Comment by rbanffy
18 hours ago
One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits.
It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.
18 hours ago
One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits.
It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.
It’s gotta be coins though.
Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists.
At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals.
So the King created a vast medal series (Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings.
These bronze and gold medals were intentionally buried in the foundations of monuments like the Louvre, specifically waiting for future generations to excavate them.
So the key is: durable materials, widely spread.
If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world.
Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.
They're clearly a ceremonial artifact, and their reflective surface is used to perform some religious ritual or other, probably related to the sun.
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Shame that dopant drift would render the chips inoperable eventually.
But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.
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https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/life-in-general/marbles.h...
"""Civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did a good job of showing how the artifacts of civilization would decay, erode, disintegrate, and disappear. What’s surprising is that most of the stuff won’t last more than a few centuries. Our big cities, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, and so forth will be untraceable within a millenium of the collapse of civilization. What will survive for longer?
...
This is why I occasionally dig a deep hole — perhaps two feet deep — on my land, drop a marble into it, and cover it up again. I always dig such holes on flat land halfway between the slope and the creek. The soil erosion here is slowest. For many years, the rains will slowly move dirt down the slopes toward the creek. On this flat section of land, the process will be very slow, and the loss of dirt to the creek will be matched by the gain of dirt from above. But eventually the former process will outperform the latter process, and dirt will start eroding away from above the marble. Eventually, all the dirt over the marble will be washed away and it will be exposed. """
They’ll last thousands of years, but not millions.
it's more likely that they used our planet as a "greenhouse" to grow these crystals for themselves, and we're just the lichen that happens to grow on the walls as a consequence of their process
I was literally thinking ancient civilizations/aliens throughout the whole article.
It’d need to be really ancient in this case. To the point only mineral traces and no structure would remain.
It is. I wish the conspiracy theorist 'the pyramids could not have been built by humans' etc etc crowds didn't exist, because I wish there was space to theorise about pre-human, pre-ape intelligent culture just for fun.
Same with UFOs. It seems to have changed in the past few years, but for a long time interest in them was associated with wackiness, and it was not something you could really discuss with a genuine sense of interest without the stain of appearing to believe something you didn't. It's intellectually and socially important to be able to be able to be curious and speculate without the appearance of belief in something.
That ol' Silurian Hypothesis is fun, but, knowing how damn smart birds are, it's not inconceivable that the theropods could have become advanced enough to be at least tool-users.
Of course, now, we know they probably had as much similarity to lizards as we do.
Another interesting thought experiment is an octopus civilization. They are probably smart enough to have also developed along those lines.
Depending on what that civilization would have looked like, there might not be much left.
I remember reading an essay (probably linked from here), that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization. They posited that the only evidence of our civilization, in a few million years, would be marbles.
> that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization.
It depends who comes searching. u235 has a half-life of ~700m years, so finding it in enough places (i.e. rocket silos, even if underground) and obviously processed into spheres, would raise some advanced alien eyebrows. There's also a chance that some things we left on the Moon / in high orbits will survive for a few million years. (also the test tubes on Mars and the rovers themselves, some have RTGs which, even if "depleted" of usable energy might still register as artificial)
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In a couple million years, what you’ll see are the mineral deposits where dumpsters are today, with all the materials that are not economically viable to recycle, but that will remain as they were for very long times - metal alloys, rocks that shouldn’t have formed at that time and place, oil deposits where plastics were that appear much older than the adjacent substrate in carbon dating, and so on.
The shape is erased, but the chemical composition mostly remains.
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Was the sense of wackiness wrong though? Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous. It's useful to play around with ideas, yes, but it's also important to acknowledge that some ideas simply are wishful thinking.
>Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous.
If only, but no. Thanks to equally ubiquitous video and image editing and now AI and the profit potential of social media there are more such claims than anyone can count.
The sitting president of the US is even intentionally stirring the pot releasing obvious AI photos of himself walking with aliens while the government is releasing "evidence" that isn't any more credible than the stuff you find on Reddit and Youtube. A significant number of Americans already believe the government has confirmed the existence of aliens and UFOs on Earth thanks to "whistleblowers" like Grusch and the Tic-Tac stuff, even though the government's official position has never changed, and most of that "evidence" has been debunked, and Grusch et.al have yet to provide anything conclusive.
Far from going away, the whole thing has become normalized and I feel like we're going to reach the point where more people believe in interdimensional space elves than believe humans ever landed on the moon by the end of the decade.
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Building the pyramids is the easy part. You need food, labor, stone. Designing the bastards is where the true mystery lies for me. And it doesn't seem that we have very good history on the design process. Unlike the building one.
Design in what way? A pyramid is the natural shape any pile of stuff takes when created because it is the most stable.
Heck, when just playing in the dirt or sand as a little kid you sort of instinctually learn that.
So once you have that, what is left to learn of the design process? Cutting and assembly.
Cutting we figured out already, with copper tools you can use the desert sand as a diamond abrasive (has microscopic diamonds in it). Put sand on block, move a saw blade with no teeth back and forth.
Assembly: we do have some idea of the assembly process, but yes we will never know for certain because it was either taken for granted in that age (like we take for granted how to use modern technology), or written on parchment long since destroyed.
Design: we have countless examples in the region of pre-giza pyramids that have different height/width ratios. And how the older ones are less stable due to having more height to width (taller than wide).
So yeah, designing really is do it at smaller scale. Heck hand held bricks would give you a lot of practice and design reference when building the real thing, for a fraction of the cost.
And you missed the most obvious thing we learned, (a) they had a ton of time (no YouTube), (b) they built it in the off-season and paid the workers in food - not slaves. It was a public works project, that was used to keep the citizens fed.
Or, it's just another spin of the anthropomorphism bias we have. If anyone found those mineral what, 50 years ago? or let's say 150 to predate every quantum theory possibility... well, they would have been just nice and weird crystals with 0 importance, just because we didn't know about their properties.
But now they have suddenly a meaning so hey, maybe it's somebody like us, smart as us, that created them many eons ago to harness quantum capabilities back in the day.
They were in fact discovered 54 years ago. The quantum properties weren’t recognized until 2012.
I think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.
Yeah, I’m hoping to replicate the higher purity natural growth pathway in synthetics. The bottom line is higher purity means more zinc for us, and it’s a common enough ion in the earth’s crust. This mine in particular has a lot of Zn dense minerals, so there’s just a lot of zinc here. Most natural crystals might be less pure, but it grows so commonly in nature, it’s less surprising that some are more pure from that perspective
What does it matter when something was realized versus its anthropomorphism?
Didn't some guy use a huge rock as a doorstop before someone realized it was gold and worth a lot.
It was gold before it was realized it was gold. What did it's discover matter? It didn't change what it was. The worth as 'gold' is totally superimposed by the humans.
It means that if you remove the meaning humans give to to, it's much easier to explain it as a coincidence, something that is produced naturally and it just happens to have the right property (for any value of property).
There are a bunch of stories about people using valuable rocks as a doorstop, meteorites, gold, amber etc
Oil
or rather Petroleum
I mean, can an ant tell that a highway or skyscraper is artificial?
From their individual perspectives, it has been there since the beginning of time and will remain there long after they are gone.