized - any of these.

Possibly so. But keep in mind that this is being discussed because of ancient episodes of global warming, which means that if those were caused by pre-human civilizations, they would have to have been both high tech and widely spread. Human civilizations are less than ten thousand years old, and I don't think it's possible for us to purposely erase all the geologically lasting evidences of our existence no matter how hard we tried. If some species reached sentience and high tech a hundred million years ago and managed to change the climate, I don't doubt we would have found abundant evidence of it long before now.

 

[skepticalbip]

I think there is some talk here at cross purposes; It is undoubtedly true that a civilization such as ours will leave behind detectable traces. The question is not whether that will happen; But whether, given that it had happened at some time in the distant past, it is possible that we may not yet have stumbled across - and recognized - any of these.

Possibly so. But keep in mind that this is being discussed because of ancient episodes of global warming, which means that if those were caused by pre-human civilizations, they would have to have been both high tech and widely spread. Human civilizations are less than ten thousand years old, and I don't think it's possible for us to purposely erase all the geologically lasting evidences of our existence no matter how hard we tried. If some species reached sentience and high tech a hundred million years ago and managed to change the climate, I don't doubt we would have found abundant evidence of it long before now.

That seems to be a "conclusion" based on a really bad assumption that only an advanced civilization pumping out carbon dioxide can cause climate to change.