Do you believe in the existence of highly advanced ancient Earth civilization before?

[WinkAllKerb'']

i kinda like the asimov metaphor when man rediscover the ability to count in their head without machine, i need two silex and a tv show

[N_las]

Anyone ever seen enough of "The World Without Us" to know how long it would take for all evidence of our current civilization to go poof?

'course, I have yet to even find any criticisms about how accurate it may or may not be.

A civilisation as advanced as us would find our remains:

- The remains of apollo and various other robotic landings on the moon would stay there very long.

- The 'lack of fossil fuel' will stay long. The very sudden increase of CO2 in the atmosphere will be measureable in ice layers in the future.

- They will have a fossil record. A sudden mass extinction event will be noticed.

- Noble metals will be found in unnatural forms. If a fossilised t-rex skelleton can pass the test of time, a gold reserve will too.

[Kryten]

A civilisation as advanced as us would find our remains:

As well as the other points here, this would also apply literally; there are huge numbers of us and we deliberately bury our dead, so we'd likely show up in in relatively large numbers. The fossil record would show a group of clearly large-brained organisms suddenly appearing worldwide at the same time as almost all other animals larger than a housecat go extinct; clear signs of civilisation at some level.

[Seret]

We've also built some things out of natural materials in geologically stable areas. The Mount Rushmore monument in the U.S., for example. That's going to be there for a long, long time.

[Scotius]

Not to mention ceramics Obiects made from clay fired in kilns can last for a very, very long time. Earliest we found date to 1400 years ago, and are still easily recognizable as man-made. Glass can last even longer - and boy, do we produce a lot of this stuff yearly

[jwenting]

They did. Have a look at the various Pyramids all aligned along an past equator line around the Earth.

Also most master builders will tell you even nowadays buildings like the Cheops pyramid are not buildable with this precision.

that's the old fallacy of thinking that just because they lived long ago the ancient Egyptians were stupid, so they must have had help from some superadvanced alien race (or time travelers).

It's simply not true.

And that "precision" isn't true either. That assumes they were aligned like that using theodolites and deliberately placed as they were, rather than the known accurate way of a guy squinting along a ruler, a method that worked for thousands of years before people decided they needed to invent computerised equipment and only allow people trained to use it to be building engineers.

[WinkAllKerb'']

i need some ants that explore, conquer and expand, that work or don't (some species ratio are kinda fun btw), that domestic other species &etc.&etc... i just forget one thing amongst other how old are ants and what's occured since.

EDIT: if i was an ant wich is not the case i could pheromonally think:" hehe watch thoose silly human there so proud of themselves, bah nevermind next meteore will wipe them like dinausaurs before."

just look under your feet you might had miss some civs. xD

Edited June 1, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''

[Creature]

Not to mention ceramics Obiects made from clay fired in kilns can last for a very, very long time. Earliest we found date to 1400 years ago, and are still easily recognizable as man-made. Glass can last even longer - and boy, do we produce a lot of this stuff yearly

I'm not sure if you mean something else than ceramics in general, but there's plenty of older ceramics around. The earliest ceramics here in the northern periferia dates to about 5000 b.c making it roughly 7000 years old. This stuff is easily found in any stone age habitat in large quantities and it's preserved very well.

[NERVAfan]

Humans? Probably would be way too obvious, way too much evidence left.

Now, you could have a "low tech"-but-ahead-of-its-time civilization we've missed -- humans were around quite a while before we have any evidence of civilization, so there could have been, say, a small local civilization on the level of say, Sumer or whatever 30,000 years ago we've missed because it existed in a place that's underwater now and didn't build big monuments out of stone that lasted.

When you start going way back in geological time, it gets a bit more believable that we could miss a high-tech civilization, but even then -- if they got to our level -- our ubiquitous use of artificial materials would probably leave some sign in the fossil record. (Now maybe we've seen it already and just assumed it's natural... cool SF concept, but I doubt it.)

The bigger problem for really long ago (dinosaurs etc.) civilizations is, what was the intelligent being and where did it come from? Primates have lots of species and a significant fossil record. There isn't anything like that in the Mesozoic or earlier -- the "big-brained" dinosaurs were still pretty dumb by the standards of modern birds, though larger-brained than other dinosaurs. There's a huge amount of evolution required from anything we've seen to even an ape level of brain size and complexity, much less a human one.

Now, maybe you could squeeze something into the Cenozoic from a dolphin lineage or a corvid (crows/jays/etc) or parrot line, ravens and African grey parrots are apparently comparable to ape intelligence so you can imagine a sapient species coming from those lineages, but none of them has hands so... I really doubt it.

