Reminds me of the Silurian Hypothesis that raises the question if we would ever find evidence if there was an industrial civilization millions of years before us.
I imagine it would be extremely difficult to know or even detect any non industrial civilization with much confidence that long ago.
Glass and pottery fragments both last "forever" if they're left someplace relatively dry, or get buried, or otherwise protected from physical and chemical weathering. A glass bottle thrown away on the beach will be eroded to nothing in mere years to decades, but a glass bottle thrown aside and buried by some soil can stay there for millions of years easily. Stone artifacts are similarly robust. These relatively permanent traces get left behind long before a civilization gets "industrial". Pottery and glass predate our own industrial revolution by thousands of years.
For such a civilization to develop and go unnoticed to historians, their influence must have been very small, they must have been geographically limited. For instance maybe they lived in low-lands and rising sea levels erased all trace, but this would still require that their artifacts rarely if ever got carried up hills where they might have been untouched by the rising oceans. It seems deeply implausible.
Certainly there was nothing even remotely like our civilization in the past. There are glass beer bottles laying around on virtually every corner of the planet, on mountain tops, in caves, in landfills. Just everywhere really. It will take longer than a mere few million years to erase all these.
It sort of makes me happy to think that millions of years after civilization is consumed by fire and humanity goes extinct, all that will be left is the beer bottles.
Maybe all those gemstones we find in the mountains are what's left of the previous iteration's beer bottles after they went through the tectonic conveyor belt.
Geological processes, given enough time, will probably destroy your glass bottle. And everything else. Assuming the Earth doesn't stop being geologically active, I would suspect that eventually, everything will get churned through magma.
Anything on the oceanic crust will get recycled in short order, think hundreds of millions of years at most. On continental crust it is far, far more complicated. There are areas we call 'shields' that are over 3 billion years old and are the original cratons that seeded continent formation. Now, they've tended to be scraped clean by glaciers and other processes over time, but not all is recycled.
But while direct evidence is somewhat easy to erase, indirect evidence is very, very hard to erase. The banded iron formations are an indirect sign of life in the oceans at the time and cover massive areas with varying chemical compositions. The same is true for the for the anthropocene. The chemicals we've released in to the air, water, and ground will leave fingerprints for hundreds of millions of years on this planet as they fossilize into rocks and get pushed into mountains.
Eventually sure, but think about all the dino fossils, 100+ million years old, that we find in sedimentary rock today. I expect that eventually, beer bottles lost in the mud at the bottom of lakes and rivers may become inclusions in sedimentary rock, permanently preserved for as long as it takes that part of continental crust to get recycled in the mantle.
Wouldn’t they have used up most of the energy dense liquid that we currently pump out of the ground? At least in some part of their civilization’s lifespan? That we still had superficial oil fields suggests to me no one extracted oil because no industrial civilization existed before us on this planet.
Or that society formed long enough ago that oil has had a chance to form. The OP did say millions of years ago, which would be needed for this.
We could put a bound on this. ~90% of oil deposits come from the Mesozoic or later. So the latest we could see a society show up, use up the easily accessible oil/other fossil fuels, collapse (presumably from energy crisis), and still have the fossil fuels we see today would be the late Paleozoic or possibly the early Mesozoic before it's fossil fuels have formed (~250 million years ago).
I follow the energy field for mostly financial reasons and its a strange but true story that the first time oil was ever radio dated was by a Canadian team just a few years ago and they were surprised to discover the Alberta oil sands are more like a hundred million years old rather than the previous estimate of fifty mil or so.
People have known about radio dating using different isotopes and it always shocked me that the first time someone radiodated crude oil was in the mid 00s just 15 or so years ago. I don't remember the technology the Canadians used it wasn't C14 as that tops out around 100K or so years.
The more you learn the more you find stuff everyone thinks they know, but they don't actually know it, or we just figured it out shockingly recently. Like we've been pumping oil how long, and doing radiodating how long, but nobody never put two and two together until just 15 years ago? That's just wild. You'd assume every field has a birthdate but reality is nobody knows for sure. Except that one field in Alberta as of 15 years ago. Maybe more data available now, donno.
Its just funny that journalist types will cite each other as if they're primary sources for decades until a number like "a quarter billion yrs" is culturally engrained into our civilization, then someone does some actual real world test tube work ONE time in ONE place and get different results.
For a multi trillion dollar business, its not as completely scientifically researched as people would assume. If it doesn't result in more flow at the pump, it doesn't get researched, mostly.
