© University of Rochester illustration/Michael OsadciwHow do we really know there weren't previous industrial civilizations on Earth that rose and fell long before human beings appeared?
Reptilian menaces called Silurians evolved on Earth before humankind - at least in the
Doctor Who rendition of the universe. But science fiction aside,
how would we know if some advanced civilization existed on our home planet millions of years before brainy humans showed up? This is a serious question, and serious scientists are speculating about what traces these potential predecessors might have left behind. And they're calling this possibility the Silurian hypothesis.
When it comes to the hunt for
advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that might exist across the cosmos, one must reckon with the knowledge that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. In contrast, complex life has existed on Earth's surface for only about 400 million years, and humans have only developed industrial civilizations in the last 300 years. This raises the possibility that industrial civilizations might have been around long before human ones ever existed - not just
around other stars, but even on Earth itself.
"Now, I don't believe an industrial civilization existed on Earth before our own - I don't think there was a dinosaur civilization or a giant tree sloth civilization," said study co-author Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York. "But the question of what one would look like if it did [exist] is important. How do you know there hasn't been one? The whole
point of science is to ask a question and see where it leads. That's the essence of what makes science so exciting."
Artifacts of human or other industrial civilizations are unlikely to be found on a planet's surface after about 4 million years, said Frank and study co-author Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. For instance, they noted that urban areas currently take up less than 1 percent of Earth's surface, and that complex items, even from early human technology, are very rarely found.
A machine as complex as the Antikythera mechanism - which is considered to be the world's first computer from ancient Greece - remained unknown until the development of elaborate clocks in RenaissanceEurope.
One may also find it difficult to unearth fossils of any beings who might have lived in industrial civilizations, the scientists added. The fraction of life that gets fossilized is always extremely small: Of all the many dinosaurs that ever lived, for example, only a few thousand nearly complete fossil specimens of the "terrible lizards" have been discovered. Given that the oldest known fossils of
Homo sapiens are only about
300,000 years old, there is no certainty that our species might even appear in the fossil record in the long run, they added.
Instead, the researchers suggested looking for more subtle evidence of industrial civilizations in the geological records of Earth or other planets. The scientists focused on looking at the signs of civilization that humans might create during the
Anthropocene, the geological age characterized by humans' influence on the planet.
"After a few million years, any physical reminder of your civilization may be gone, so you have to look for sedimentary anomalies, things like different chemical balances that just look wacky," Frank said.
One sign of industrial civilization may have to do with
isotopes of elements such as carbon. (Isotopes of an element vary in how many neutrons they possess in their atomic nuclei - for example, carbon-12 has six neutrons, while carbon-13 has seven.)
For instance, humans living in industrial civilizations have burned an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels, releasing more than 500 billion tons of carbon from coal, oil and natural gas into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels ultimately derive from plant life, which preferentially absorb more of the lighter isotope carbon-12 than the heavier isotope carbon-13. When fossil fuels get burned, they alter the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 normally found in the atmosphere, ocean and soils - an effect that could later be detected in sediments as hints of an industrial civilization.
In addition, human industrial civilizations have also discovered ways to artificially "
fix nitrogen" - that is, to break the powerful chemical bonds that hold nitrogen atoms together in pairs in the atmosphere, using the resulting single nitrogen atoms to create biologically useful molecules. The large-scale application of nitrogenous fertilizers generated via nitrogen fixing is already
detectable in sediments remote from civilization, the scientists noted.
The Anthropocene is also triggering a mass extinction of a wide variety of species that's likely visible in the fossil record. Human industrial activity may also prove to be visible in the geological record in the form of long-lived synthetic molecules from plastics and other products, or radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons.
One wild idea the Silurian hypothesis raises is that the end of one civilization could sow the seeds for another. Industrial civilizations may trigger dead zones in oceans, causing organic material (from the corpses of organisms in the zones) to get buried that could, down the line, become fossil fuels that could support a new industrial civilization. "You could end up seeing these cycles in the geological record," Frank said.
All in all, thinking about the impact that a previous civilization has on Earth "could help us think about what effects one might see on other planets, or about what is happening now on Earth," Frank said.
Schmidt and Frank detailed
their findings online April 10 in a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal
International Journal of Astrobiology.
Reader Comments
Mmmm... I never fails to amaze me to see specialists and experts in one field totally ignoring other realities. For example the electric car came first, no fossil fuel needed there. What about the megaliths all over the planet and no trace of machinery so far, unless the finds have been heavily suppressed. Megaliths made of multi faceted stones we can't reproduce today.
