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

[KerikBalm]

So... if they were more advanced than us... where are their spacecraft, thinks in graveyard orbits, or geostationary orbits, will last for hundreds of thousands of years, at least...

I'm assuming we're only talking human civilizations here, and to be objetively more advanced than use requires equal or greatery mastery of spacetravel

[Awaras]

So... if they were more advanced than us... where are their spacecraft, thinks in graveyard orbits, or geostationary orbits, will last for hundreds of thousands of years, at least...

I'm assuming we're only talking human civilizations here, and to be objetively more advanced than use requires equal or greatery mastery of spacetravel

Look up "Black Knight satellite"...

[Dkmdlb]

Look up "Black Knight satellite"...

You mean the wandering piece of trash that has been seen approximately *once* floating around in orbit?

[Awaras]

You mean the wandering piece of trash that has been seen approximately *once* floating around in orbit?

Yes, I know, hence the smiley face. And it leads down the path of Däniken's ancient astronauts, vimanas and similar weirdness. But hey, he did ask...

Edited June 3, 2014 by Awaras

[WinkAllKerb'']

Of course, all definitions/descriptions are 'made up' by humans.

definitions are made to give a basicS self understanding of each other, so on they are very approximatives ... just watch how human, country interact each other due to thoose approximation basicS misunderstood.

Edited June 3, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''
fact remain yet and so far is t hard to interact without thoose congestive def. tools

[NASAFanboy]

So... if they were more advanced than us... where are their spacecraft, thinks in graveyard orbits, or geostationary orbits, will last for hundreds of thousands of years, at least...

I'm assuming we're only talking human civilizations here, and to be objetively more advanced than use requires equal or greatery mastery of spacetravel

It's funny how everyone immediately starts to think about ancient spaceships.

A civilization does not need spacecraft. A civilization does not need to be spacefaring. If that's how you view things, civilization didn't exist until 1942, when the German's tossed one of their V-2 rockets up there not for research, but to litho brake on London. Humanity took the route to the stars; but that doesn't mean every other race will take the same path or will take it as fast. An more advanced civilization, while they don't have satellites and space stations, may have achieved things we have not (even though we have satellites and space stations) such as world peace or an unified government or an very diverse culture.

A technologically advanced civilization needs resources. Lots of it. Then, if they were technologically advanced, how come we aren't seeing their mines? Their drills? Their equipment, their transports, their logistics and infrastructure? It takes a lot to run a technological civilization, and some traces of bound to raise some eyebrows. Except, we haven't found the ruins of their infrastructure.

Any more advanced civilization will be an moral and culturally advanced one. Not in industry or technology,

Edited June 3, 2014 by NASAFanboy

[WinkAllKerb'']

*snip* path *snip

+1 Good point, OUR PATH IS the PATH, so silly that i prefer to *shrug* & *yawn*

Edited June 3, 2014 by WinkAllKerb''
free eyes who want want free eyes, what the ?!?

[Dodgey]

True they don't have to be space faring but it makes sense. Think about our GPS system. Our communication system.

[phoenix_ca]

True they don't have to be space faring but it makes sense. Think about our GPS system. Our communication system.

Exactly. Those aren't important to the running of our civilization at all. Nope. Definitely not useful.

[NASAFanboy]

True they don't have to be space faring but it makes sense. Think about our GPS system. Our communication system.

Who said they have to be in space?

Who said they would span the globe?

Large networks of radio towers and underground cables can do the job too.

[Dodgey]

Because it makes sense. Contrary to popular belief people do have common sense. It is a lot more logical to launch satilites instead of laying down thousands of kilometers of high data cable. Is it possible to do it without satilites? Yes, but it doesn't makes sense.

[DJEN]

In the terms of belief, yes.

Edited June 4, 2014 by DJEN

[phoenix_ca]

Large networks of radio towers and underground cables can do the job too.

GPS exists because we understand relativity and have satellites, period. You can't replace that with radio towers and underground cables.

[ZetaX]

GPS exists because we understand relativity and have satellites, period. You can't replace that with radio towers and underground cables.

That is a very good example of a total non-sequitur.

[DJEN]

That is a very good example of a total non-sequitur.

The reason?

[vger]

We had a "grid" of towers for navigation for quite a while. It only got shut down within the last 10 years.

[NERVAfan]

A 300My old civilisation with pre-industrial technology in what is now Antartica, the bottom of the Mediterranean or the top of Yellowstone could have avoided our detection.

300 million years is a long time. The farther back in time you go, the more significant of a civilization we could have missed (especially if localized to areas where we don't have fossils from that period).

BUT... that doesn't mean it's at all likely. The problem remains that there's nothing for the intelligent species to evolve FROM. 300 million years ago is the end of the Carboniferous, and nothing that was alive then was doing very well in the intelligence department. That was the age of big insects, amphibians, primitive reptiles, etc. -- this lizardy thing (Archaeothyris), one of the earliest synapsids [the group including mammals and their extinct relatives], is approximately what the ancestors of mammals were like back then (OK, that's not on the direct mammal line, but still...).

Nothing alive then looks at all promising as a "root stock" for intelligent life without hundreds of millions of years of evolution... which is what it took to get to us. OK, it could maybe have been faster if mammals won out instead of dinosaurs in the Triassic... but that might have cut off a hundred million years, maybe a bit more. That still means no hope for anything intelligent in the Paleozoic.

