Silurian Hypothesis

[Zardnaar]

Fairly basic idea. Are humans the first intelligent species to evolve in earth. Of course we are BUT.

After 4 million years all physical evidence of our civilization will be gone. Erosion, resurfacing, sea level changes etc.

Fossil record. 99% aquatic and incomplete, 0.1% of suspected species have left fossils.

Personally I'm not convinced one way or another. Interesting idea can't be ruled out. I think we are the first industrialized civilization but even thats plausible last 300 odd million levels.

Main argument against industrialization. We may be causing a 6th mass extinction event. But there may be evidence of that as well. But if said hypothetical species did things slightly differently or didn't reach the industrial age who knows.

Interesting hypothetical.

 

[Samson]

I am not watching a video to get details, got a text link? How long ago? Why no techno signatures?

You mention 4 million years ago. These are 3.3 million year old techno signatures:

3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

 

[Tee Kay]

the nauseating AI generated thumbnail is really putting me off here even more than the pseudo-conspiratorial speculation

 

[Zardnaar]

I am not watching a video to get details, got a text link? How long ago? Why no techno signatures?

You mention 4 million years ago. These are 3.3 million year old techno signatures:

3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

Over a long enough period of time even techno signatures disappear. In most places anyway. Not impossible just very difficult

Also we might lack the knowledge to identify them.

 

[PhroX]

Yeah, I'm not gonna wacth a video with that bad an AI thumbnail, but the idea that traces of our civilisation would be gone in a few million years is nonsense. Maybe the buildings and artifacts might be, but we have impacted the Earth's climate and environment in ways that will be detectable for much, much longer (given that we can detect similar natural changes hundreds of millions if not billions of years ago....). And I'm not just referring to the stuff like the obvious atmospheric CO2 levels. There are all sorts of elements and compounds that we have introduced into the enviroment that are either completely unnatural, or are in levels not seen naturally that will leave trace evidence for an immense amount of time. Some of which are pre-industrial, so you don't even need a "modern" civilisation.

 

[EnglishEdward]

This thread make makes me think of:

Doctor Who and the Silurians - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Arwon]

You don't have to take youtube videos seriously

 

[PhroX]

This thread make makes me think of:

Doctor Who and the Silurians - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm pretty sure that's actually where the name of the hypothesis comes from. When people started seriously considering what impact a really ancient industrial civilisation would have on our planet and thus whether we could detect it, decided it was just easier to take the name from the Dr. Who race of lizard people from the dawn of time. (The Silurian itelf is a peroid in the Earths deep past who's naming that predates Who, and is why said lizard people are named that....)

 

[Cutlass]

A cut diamond is a cut diamond. None have been found. They might be hid, they won't stop being recognizably the work of tools. Gold is stable. No worked gold has been found. The idea assumes that every piece of worked mineral or metal has ceased to be recognizable, or hidden beyond the scope of everywhere we're looked. And yet we find fossil remains 100million years old all the time.

 

[Remorseless1]

Heck, what if our universe is simply the latest iteration of the universe. How many "big bangs" over trillions and trillions of years may have occurred? Like the old scientist's lament, the more we know, the more we we realize how much we don't know.

 

[Angst]

not watching the video either, sorry.

it's not just about leftovers of construction (that indeed gets wiped out).

none of the fossils we've found have had any recognizable traces of complex tool use. i'm not just talking using tools, but having tools used on them. today we can look at bones and recognize if it's cut with a tool. stuff like that. i'm dating someone whose job that literally is. so even if something unidentified exists, it's unlikely, as we'd see some weird inexplicable things in the fossil record similar to this.

at least on an industrial scale, the op touches on an issue with that too. literally every former extinction event has been thoroughly researched, and the explanations are very well documented. the 6th mass extinction today is explained with industry simply because the things we use to explain other extinction events and ecological issues simply don't apply in the current crisis. there's no supervolcanic eruption, no meteor, no overforestation, etc etc etc. the reason the current extinction even is thought to be industrial is not just because human environmental impact is a good explanation, it's because all the alternatives have no substantiation. like when a climate denier rambles about global wobbling, science dismisses it because global wobbling is not enough to explain what's going on today. but for all those other extinction events, researchers have pretty clearly determined that the causes were "natural"

like, what would one even speculate over? that the overforestation could be intentional? let's go with that as an example. then - it's just kind of ridiculous since, like... i don't think people appreciate enough how overpowered trees are. they're extremely nutrient poor for the amount of work (ie calories) it takes for most creatures to eat them, and most animals can't even feed on wood. there's a reason most... tree-ivores? are crazy specialized species, tiny beetles and larvae and such, that only ever so slowly break down the wood. same goes for fungus and microbes. trees suck to eat. you know what happens if we didn't have such species? we'd have insane tree growth all over the world as happened back then. because trees were new and creatures hadn't evolved to eat them at a large scale yet. it's similar to plastic today as a shorthand concept (where we've now found germs that can consume plastic, but stupid slow)