(Although I've written an SF story using the concept, a Miocene marsupial species that was killed off by the freezing of Antarctica, and all that's left to find (above ice) are a few artifacts left by explorers in Argentina and the southern tip of Africa. They were bronze-age-at-best though.)

perhaps certain types of (raptor) dinosaurs became intelligent and created a civilization, but existed for such a brief period that no evidence of them would be found like in Baxter's novel Evolution

IIRC in that bit "The Hunters of Pangaea" they died off because the rifting of Pangaea messed up the sauropod migration routes and killed them off, and they depended on hunting sauropods. Which is silly because continental drift is so utterly slow on the timescale of individual lives -- they would have had plenty of time to adapt, much longer than the entire existence of humanity. And we survived the extinction of our own megafauna in a much shorter period, we just learned to fish and to hunt smaller game and so on (and then to domesticate livestock and grow crops).

Now, a species that was way less "exploring" than humans -- maybe one that evolved on an isolated island -- could potentially have gone extinct from local conditions. Or you could have a species that evolved just immediately before the end-Cretaceous extinction. Neither would have the chance to build a civilization, though, and both situations seem sort of a stretch to me.

. Consequently, if we end up killing ourselves, any other intelligent species that might evolve after us will have a much tougher time reaching our own level of technology because the easily available high-yield fossil fuels will be much harder to come by because of us.

I don't think you need fossil fuels to develop a technological civilization. Steam engines can burn wood, and biological oils can be used as fuel, and you could probably use that to get to the point that you could develop solar or nuclear power. It likely would delay your Industrial Revolution by a century or two, as wood-burning steam engines and use of biological oils (before a Green Revolution and modern biotech) wouldn't let you do stuff on that scale, but on the grand scale a century or two isn't that much.

[magnemoe]

Humanity hasn't been around long enough for a high tech civ to fall and for all the traces to vanish. Remember, we regularly find stone tools from the first tool-using humans, we'd find remnants of high technology just as easily. Nor could such a high tech group arise in isolation, leaving us to miss them because we haven't looked where their village was - to develop high technology, you need a large population, and posessing that tech would lead the group to expand. Any way you look at it, an ancient high tech civ should have us pulling ancient smartphones out of the rubble.

It's a little more practical to look at pre-human high tech cubs, but then we'd probably find something even from a dinosaur civilisation. Today's landfills will have traces of technology for millions of years, in the form of materials that don't occur in nature even if nothing recognizable survives.

Yes, landfills will conserve stuff as you dig it down, copper, aluminum, and ceramic breaks down far less than bones. Even from something like a dinosaur civilization we would find fossils of technology.

The only thing who might be possible but unlikely is an towns and regional civilizations predating the end of the ice age. One town in Tyrkia is 10.000 year old, still stone age and pretty small scale compared to Egypt but might even have primitive writing.

[rtxoff]

The pyramids in Gizeh are maybe older then 10.000 years. The problem is only most of the so called egyptian academics fail to open their minds for other possibilities then the established thinking of 200.000 workers worked for at least 20 years only for the Cheops pyramid and we are not talking about the others. Sorry i can only laugh at such narrow mindness. I am not saying that aliens came down and built the thing but i see the speechlessness of them when they try to explain things. They won't admit that they have no clue. It is such a big shame not to know something is'nt it? Sorry if i am someone to teach people stuff for sure i would not tell my students such nonsense, i would rather die before taking that shame on me telling them lies. All this big monuments are perfectly doing what they are supposed to do, they are reminding us of how little we really know.

The great pyramid is at over 29 degrees north, and axial tilt doesn't exactly change rapidly. In order for it to be on a 'past equator line', it'd have to be literally billions of years old.

I guess you have written records of this time that proof your words? Or you somehow magically measured the axial tilt back then?

Fact is nobody knows exactly whats there in Earths core. Or you want to tell me now that we have send probes down there?

Is it so unbelievable that something happened with Earths core and tilted the axis about 10000-15000 years ago which ended in a global catastrophe? Is it so unbelievable that the people back then saw this coming and build monuments around the equator line at that time to warn the generations to come? For me that is more plausible then pharaos making graves for themself and that all the time living.

I am not saying that this is the only explaination and the truth, but i am saying it is worth considering alternative possibilities when thinking about this matter.

[Scotius]

Humans? Probably would be way too obvious, way too much evidence left.

Now, you could have a "low tech"-but-ahead-of-its-time civilization we've missed -- humans were around quite a while before we have any evidence of civilization, so there could have been, say, a small local civilization on the level of say, Sumer or whatever 30,000 years ago we've missed because it existed in a place that's underwater now and didn't build big monuments out of stone that lasted.

