The Paranormal, UFO's, and Mysteries of the Unknown

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

and again, those satellites only had to deal with 10,000 years of

oh christ nevermind, we're all just armchair archaeologists as far as i know, i've got articles that claim if ancient species had iPhones they wouldn't exist in the fossil record, we can throw pop science trap cards at each other all day and turn this into the science colored version of /pol if we want

we'll just have to wait 10 million years and see

Screamfeeder · May 10, 2018

pharmakos said:
i've got articles that claim if ancient species had iPhones they wouldn't exist in the fossil record,

Do you? I would be interested in their reasoning and science.

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

Screamfeeder said:
Do you? I would be interested in their reasoning and science.

did you read the original article? it discusses how it is quite possible that the only way we could detect a pre-human industrial civilization would be by looking at stuff like burned fossil fuel remnants in ocean sediment and other very indirect ways of detection. it even hypothesizes that the best way to detect them might be by looking for their space debris rather than fossils.

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

here is the original paper the article was citing. i admit i have not read this paper yet, but i will today. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf

Tuco · May 10, 2018

Paging

hodj How much shit we built would still be around in 10 million years?

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

Tuco said:
Paging hodj How much shit we built would still be around in 10 million years?

good call. i'd like to request that hodj join everyone in reading the paper linked before responding, however.

Chukzombi · May 10, 2018

mkopec said:
dont we have satellites that can see under the earth? I seem to recall reading something about this, how some ancient buried sites were found through the use of ground imaging satellites.

yes we have, we keep finding new lost stuff with satellites and people using google earth. with Lidar we just found an ancient mayan megacity in guatemala capable of holding over 100k people

Laser scanning reveals 'lost' ancient Mexican city 'had as many buildings as Manhattan'

but thats only a thousand years old buried. think how deep under something 10 million years old would be?

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

also, the 10 million number was an arbitrary figure i pulled off the top of my head. if we're talking about a pre-human reptile civilization, it might be closer to 200 million years.

so i suppose this derail might be my fault for throwing out that number

Screamfeeder · May 10, 2018

pharmakos said:
here is the original paper the article was citing. i admit i have not read this paper yet, but i will today. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf

Read all 18 pages of relevant information in that document and it doesn't really help your case at all for current humans not being representative in the future fossil record going back even to the Early Mesozoic (200M years ago). In fact they even say they have zero consensus on their hypothesis and they acknowledge they have no real definition of when the Anthropocene era was supposed to have started.

It's a great idea, but their hypothesis is basically "Test More Dirt" and acknowledging it's just going to say what we already know.

Rime · May 10, 2018

Screamfeeder · May 10, 2018

Rime said:

Oh God I need this to be real.

hodj · May 10, 2018

Why has

Tuco , tyrant of Rerolled, summoned me by utilization if my true name?

This can only end in my calling for him to be banned again!

hodj · May 10, 2018

Tuco said:
Paging hodj How much shit we built would still be around in 10 million years?

Depends upon how the stuff was preserved, how stable the ground around it is geologically, and how deep future generations were willing to dig I suppose.

Tuco · May 10, 2018

So like

hodj says, aliens visiting us in a billion years will be able to dust off my solid state drive and check out some HD homosapien porn.

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

hodj said:
Depends upon how the stuff was preserved, how stable the ground around it is geologically, and how deep future generations were willing to dig I suppose.

we were discussing this pop science article with a headline that makes you expect facepalm but discusses a legitimate scholarly article with what some of us feel are good points

pharmakos said:
Was scrolling through Facebook and saw this headline from NBCNews.com. was surprised to see something like this from them. Actually a really good read.

Did another advanced species exist on Earth before humans?

the article is linked here

pharmakos said:
here is the original paper the article was citing. i admit i have not read this paper yet, but i will today. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748.pdf

Tuco said:
So like hodj says, aliens visiting us in a billion years will be able to dust off my solid state drive and check out some HD homosapien porn.

better question -- even if they do end up preserved in a form that is recognizable in many millions to billions of years, will any future civilizations really be able to find the needle in the haystack that is the 0.01% of human history during which we've been industrialized?

pharmakos · May 10, 2018

with all of 3 million years of human history itself not even being 1% of the fossil record

Aldarion · May 10, 2018

there are major groups of animals that we know existed but have essentially no fossil record for. because fossilization is a rare event that can only preserve some kinds of body parts and body plans. The same will be true for artifacts. Some will last a long time (e.g. pieces of pottery or glass), but they generally wouldnt demonstrate much technological ability. Anything with copper in it -- like all electronics - is going to degrade much faster.

much of our civilization is concentrated around coasts. ocean levels rise and fall dramatically over geological time scales, and seawater destroys almost everything.

then there is the needle in a haystack problem (which layer to look in, at which part of the world)

I find it extremely unlikely we could detected even a metropolis like NYC or LA after 10,000 years submerged under corrosive seawater, even if we knew where to look.

Kiroy · May 10, 2018

Aldarion said:
I find it extremely unlikely we could detected even a metropolis like NYC or LA after 10,000 years submerged under corrosive seawater, even if we knew where to look.

and we're talking 10 million years

hodj · May 10, 2018

pharmakos said:
with all of 3 million years of human history itself not even being 1% of the fossil record

See my quote in your sig for your answer.

hodj · May 10, 2018

Tuco said:
So like hodj says, aliens visiting us in a billion years will be able to dust off my solid state drive and check out some HD homosapien porn.

See this right here?

This is why u r a fgt

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