If you read the thread you will see that it has already been explained that the issue is not just one of fossils surviving. The issue is primarily that fossils simply won’t form. Fossil formation occurs on an order of square metres or maybe square kilometres every thousand years, worldwide. Civilisation has existed for a mere 6, 00 years, and occupies a tiny fraction of the planet. At best we’ve left a couple of square kilometres of fossils. The odds of those surviving and being revealed by erosion and producing attributable evidence is so close to nil as makes no difference.
It wans’t meant as a dsqualifier. It is an example of how an intelligent species will invent a natural explanation for such discrepancies. Only the fruitcakes of the far future will attribute it to lost civilisations and ancient astronauts.
The world is full of odd discrepancies like layers of iridium, areas of shocked quartz, regions of unusual radioactivity. inexplicable geological formations and so forth. We blithely invent natural explanations for them all.
Firstly it’s debatable whether the current extinction would even register. Most of the species lost are tiny invertebrates, and very few if any noticable taxa have been lost. Chances are it wouldn’t even be apparent in the fossil record.
Even if it were, while such extinctions aren’t common, they are hardly unprecedented. Hell, we can’t even agree how much of the current extinction event is attributable to people, and we are have unabiguous proof that it happened it occured just a few thousand years ago. The idea that people in a million years will be bale to ascertain that Indians exterminated the megafauna when we can’t agree on that today is hoping for a little much.
As for the rise of certain species, this is again hardly unprecendented. What it will look like is that there was a drastic, shortlived fall in sea levels that allowed widespread species dispersals. Whatever mechanism they invent for that fall will also be able to explain any extintction event.
Wait, are we saying the Silurians might not be real? Has Doctor Who been lying to me?
Seriously, I think Blake is completely right.
One obvious difference we’ve made is that a whole bunch of oil that should be in the ground has instead been drilled up and burned. That’s a difference that may be visible over tens of millions of years. But how will someone tens of millions know that the oil is missing? We care a great deal about the biogeological processes behind oil, and we’re nowhere near being able to predict from first principles how much of it ought to exist. Now imagine how much farther away we’d be if our civilization developed in a less oil-centric way because the Silurians had used too much of it.
Really, any measure you can think of that’s within our current technology is going to have the same problem. Except maybe completely destroying the planet–I don’t know if we can pull that off yet, but it might be fun to try.
The Long Now people have put a bit of blue-sky thought into how we could leave records that would outlast us by millions of years. The best answer I’ve heard from them is the incredible longshot of just beaming lots of radio waves at every star we can see. If I guess if we get a message from some aliens 75 million light-years away saying, “Hey, nice to hear from you, how’s things on your planet?” we’d know about this Jurassic civilization. But how likely is that–especially if radio-capable civilization only exists on average 1000 out of 10000000 years?
As things stand, we’ll have to survive a lot longer and get a lot more advanced (and without hitting some kind of Vingean singularity that makes the whole thing irrelevant) before we’re likely to leave any good record of our existence.
If I understand Otaru’s point, it’s that, if fossils (patterned stones) can survive hundreds of millions of years, why can’t other human artifacts that are as hard as fossils survive?
What about cut gemstones? What about gold? I’m thinking that a single piece of elaborate jewelry’s survival would be unambiguous evidence of a past civilization. Does gold adhere to itself over this time frame? Would cut jewels, buried in strata, decompose?
Similar to what I was thinking. We actually make ‘fossils’ in industrial quantities on a global scale (infinite varieties of carved stones), so it’s not like we are relying on the uncertainties of natural fossilisation to preserve us? That must make a difference to incidence and persistency?
I have no expertise in this field so I may be talking nonsense. Which makes a pleasant change from talking nonsense in fields I am familiar with.
I may not have understood or agreed with previous assertions but its quite obvious I have read the thread as my replies are direct disagreements with previous claims.
I havent seen anything to explain why fossils can survive but similar substances wont.
Nor do I accept that billions of people existing for millenia boils down to ‘a few kilometres’. The world is certainly a large place, but we also have been slinging a fair few solid manufactured objects around it, unlike any previous species we know of. We have actively investigated time periods and the history of this planet, particularly periods of large extinctions, and our knowledge of some of these areas is increasing immensely even over the last few decades.
Nor do I accept ‘it would all be written off’ as a compelling argument - it could happen but the level of certainty that it would happen seems unwarranted with the examples supplied. We dont exist in a situation where there is an unexplained extinction, low petroleum, odd radiation samples, etc etc.
And for some of the objects in question, only one would have to survive.
The real problem with the whole scenario is it is ultimately untestable. We really dont know what would survive and what wouldnt, we can only surmise. Nor can we know what would be willing to be considered in the context of the evidence they would have before them, vs what we have in considering the possibility of previous intelligent species.
Humans make many objects which could survive for eons, given the right conditions.
What about a landfill filled with coca-cola bottles? How long would glass survive, given the right conditions?
Even a single coca-cola bottle would be an unambiguous sign of civilization.
In the Canadian north, there is exposed “Canadian shield” rock, which has existed for a very long time, basically unchanged:
Road-building in that part of the world often involves blasting substantial perfectly-straight lanes though outcrops of this rock, as anyone who has ever driven to North Bay can attest; it is hard to believe that these scars would not remain quite detectible for literally hundereds of millions of years - quite visible proof of civilization.