When you start going way back in geological time, it gets a bit more believable that we could miss a high-tech civilization, but even then -- if they got to our level -- our ubiquitous use of artificial materials would probably leave some sign in the fossil record. (Now maybe we've seen it already and just assumed it's natural... cool SF concept, but I doubt it.)

The bigger problem for really long ago (dinosaurs etc.) civilizations is, what was the intelligent being and where did it come from? Primates have lots of species and a significant fossil record. There isn't anything like that in the Mesozoic or earlier -- the "big-brained" dinosaurs were still pretty dumb by the standards of modern birds, though larger-brained than other dinosaurs. There's a huge amount of evolution required from anything we've seen to even an ape level of brain size and complexity, much less a human one.

Now, maybe you could squeeze something into the Cenozoic from a dolphin lineage or a corvid (crows/jays/etc) or parrot line, ravens and African grey parrots are apparently comparable to ape intelligence so you can imagine a sapient species coming from those lineages, but none of them has hands so... I really doubt it.

(Although I've written an SF story using the concept, a Miocene marsupial species that was killed off by the freezing of Antarctica, and all that's left to find (above ice) are a few artifacts left by explorers in Argentina and the southern tip of Africa. They were bronze-age-at-best though.)

IIRC in that bit "The Hunters of Pangaea" they died off because the rifting of Pangaea messed up the sauropod migration routes and killed them off, and they depended on hunting sauropods. Which is silly because continental drift is so utterly slow on the timescale of individual lives -- they would have had plenty of time to adapt, much longer than the entire existence of humanity. And we survived the extinction of our own megafauna in a much shorter period, we just learned to fish and to hunt smaller game and so on (and then to domesticate livestock and grow crops).

Now, a species that was way less "exploring" than humans -- maybe one that evolved on an isolated island -- could potentially have gone extinct from local conditions. Or you could have a species that evolved just immediately before the end-Cretaceous extinction. Neither would have the chance to build a civilization, though, and both situations seem sort of a stretch to me.

I don't think you need fossil fuels to develop a technological civilization. Steam engines can burn wood, and biological oils can be used as fuel, and you could probably use that to get to the point that you could develop solar or nuclear power. It likely would delay your Industrial Revolution by a century or two, as wood-burning steam engines and use of biological oils (before a Green Revolution and modern biotech) wouldn't let you do stuff on that scale, but on the grand scale a century or two isn't that much.

Alcohol-burning internal combustion engines are another option. You just need fermenting plant mass and distillery to make plenty of fuel.

[Brethern]

The pyramids in Gizeh are maybe older then 10.000 years. The problem is only most of the so called egyptian academics fail to open their minds for other possibilities then the established thinking of 200.000 workers worked for at least 20 years only for the Cheops pyramid and we are not talking about the others. Sorry i can only laugh at such narrow mindness. I am not saying that aliens came down and built the thing but i see the speechlessness of them when they try to explain things. They won't admit that they have no clue. It is such a big shame not to know something is'nt it? Sorry if i am someone to teach people stuff for sure i would not tell my students such nonsense, i would rather die before taking that shame on me telling them lies. All this big monuments are perfectly doing what they are supposed to do, they are reminding us of how little we really know.

I think the problem is that most of them refuse the consider the idea that the egyptians might have used slave labor for them. Most of the things I seen on the pyramids they assume they were built with paid labor.

200,000 free men building a pyramid in 20 years, why not 1,000,000 slaves being worked to death to build one in a fraction of the time.

[Scotius]

Slavery, while widespread then, was not exactly providing an army of cheap labourers. A slave was quite expensive commodity, available in numbers only after succesful wars. Generally, they were NOT worked to death - because it was economically counterproductive. To replace 1 million of dead slaves, you would have to wage a huge war (or series of smaller ones) which is expensive in itself. Not to mention problems with population density Catching so many able-bodied men would be difficult in a time, when a city with 10 000 population was considered huge.

[N_las]

I guess you have written records of this time that proof your words? Or you somehow magically measured the axial tilt back then?

Funny, isn't it? YOU claimed they were all along a past equator line. So one would think you have written records or magical measurments?

Is it so unbelievable that something happened with Earths core and tilted the axis about 10000-15000 years ago which ended in a global catastrophe? Is it so unbelievable that the people back then saw this coming and build monuments around the equator line at that time to warn the generations to come? For me that is more plausible then pharaos making graves for themself and that all the time living.

This has to be sarcasm... This idea is seriously more plausible to you than a pharaos making graves for themselfes?

[Albert VDS]

This has to be sarcasm... This idea is seriously more plausible to you than a pharaos making graves for themselfes?

Not to mention that they actually written down that they were for the pharaos.