I used to invest pretty heavily in the energy sector in general and I learned a lot of the science along the way and I really have no idea what fraction of the earth's surface has been geologically surveyed.
I would imagine if someone wanted to seriously pursue the theory (if they'd be permitted to do so, probably not) the way I'd do it is find "disappointing fields" and look for peculiar correlations between them WRT odd permeability test results. So is that field disappointing because its permeability is really low (frac it!) or is it disappointing because all the geology points to a good salt dome and the permeability is great but there's nothing there? The old fashioned way to explain fields that look good but don't produce is the permeability is so high it all leaked out millennia ago (among other explanations boiling down to "we don't know").
I would think you'd find weirder evidence of tailings piles around solid mines and a lack of open pit mines. That would be easier to find than an oil well. Also I expect there would be really weird patterns in sediment related to mercury and similar waste products. "They" never did leaded gas if there's no lead layer in the sediment, etc.
Some of it is sophistry. No civilization beyond monkey tribes could possibly exist 3M years ago because there would be nuclear reactors and space ships laying around everywhere, as though there's no intermediate step between monkey tribes and nuclear reactors. Well, what if they never advanced beyond (fill in the blank with some group that's not very advanced in 2023)? Still centuries beyond a tribe of monkeys, yet culturally interesting none the less. We could detect the industrial revolution from England if it happened in Italy 2000 years previous. But... could we detect the Roman Empire if it happened before in Australia in 4000 BC? or 3M BC? I don't know about that, kind of an open question. If the Roman Empire or similar happened in the USA upper midwest before the mile tall ice sheets scrubbed everything, could we tell today? My educated guess is "no" we could not. It would still be culturally interesting even if no nuclear reactors and space ships were built here 50K years ago. I think it quite likely that bioidentical humans were up to all kinds of nonsense in prehistory that we've never discovered or never could discover. They were as smart as us, and healthier than us, until agriculture was invented.
On that last point I have assumed that agriculture was a necessary precursor to any major technological develolment - ie you cannot build a forge and metal working tools if you need to pack them up and follow the herd every few months.
What if their society was like the Sierra Club, or the rules around Burning Man, which say leave no trace behind? Like very environmentally conscious? And not into monuments like the Pharaos of Egypt, or similar? For whichever ideological reasons.
I am only joking a little bit here, but we only use the idea that “oil is the most reasonable energy source for civilization” because it’s how we bootstrapped our civilization.
Suppose there were some extremely stable and energetic combination of elements that was really easy to burn etc. we’d use it, but it’s extremely rare on earth. What if that is the result of the Silurians burning it all up 300m years ago or whatever - it’s rare because it’s been depleted already, leaving only the worthless and difficult to extract fossil fuels that we were forced to use.
This sort of discussion isn’t disimilar to SETI stuff - we look for water rich planets in the habitable zone because that’s what we grew up on - in reality we could be abnormal or rare-ish and has giant life or stuff living on Venus analogues could be the norm. We’re trying to make assertions from a point of informed ignorance - which is still ignorant.
I suspect (but don't quote me on this) that in the very big scheme of things our little fossil fuel addiction is just a fluke. Stars are such an endless source of high quality energy that the vast majority of "advanced" organizational forms ("life") surely figure out how to tap it rather quickly.
I guess the first question to your question is "what compounds fit that description". What processes could have concentrated them both to the point of economic usability and complete depletablity?
That's the hard question you're going to have to work around. Humans cannot 'use up' 100% of the oil/carbon resources on earth. It is energetically impossible for that to happen without turning over a significant portion of the Earths crust. There are always going to be signed of carbon concentrating processes on Earth, at least until our crust is completely remelted. This miracle energy source doesn't seem to exist anywhere now which would defy explanation.
Pretty trivial assumption to make, just like it is easy to assume that whilst sea based creatures might be intelligent you won’t have a technological society developing under water.
Ofc it’s trivial to make, renewable sources are far more complicated than simple chemistry, wood, charcoal, coal and eventually petroleum require far fewer technological leaps than renewables.
Again, only if you go down the exact path we did instead of using way less energy for completely different reasons and building from there. E.g. discovering solar power strictly for agricultural reasons and discovering electrical storage then other uses of electricity from there.
People who can’t envision the above or the multitude of other ways to get to electricity without it being transpiration focused lack imagination.
I don’t think it’s due to lack of imagination at all… and again you are skipping a lot of steps you are putting solar cells and high energy density batteries before the steam engine or even the forge.
Describe me a basic evolutionary path that leads to this even if it’s not the path of least resistance.
