If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.
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I recommend Schmidt and Frank’s article on the Silurian hypothesis [1] for a surprisingly different take on this. The full text is on arXiv [2]. “We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record” – that is, the record we can observe from a distance of zero!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
If they were as advanced as we are now, we would have seen that the atmospheric CO2 levels had been higher back then, no? This paper draws the conclusions that such a civilization would be visible in the geological record.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
The concept of prior industrial civilizations was explored in a 2018 paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748. If you exclude industry, it could be exceedingly improbable that we would find fossil evidence of such creatures unless the species existed for several million years.
That's a question in geology and archaeology called the Silurian Hypothesis: Could we even detect a millions-of-years old civilization in the geological record?
1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
Depends how long dead we’re talking about. You might like this paper[1] which asks what evidence would be left if there had been a pre-human industrial civilisation.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.
"We name the hypothesis after a 1970 episode of the British science fiction TV series Doctor Who" - The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
> Unpopular opinion(?):
Not that unpopular.
(Partially tongue-in-cheek:)
Select the doi, in this case on the left side of the first page, but usually present somewhere in the article, and paste it in a new tab. In this case:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095
which leads to what zgniatacz linked.
Most likely it is nonsense. The carbon and nitrogen composition of sedimentary layers will show anomalies in case of intelligent civilizations.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf
Yes, this has been investigated before - e.g.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...
But the evidence we have (as per prior comments) is that a human-level intelligence civilisation has arisen only once on Earth.
Maybe it was this?
Gavin A. Schmidt, Adam Frank: The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
I found it through an article in The Atlantic that may or may not have been linked on HN recently.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-e...
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe.
Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small difference between training and test performance.
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will.