 

[Gori the Grey]

I took one for the team and watched the video. None of you have to worry about watching it, actually. It's not advocating that there was such a civilization, just explaining a 2018 article that says we can't conclusively prove that there wasn't, and giving that article's reasoning for that considerably more modest thesis.

For myself, the best part is around 12:30. Because there he makes clear what I was thinking all along. There are actually two separate questions: could there have been previous intelligent life? and was there life that imitates our own industrialized carbon-burning societies? At 12:30, he indicates that we tend to conflate those two. What if, I ask, there was an intelligent species that was in fact more intelligent than we are, discerned the importance of sustainability and therefore deliberately took a principled hard pass on all of our forms of "civilization." Contented themselves with staying hunter-gatherers, with no tool more advanced than a sharpened stick. A society like that might well leave no material trace.

In other words, it's rather haughty of us to think that intelligent life necessarily = carbon-burning industrial life. After all, as we are increasingly coming to realize, maybe that's not in fact the most intelligent way to live, after all.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Well, we know for a fact that the Egyptians could not have built the pyramids without help from superior peoples! It is all right here:

 

[pob]

This forms the basis of one of Terry Pratchett's Science of the Discworld books. The Wizards inadvertently create our universe and observe and help various species on our planet advance, the most promising of which is a crab civilization that was just about to make the Great Leap Sideways when it's killed off by a meteor. Our time on earth is so fleeting that they miss us completely.

 

[Zardnaar]

I took one for the team and watched the video. None of you have to worry about watching it, actually. It's not advocating that there was such a civilization, just explaining a 2018 article that says we can't conclusively prove that there wasn't, and giving that article's reasoning for that considerably more modest thesis.

For myself, the best part is around 12:30. Because there he makes clear what I was thinking all along. There are actually two separate questions: could there have been previous intelligent life? and was there life that imitates our own industrialized carbon-burning societies? At 12:30, he indicates that we tend to conflate those two. What if, I ask, there was an intelligent species that was in fact more intelligent than we are, discerned the importance of sustainability and therefore deliberately took a principled hard pass on all of our forms of "civilization." Contented themselves with staying hunter-gatherers, with no tool more advanced than a sharpened stick. A society like that might well leave no material trace.

In other words, it's rather haughty of us to think that intelligent life necessarily = carbon-burning industrial life. After all, as we are increasingly coming to realize, maybe that's not in fact the most intelligent way to live, after all.

I've heard of the Silurian hypothesis and knew about how rate fossils are.

Off top of my head I didn't know the beers though.

 

[Zardnaar]

not watching the video either, sorry.

it's not just about leftovers of construction (that indeed gets wiped out).

none of the fossils we've found have had any recognizable traces of complex tool use. i'm not just talking using tools, but having tools used on them. today we can look at bones and recognize if it's cut with a tool. stuff like that. i'm dating someone whose job that literally is. so even if something unidentified exists, it's unlikely, as we'd see some weird inexplicable things in the fossil record similar to this.

at least on an industrial scale, the op touches on an issue with that too. literally every former extinction event has been thoroughly researched, and the explanations are very well documented. the 6th mass extinction today is explained with industry simply because the things we use to explain other extinction events and ecological issues simply don't apply in the current crisis. there's no supervolcanic eruption, no meteor, no overforestation, etc etc etc. the reason the current extinction even is thought to be industrial is not just because human environmental impact is a good explanation, it's because all the alternatives have no substantiation. like when a climate denier rambles about global wobbling, science dismisses it because global wobbling is not enough to explain what's going on today. but for all those other extinction events, researchers have pretty clearly determined that the causes were "natural"

like, what would one even speculate over? that the overforestation could be intentional? let's go with that as an example. then - it's just kind of ridiculous since, like... i don't think people appreciate enough how overpowered trees are. they're extremely nutrient poor for the amount of work (ie calories) it takes for most creatures to eat them, and most animals can't even feed on wood. there's a reason most... tree-ivores? are crazy specialized species, tiny beetles and larvae and such, that only ever so slowly break down the wood. same goes for fungus and microbes. trees suck to eat. you know what happens if we didn't have such species? we'd have insane tree growth all over the world as happened back then. because trees were new and creatures hadn't evolved to eat them at a large scale yet. it's similar to plastic today as a shorthand concept (where we've now found germs that can consume plastic, but stupid slow)

