Just wanted to point at this interesting article
Are you saying the syllogism is correct reasoning, or that the conclusion about intelligent life on Earth is correct?
Despite the strong case against Homo sapiens we just witnessed in Tampa, Florida, I think good cases remain for the intelligence of dolphins or even octopi.
And yet we find all sorts of delicate structures that lasted for millions of years, from fossils to impact debris. The fact that most such things gets destroyed does not preclude against some likely being preserved if there are enough of them. And a stone tool-using civilization makes* a lot* of stone tools. They wear out much faster than metal ones. That’s the real advantage of metal tools - ease of resharpening and edge-holding.
Gastroliths *very well might *preserve well. But a gastrolith is superficially just a very smooth pebble. Not exactly going to jump out of the geological record when every river is doing the exact same thing to its pebbles. You need a reason to turn the SEM and reflectometer onto your smooth pebbles, like erraticism or association with other fossils. But we’ve gotten pretty good atidentifying gastroliths, actually. So I’d say “suspect” is a putting it a bit mildly. “Are pretty damn certain” would be a better way of putting it.
Dolphins and octopi aside, I think Monty Python expressed it best:
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
Extremely ancient civilizations figure strongly in the Cthulhu Mythos. Though, the idea there is not that they evolved on Earth but that they visited and built colonies here. Indeed, one group is credited with starting life on Earth either as an accident or as a kind of joke. Because these cultures were so truly alien, artifacts of theirs are hard for humans to recognize as such. Additionally, this knowledge has been judged to be generally harmful to humanity and a kind of conspiracy protects it.
This is an exceedingly minor nitpick, but this isn’t really true. There may be only a couple dozen fossil forests that are spectacular enough to be tourist attractions, but other tree fossils are very common.
We have good evidence that humans used fire regularly at least 250K years ago.
We have even older evidence (3.4M years ago) of fossilized animal bones with stone tool marks.
Tools, fire … those are pretty good candidates for technology. Evidence for intelligence is harder to come by. Are bottle-nosed dolphins intelligent? Perhaps. Do they leave any evidence of it? Not much, other than the size of their craniums.
But as mentioned above, while there are a lot of fossils for things that were very common, there are a lot of LACK of fossils for other things that were very common.
A good example is that things in forests don’t tend to fossilize well at all, so the fossil record of arboreal primates is very scanty, despite an incredible emphasis on research in this area (since there’s good evidence that H Sapiens descended from an arboreal species, one that hasn’t been found.)
And I’m sure we can all agree that anything that wasn’t common isn’t likely to turn up in the fossil record. The few fossils that may have occurred have to be found.
The reason we call ancient humans “cave men” is because many of the first examples were found in caves. It turns out that’s not because we all lived in caves and spent most of our time there, but rather because caves make excellent places for things to be preserved.
So, it’s quite possible that stone-age intelligent species have developed, and left no record that anyone has found yet. When you find some evidence, please let us know!
How long will Mount Rushmore remain recognizable?
What’s the oldest known large stone statue/structure? The Pyramids maybe? How long will they last?
Well there’s a big difference between how long edifices will last, and how long evidence of civilization will last.
My guess is the pyramids will outlast most of what we’re building today.
The only reason that we have existing Roman aquaducts and buildings is that Roman engineers didn’t know the parallelogram of forces, and couldn’t do the math to figure out the minimal structure to serve the purpose. Emperors wanted to do the most with the cash on hand, so they didn’t overbuild for the fun of it: they overbuilt because they didn’t know how to estimate, and they preferred to err on the side of caution rather than risk being a laughing stock. They also didn’t know that elliptical arches would work, and used only circular ones, which end up using more material but I believe should outlast elliptical arches.
Today, we “know better”, so we generally don’t build things to last millenia.
Mount Rushmore probably being a good counterexample. Another possible example might be huge dams, but I’m just guessing about that.
I don’t think it’s plausible that there were very ancient civilizations (as in millions or hundreds of millions of years ago). If there were intelligent reptiles or intelligent proto-raccoons or whatever, we’d know it from the fossil record even if the exact species and its technology was undiscovered. You’d see precursor development throughout the entire evolutionary chain to that creature. Is it possible that we could have missed the entire evolutionary line of a species that sophisticated? I’m no paleontologist, but I don’t think so.
As far back on the plausibility chain I’d go is that perhaps we’ll one day find evidence of a human or hominid social structure of some sort that predates our earliest estimate by a few thousand years. Some small outlier that established itself early then died out fast. Like the Neandertals. They were smarter than us at the time, so maybe they still have some surprises in store for us. Not ancient stone cities, but perhaps evidence of extensive trade networks or something like that.
I wonder how long a satellite in geosynchronous or Lagrangian orbit will last?
I believe we are fairly certain that nothing prior to the 20th Century CE is ‘out there’.
Likewise, our imprint on Luna is going to be there for millions of years, long after our species has moved into the extinct column.
Therefore, there is a very good chance that we are the first Terran species to achieve spaceflight.
Or, at the very least, the first to establish an extraterrestrial presence.
Being civilized? Being civilized would be a good parameter for civilization. We’re still throwing rocks across each others borders, granted those are high tech rocks we are using but one would think if we had the brain power to theorize such technology and then the brain power to develop it from theory, we could figure out a way to resolve differences without throwing rocks.
Civilization looked at from that perspective doesn’t exist.
What does civilization mean. Simply being a civilian? As opposed to…what is the opposing value of civil or civilian?
Then slip that next word in there…Culture. Ooo…the root word seems to be cult. That’s unnerving.
‘Culture’ is derived directly from the Latin word ‘cultura’ which means ‘cultivation’.
‘Civilization’ comes from the Latin ‘civil’ meaning ‘having to do with a city-state’.
Cultivation as in forming or shaping or creating conditions for something to grow? What growth is experienced by any sort of populated body located in a certain geographical location?
So civilization has little to do with the people inhabiting it but to do with its governing bodies? Or locality --city or state, a populated body contained to certain geographical location? Plunking down several people in a certain area and have certain other bodies governing those areas–cities and states. Basically what it amounts to? The perhaps we are attaching too much importance to civilization or perhaps expecting too much of it.
The act of throwing rocks across borders, creating yet another series of wars would not be considered uncivilized at all.
I think you’re having a conversation that nobody else is having.
Don’t forget Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Two things from a civilisation that would last a very long time are mineshafts and glass. Both would be recognisable as artificial for many millions, if not billions of years, assuming the rocks they are contained in are not subject to metamorphosis of some sort.
Some kinds of stone tools would last as long- it is ironic that some of the most durable artifacts of human civilisation are also some of the oldest.
I agree with the first part - signs of previous visits to the moon would remain intact. But would we have necessarily found them?
Here’s a map of the area explored by the Apollo 11 mission. To give a sense of the scale, it’s superimposed on a baseball diamond. Multiply it by six missions and that’s how much of the moon we’ve explored. That and some observations from orbit.