I would like to hear what Mr Charles Q. Choi has to say over the megaliths. Bronze chisels won't cut it (pun intended) and stone blocks in the 100's of tons such as in Baalbeck, Lebanon can't be maneuvered by human or oxen with natural fiber cables.
There has been at least one more advanced civilisation here, a global civilisation, and the proofs are there, in the open, to see.
Secondly the vast amount of megalitihic sites globally, tell us there was once a globalised civilisation on earth that met an end. Carbon dating is not reliable, if you know anything about it they can only date plant material, not the stone itself.
So many ancient cultures refer to "the ones before", and due to our exceptionalism we think they are just savages depicting gods.
Reseach the younger dryas comet hypothesis. 12000 odd years ago The comet fragments that hit the north american ice cap and aruptly ending the last ice age. An enourmous flooding event occured, 400ft rise in sea level. Enough to end a civilisation.
Whether this amnesia is due to ignorance or malicious agenda, it is yet to be decided, however the evidence is abundently clear. Prior to the last ice age, this planet, and perhaps the solar system, was populated by an advanced civilisation of human beings.
I've often wondered about that. Was the fire that destroyed the library of Alexandria deliberate with a history suppressing agenda ? What was the evidence the Jesuits destroyed in South and Central America ? And much more.
Here's a list of some from this site: [Link]
ANOMALIES IN COAL AND ROCK Human bones, foot and handprints and artifacts have been found in rock and coal deposits which evolutionists claim is millions and even billions of years old. If that were true, there would be no way to account for these oddities, since man is supposed to have evolved in the recent past. The geological time frame is very obviously wrong. A fossilized handprint in rock was found near Glen Rose Texas. A fossilized human skull was found in coal that was sold in Germany (mid-1800s). A jawbone of a child was found in coal in Tuscany (1958). Two giant human molars were found in Montana (1926). A human leg was found by a West Virginia coal miner. It had changed into coal.—pp. 34-35. A woman, in Illinois, reportedly found a gold chain in a chunk of coal which broke open (1891). A small steel cube was found in a block of coal in Austria (1885). An iron pot was found in coal in Oklahoma (1912). A woman found a child's spoon in coal (1937).—p. 35. In 1944 Newton Anderson claimed to have found this bell inside a lump of coal that was mined near his house in West Virginia. When Newton dropped the lump it broke, revealing a bell encased inside. What is a brass bell with an iron clapper doing in coal that is supposed to be hundreds of millions of years old? According to Norm Scharbough's book Ammunition (which includes a compilation of many such "coal anecdotes") the bell was extensively analyzed at the University of Oklahoma and it was found to contain an unusual mixture of metals, different from any modern usage. Photo and text from Genesis Park. Man-made objects in rock. An iron nail was found in a Cretaceous block from the Mesozoic era (mid-1800s). A gold thread was found in stone in England (1844). An iron nail was found in quartz in California (1851). A silver vessel was found in solid rock in Massachusetts (1851). The mold of a metal screw was found in a chunk of feldspar (1851). An intricately carved and inlaid metal bowl was found in solid rock (1852). An iron nail was found in rock in a Peruvian mine by Spanish conquistadores (1572).—pp. 35-36.
The ones I like best are the machined carbon steel, grooved spheres, repeatedly found in mines in S. Africa. Klerksdorp spheres are small objects, often spherical to disc-shaped, that have been collected by miners and rockhounds from 3-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposits mined by Wonderstone Ltd., near Ottosdal, South Afri ca. [Link] and [Link]
R.C.
We are being duped. What would see if the locked rooms in museums basements were opened to the public ? Who does and why is ancient history suppressed ?
Desperate global warming 'scientists' theorize Earth's cyclical climate fluctuations due to ancient unknown civilisations
They really are desperate to prove their Global Warming Thesis: Fifty-six million years ago, the Earth warmed far above the temperatures we experience today - and ice at the poles melted. Could...R.C.
*Now AGCC (climate change) because when they tried to sell a global warming GLOBAL tax,** they bet wrong as we were then in for (and likely still are) a global cooling period. Thus they changed it to
** Remember that the power to tax is the power to destroy. (Webster, Marshall, McColloch v. Md.)
(I think I'll post this there. Thanks SE.)
RC