It's covers how rare fossils are. Basically we probably have only found a small number of species that ever existed.

Hunter gatherer level of civilization or intelligent aquatic species might not leave behind anything we could identify.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, I'm not gonna wacth a video with that bad an AI thumbnail, but the idea that traces of our civilisation would be gone in a few million years is nonsense. Maybe the buildings and artifacts might be, but we have impacted the Earth's climate and environment in ways that will be detectable for much, much longer (given that we can detect similar natural changes hundreds of millions if not billions of years ago....). And I'm not just referring to the stuff like the obvious atmospheric CO2 levels. There are all sorts of elements and compounds that we have introduced into the enviroment that are either completely unnatural, or are in levels not seen naturally that will leave trace evidence for an immense amount of time. Some of which are pre-industrial, so you don't even need a "modern" civilisation.

Dinosaur that wiped out the dinosaurs was equal to billions of nuclear weapons being detonated at once.

Yet it wasn't until the 1980s we found evidence for it. They're still debating the effects of it despite finding the impact site since then.

Video shows they've found a layer 55 million years ago indicating an impact an industrial civilization coukd have. Probably volcanoes.

More indicating how easy it is to miss something.

 

[Gorbles]

More indicating how easy it is to miss something.

There could be purple leprechauns that live on the moon. Theoretically.

I could say something less ridiculous, but the example doesn't really matter. The point is anyone can claim something. So what?

 

[Zardnaar]

There could be purple leprechauns that live on the moon. Theoretically.

I could say something less ridiculous, but the example doesn't really matter. The point is anyone can claim something. So what?

It explains why we don't have the information vs making a claim then saying "prove I'm wrong".

People may place to much faith in science (or none). A goid scientist will know when they don't know and why.

Vs making up stories.

I don't think there's a previous industrialized society btw but its interesting how we could miss one.

 

[Cutlass]

not watching the video either, sorry.

it's not just about leftovers of construction (that indeed gets wiped out).

none of the fossils we've found have had any recognizable traces of complex tool use. i'm not just talking using tools, but having tools used on them. today we can look at bones and recognize if it's cut with a tool. stuff like that. i'm dating someone whose job that literally is. so even if something unidentified exists, it's unlikely, as we'd see some weird inexplicable things in the fossil record similar to this.

at least on an industrial scale, the op touches on an issue with that too. literally every former extinction event has been thoroughly researched, and the explanations are very well documented. the 6th mass extinction today is explained with industry simply because the things we use to explain other extinction events and ecological issues simply don't apply in the current crisis. there's no supervolcanic eruption, no meteor, no overforestation, etc etc etc. the reason the current extinction even is thought to be industrial is not just because human environmental impact is a good explanation, it's because all the alternatives have no substantiation. like when a climate denier rambles about global wobbling, science dismisses it because global wobbling is not enough to explain what's going on today. but for all those other extinction events, researchers have pretty clearly determined that the causes were "natural"

like, what would one even speculate over? that the overforestation could be intentional? let's go with that as an example. then - it's just kind of ridiculous since, like... i don't think people appreciate enough how overpowered trees are. they're extremely nutrient poor for the amount of work (ie calories) it takes for most creatures to eat them, and most animals can't even feed on wood. there's a reason most... tree-ivores? are crazy specialized species, tiny beetles and larvae and such, that only ever so slowly break down the wood. same goes for fungus and microbes. trees suck to eat. you know what happens if we didn't have such species? we'd have insane tree growth all over the world as happened back then. because trees were new and creatures hadn't evolved to eat them at a large scale yet. it's similar to plastic today as a shorthand concept (where we've now found germs that can consume plastic, but stupid slow)

What is this overforestation idea? I don't recall that I ever heard that one.