There was another thread on this subject a while ago, but couldn’t find it (forgot who started it or what the title was). Basically, my answer there was that, given the fact that humans inhabit a large percentage of the world and have built many large permanent structures, the odds are that something would survive. If foot prints or even topographical structures can become fossilized and later uncovered then so could structures like houses or buildings. The actual materials of the structures might be long gone (though things like glass would last for a LONG time, especially if it were buried), but the outline of the structure would be preserved.
Also, you’d have materials such as caches of rare worked metals (gold for instance) that would still preserve the casting (again, given the right conditions), that would obviously point to something constructed instead of a natural formation.
Even one such finding would be a strong indication of a civilization such as our own existed, and given the world wide nature of current human civilization I’d say the chances that something would be preserved and last that long are pretty high.
It degrades, but slowly. Takes millions of years, IIRC, but basically glass is like a really slow moving liquid, so it will deform over the time spans we are talking about here…unless it’s preserved in something.
That would go for even stone…if it’s exposed and doesn’t get buried or otherwise protected it will weather away. On Life After Humans I think they said that something like Mount Rushmore would be gone in something like 300k+ years…weathered away.
"And as may clearly be seen from slide ten, this particular species of glass-depositing microbe can be identified by the characteristic “coca-cola” formation - not to be confused with the contemporaneous and competing “pepsi-cola” organism found depicted in slide 11 … "
Fossilized cities might be the best bet, buried by lava or by mud flow, but then what would be the odds of finding one of these after 150 million years of plate tectonics? By that time, it could be buried deep under a mountain, or lie buried beneath the sea.
I still think you’re going to run up against the fact that the civilization occupies such a small space temporally. Finding fossils 150 million years hence from one particular 20,000-year period would seem like a long shot.
Oh, I agree. A cache of coke bottles in, say, a land fill, buried even before whatever disaster happened to end civilization in the Jurassic and uncovered millions of years later would certainly be an indication of that civilization. As would the outline of a buried building, fossilized and preserved, or a road, or a vault full of gold bricks or even a bunch of obviously shaped stones.
If this theoretical civilization in the Jurassic was as large and wide spread as our own, then there would certainly be something left behind that we could and probably would find…probably many somethings, scattered all over the world, possibly from different times (maybe we’d find the remnants of stone tools from an earlier period, stone megalithic structures from a later period, stone ruins from the equivalent of their classical period, and preserved trash from many periods, even some fossilized buildings, roads or other things from our own).
While fossils are certainly rare, I don’t believe that any species has managed to cover so much of the earth, to live in so many different environments, nor to build on the scales we build on. It’s inconceivable to me that there would be nothing left of such a civilization even after millions, or even hundreds of millions of years. Eventually, much of the area that civilization lived on would be subducted, which would certainly impact what could or couldn’t be found, some would be pushed up into mountain ranges or dropped into new seas, continents would be formed, reformed, pushed together and pulled apart.
Again, I raise the notion that some parts of our planet (Canadian Shield for example) have been geologically stable for a very long time, and have been extensively “worked” by humans. I find it hard to believe that even after hundreds of millions of years, there will be no trace of road cuttings through solid rock and the like.
Well, a very interesting argument. Both sides have advanced some major points.
On the “pro” side the claim we have created many artifact that will survive millions of years on their own, without fossilization, is an intriguing one. Perhaps concrete and asphalt will disappear over geologic time scales quite handily, but what about the contents of my wife’s jewelry box? They are shaped versions of minerals and crystals that naturally have survived for millions of years, why should the not also survive? Beyond that, although large iron structures may rust, what about large structures made of steel? What about all those titanium jet engine parts? Will Paley’s actual watch actually be used to posit a watchmaker one day?
(I just like the thought that jewelry will be the most long-lasting evidence of human activity. We will be known to succeeding intelligent races, should they exist, as “the jewellers” and this will be called “The Tom Shane Era.”
On the counter side, I find the tendency to find explanations to fit anomalous data, or file it away in forgotten corners, to be quite convincing. Basically, if you are going to make extraordinary claims, you have to have extraordinary evidence, and I am not sure that enough of anything of human civilization will survive for 150 millions years to constitute “extraordinary evidence.”
I know of a bit of startling anomalous data that I have encountered in my lifetime that have received such treatment. A scientist in England discovered that some people may have very little in the way of normal brain mass and structure due to hydrocephalus, and yet function with normal or even higher than normal intelligence. Here’s a portion of the wiki article on hydrocephalus dealing with one such person:
The mans’ specific problem is Dandy Walker syndrome and in the Wiki on that it is noted that vicitms may have normal or higher than normal intelligence.
My point is that there is a well-developed science dealing with structures of the brain, but clearly this man’s brain structure is nothing like normal brain structure, and to take it fully into account would require some major rethinking of how brains develop and the nature of brain structures, but we just file it under “anomaly.” How many jewelry boxes and steel gun parts would be so filed by future geologists in the absence of other evidence? (And you know gun barrels are gonna be a very common and long-lasting feature of the geological record.)
Interesting thread…I’m kind of curious, what if a civilization tried to take specific measures to ensure that a civilization 150 million years from now would find X (which would be uncontroversial proof of a civilization)?
What could a civilization do to ensure that it was discovered?
This is a bit different from the OP, but along the same line.
Take a nickel iron asteroid, carve it into an unambigulously abstract, unnatural shape, say a pyrimid, tow it to a LaGrange point, put an array of solar panels on the surface made from the most indestructible material posisble. Dig a tunnel to the center of the asteroid, lay in some batteries to store the solar power, and some equipment to periodically broadcast on all frequences of the spectrum some simple code saying “I am here.” Put a picture of your Aunt Matilda in there too.