If their intelligence did not express in art but in technology alone, how could we find any paintings or sculptures?

Would it not be possible for a mutated human off-shoot (human Vulcan-Elves), missing the aggressive tendencies of our species, to develop in a secluded area, thrive and grow - until their neighbours come to visit and devastate the whole clan? (No need for a volcano or something similar to lay waste to a small yet otherwise succesful population.)

Yeah, that's an interesting question. It seems like you need a lot of interacting groups, a lot of total people, for humans to really advance. But a smarter species might be able to invent a lot of stuff even in a very small local population, of maybe 1000-10000 individuals.

And humans tend to expand (we colonized all the continents except Antarctica in the Paleolithic), and to take over less powerful cultures. But a species without those tendencies might conceivably develop a civilization that remained localized, despite having the technology to build oceangoing ships/airplanes/spacecraft, because they didn't WANT to travel/expand.

Again, I don't think it's actually something that happened (there's no evidence, and again there's no real source for an intelligent species until quite recent times -- late Cenozoic probably), but it's an interesting thought...

[phoenix_ca]

That is a very good example of a total non-sequitur.

Uhhhh, no. Go back, read the posts.

We had a "grid" of towers for navigation for quite a while. It only got shut down within the last 10 years.

Link? I highly doubt such a navigation system would be accurate to within a few meters (down to centimetres depending on the sensitivity of your equipment), and be universally accessible around the world (with some very slight annoyances at the poles).

I still really don't get why people want to invent a "super advanced race" that lived in ancient times. It's rather confusing, given the rather conspicuous lack of evidence.

Edited June 4, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[magnemoe]

Who said they have to be in space?

Who said they would span the globe?

Large networks of radio towers and underground cables can do the job too.

More of a problem an industrial civilization will have a pretty large footprint. huge specialization in labor and lots of things only become practical with mass production.

In short it will leave plenty of traces, mines don't go away fast, plenty of waste like ceramic, copper and aluminium preserves very well.

In short if we find something high technological who is 10.000 year old it has to be alien.

[KerikBalm]

Actually, before we had satelllites, like in WWII, there were a number of systems developed where they had fixed transmitters, that would allow for triangulation to serve as navigational aids. Of course, the range was very limited.

All you need are 3 signals coming from fixed positions. If those fixed positions are geostationary orbits, you can cover the whole planet rather easily. If they were... say located along the coast of England... not so much.

Also, its seems people missed my qualifer about "objectively more advanced" advancement of the type they responded with is rather subjective, no?

In order for them to be objectively more advanced, they'd need to equal or excell in every area.

Given the lack of things already in geostationary orbit, the lack of artifacts on the moon, etc, I think we can rule out with high confidence any objectively more advanced civilization. Unless you stipulate that before their collapse, they (or aliens? ) very meticulously removed all evidence of their existence.

Which is really really reaching.... and violating Occam's Razor

[Dodgey]

In the terms of belief, yes.

Is there a justification for this belief?

[Seret]

Because it makes sense. Contrary to popular belief people do have common sense. It is a lot more logical to launch satilites instead of laying down thousands of kilometers of high data cable. Is it possible to do it without satilites? Yes, but it doesn't makes sense.

Actually our civilisation is heading away from broadcast and towards cables. It's recognised as an issue for SETI; not only will we be less visible but if it's assumed other similarly advanced civilisations undergo the same change they'll be less visible.

Cables are far more efficient, you can carry a lot of data with very low losses and less interference. Cable-laying is also a simpler tech, we had spanned the entire globe with telegraph cables by the start of the 20th century, when satellites were still decades away. That's not to say satellite comms isn't useful, because it clearly is, but to say that it's clearly better than cables isn't correct either.

[Dodgey]

I was speaking in the context of a global navigation system.

[Seret]

I was speaking in the context of a global navigation system.

Ah ok, that wasn't clear from the way you mentioned data cabling and comms in this post, and the way you were replying to NASAfanboy, who definitely was talking about comms.

Satellite navigation isn't essential for modern civilisation though. Nice to have, but definitely not a prerequisite.

[phoenix_ca]

Don't forget that a large part of the reason why cable is cheaper for us to use now is because we laid so goddamn much of it in anticipation of a huge boom in internet data traffic that never came. We still have thousands of kilometers of "dark cable" all over the place. That and the bigger issue with data transmission over fibre-optic cable isn't that you need to lay a bunch of it, it's the difficulty of transmitting and receiving multiple wavelengths of light along it. Buuuuut I'm going on a tangent here.

Satellite navigation isn't essential for modern civilisation though. Nice to have, but definitely not a prerequisite.

That really is debatable. GPS use is ubiquitous, and often times necessary. Ships and aircraft use it all the time to make sure they're going where they want to, and avoiding weather. A lot of cargo ships depend on our ability to predict weather (using satellites) and navigating around that weather with accuracy (using satellites). Without satellites, we'd be losing a lot more of our cargo to the large swells of raging storms.

In fact a lot of advances in technology came directly from space exploration and the very particular demands of it. Teflon, for instance. And a great deal of radio technology.

Edited June 4, 2014 by phoenix_ca