[Kryten]

I guess you have written records of this time that proof your words? Or you somehow magically measured the axial tilt back then?

You're the one claiming to have records of exact changes. The billions of years figure is simply the last time anything could possibly have occurred that would be violent enough to change the axial tilt-just think about how much energy that would actually take. An impact large enough to change axial tilt 30-odd degrees would likely wipe out life, never mind any civilisation.

[ecat]

OT: No. There is no evidence for an advanced ancient civilisation, while it may be nice to dream it would be unwise to believe such ever existed.

Could an advanced civilisation have existed but left no trace? Highly unlikely.

Would a civilisation not based on the fossil fuel economy advance with little trace? I think advancement would be unlikely. It is one thing to exploit renewable energy resources but ignoring the fact that such exploitation would leave behind tell tail deposits, how does one replace with wood all the advanced chemicals, plastics and resultant manufacturing processes enabled by fossil fuel?

My favourite video on the evidence for advanced ancient civilisations and possible alien intervention:

Enjoy

[magnemoe]

Not to mention that they actually written down that they were for the pharaos.

Egypt is pretty old, as in the pyramids was build 2000 years before the last Pharaohs.

Pyramids are pretty simple to build, main issue of building them large is logistic and cost. Yes you have some construction issues but some hundred year solved this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Snefru%27s_Bent_Pyramid_in_Dahshur.jpg

[Dodgey]

In any case. Even if we had no idea how they were built or why it doesn't mean that we can substitute something else in. To do so is an argument from ignorance.

[magnemoe]

Alcohol-burning internal combustion engines are another option. You just need fermenting plant mass and distillery to make plenty of fuel.

Would work however you would need lots of farmland for it, run into the issue that you need highly efficient mechanical farming to get any output outside of curiosities.

They would be far better off staying with steam.

[Brethern]

Slavery, while widespread then, was not exactly providing an army of cheap labourers. A slave was quite expensive commodity, available in numbers only after succesful wars. Generally, they were NOT worked to death - because it was economically counterproductive. To replace 1 million of dead slaves, you would have to wage a huge war (or series of smaller ones) which is expensive in itself. Not to mention problems with population density Catching so many able-bodied men would be difficult in a time, when a city with 10 000 population was considered huge.

It's no wonder people think the pyramids were built by aliens if there's the kind of thinking everyone shares.

Secondly there's nothing stating that 10 000 was considered a large city. At this point our knowledge of ancient civilizations is based on stories and ruins.

[magnemoe]

OT: No. There is no evidence for an advanced ancient civilisation, while it may be nice to dream it would be unwise to believe such ever existed.

Could an advanced civilisation have existed but left no trace? Highly unlikely.

Would a civilisation not based on the fossil fuel economy advance with little trace? I think advancement would be unlikely. It is one thing to exploit renewable energy resources but ignoring the fact that such exploitation would leave behind tell tail deposits, how does one replace with wood all the advanced chemicals, plastics and resultant manufacturing processes enabled by fossil fuel?

My favourite video on the evidence for advanced ancient civilisations and possible alien intervention:

Enjoy

I want to sue you, you don't send a link to an very interesting three hour long movie to people who just came home late at night.

And yes it was interesting, mostly the giant blocks in Lebanon.

More interesting, why has the guy using the saw in the preview picture an much more detailed hair than the guy with the statue.

Perhaps the guy making the painting knew him.

[MartGonzo]

If you really want to get an archeologist to mutter and scowl ask them how the stones at Baalbek were moved or how the stones at Secsayhuaman were cut.

let's just say that some things that were once known have been lost

[lajoswinkler]

Of course no. There are no traces of such civilization, and there simply wasn't enough time for them to evolve, assuming we're talking about a species that emerged on Earth, and not some visitors that were settling here because of reasons.

The archaeological records undoubtedly support the current scientific consensus about the evolution of our species and civilization. There simply aren't any physical remnants of anyone more advanced than us and there would have to be. Some artificial materials degrade very slowly. Radioisotope distribution and composition in nature before explosion of Trinity were consistent and did not indicate of any artificial radioisotope production before that.

Any civilization more advanced than us would leave such remnants.

They did. Have a look at the various Pyramids all aligned along an past equator line around the Earth.

Also most master builders will tell you even nowadays buildings like the Cheops pyramid are not buildable with this precision.

That's bull****, times two. Not only they aren't aligned like that, but their precision is not stunning, and it can be replicated today. All they needed was enough people. You'd be surprised what superstition and slavery are capable of. To them, pharaohs were live embodiments of deities. Living gods on Earth.

I'd suggest you to stop watching pseudoscientific shows and channels like History channel, and to learn stuff from proper sources.