No I’m not. You can gather that light turns e.g. Liquids into vapor and slowly build systems from there. You are so biased looking at todays tech you can’t even step back and picture alternative ways to find electricity. It’s a lack of imagination full stop.
You are still jumping to semi conductors before the steam engine and into optic before the forge…
I’m really not biased at all, there is a difference between being open minded and just not taking into account basic factors for the sake of pretending to be one.
Any civilization will discover fire first, fire is easy and is needed to bootstrap any technological civilization.
> They argue as early as the Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago) "there has been sufficient fossil carbon to fuel an industrial civilization comparable with our own".
I think the experience of "invasive species" from the last few centuries prove that there were no civilization that made regular trips between the continents for a few dozen million years.
During my time in college I managed to sit in on a group of archaeology students making Oldowan stone tools in the university quadrangle. I had no idea how much knowledge and skill it takes to make these seemingly simple tools. It is not just banging rocks together, it requires finesse.
I felt a sense of awe when I realized just how much trial and error must have went into learning how to make such tools. With how many cuts and bruises we inflicted on ourselves, I came to view the technology as something invaluable and precious. We had the benefit of washing our hands, who knows just how many of our pioneering ancestors had gotten an infection and died while trying to make a better cutting tool - or lost an eye from a rock chip? And these folks may well have been “the crazy ones” or the more intelligent members of the tribe.
I could easily see how countless generations would wind up making the same tools with the same process. If you asked me how to make more ‘advanced’ hand axes I’d struggle to come up with something better.
All of those have been reinvented in the past century or so, mostly in terms of materials and manufacturing processes. Humanity went from bronze spoons to stainless steel spoons in a shorter time than from those stone tools to these stone tools.
Cast iron skillets haven't changed, wood spoons still exist, bronze and steel utensils differences are not innovative or better, they're just cheaper to manufacture.
You're right about the wheel though, I saw a facinating video on the properties of the new martian rover's wheels.
Why would every mainstream religion we still have some knowledge of on earth be based on the same basic stories retold.
What if the gods are just that advanced civilisation, who built humanity and then left, millions of years ago. and somehow our global consciousness has been able to recall our origins still to these days.
Maybe everyone just makes same kinda stuff up to justify existance, I dunno. Seems weird cultures can vary so much on everything, and yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations
> Why would every mainstream religion we still have some knowledge of on earth be based on the same basic stories retold.
Most of the world was explored by Christian missionaries like Jesuits, who also educated the informants who in turn told them about foreign cultures. You'd be surprised how many Noah's-ark-like myths the informants told the Jesuits only after the Jesuits told them about Noah's ark. Or, to use another example, a number of books on Greek myth and tragedy retell an Inca story about the emperor opening a box and unleashing smallpox on the Incas, as an independent parallel to the story of Pandora's jar: but the source of the Inca smallpox story was himself a Jesuit-educated native informant who had learned the story of Pandora from the Jesuits before inventing the story of the Inca emperor. The contact between two cultures is a two-way street: the informants who report stories may contaminate them with the stories learned from those they are informing.
Yeah, I love that series. It’s never actually drawing that religious connection to the bible though, as far as I can remember. Also, I’m yearning for some good, more serious, well-written science fiction…
They share the same root, and have simply been adapted to allow for more effective exploitation in specific events or regions.
Difficult merchant guilds want a special god of their own? Invent the concept of saints and name a celebrated dead guild member the saint of commerce and prosperity.
Backwards locals won't stop celebrating their fake goddess Ēostre? Create fake story about "Easter" to push instead.
"yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations"
My explanation would be, that religion was mostly used as a political power tool and power logic is the same and universal. If people believe, they are low and the emperor is a god - they won't rebell so easily.
But apart from that, they are very different, so of what foundations are you talking about, exactly?
It seems to me that religion, or spirituality if I may call it that, predates emperors. If you are truly talking about organized religion, then perhaps I might be more generous in agreeing with you. But when I think religion I think of small tribes bringing about paranormal explanations for mundane phenomenons and for their own existence.
one possibility is that these religions literally originated from the same story. it doesn't necessitate that the story is true to have translations of a story in many places.
I can think of the simple structure he's talking about, it's best documented in Zoroastrianism aka the struggle between good and evil. The conquerors were good and the defeated savages were evil, and the conquerors often faced unsurmountable odds. Origin stories of civilization and religion follow this structure quite often.
You’ll need to define civilization first, if you are talking about a global industrial civilization then the likelihood of that is about zero especially in the time frame of 1-5m years.
I imagine it would be extremely difficult to know or even detect any non industrial civilization with much confidence that long ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis