If we had a high-tech civilization Millions of years on Earth/Mars..what would be left..what would w

This is in particular because there is a common belief that MAYBE Mars once had life millions or maybe billions of years ago.

Now let's just assume this being the case..and for the sake of debate we could also assume that we had a "high tech" civilization many millions of years ago on Earth..

What...if at all...would remain for us to "find"? Would everything be gone, withered away? Would structures survive millions...possible billions (!) of years?

WHERE (if at all)..could we find hints and remains? Mind you...such numbers are mind-boggling. Homo Sapiens is said to appeared only 200.000 years ago in Africa. So we'd be dealing with a "civilization" BEFORE man..before science..before history really. Man would (probably) not know anything about this.

The other question..simply in regards to "weather" (sand, wind etc..which also exists on other planets) whether it would wipe out anything within millions of years.

(By the way..thinking about it...i *think* if such would be the case..the only "evidence" we could find would be within stone...that some "artifacts" or similar are being found encased in stone...)

Antikytherea device is a good start,
It was a fully functioning lunar calculator with gears and everything. Thousands of years before its time
Perhaps in the hall of records that was burned down in eqypt so many thousands of years ago, contained some ancient scripts as to how to build such a device.
Perhaps there are more halls of records just waiting to be discovered, to tell us who we really are.

Knowledge passed down to us from 'gods'
'As some ancient astonaught theorists..believe.." haha,
But no really, the only way we could figure it out is if we went to mars and checked for some ancient civilizations, or perhaps if there is evidence here on earth, we may never find it. The earth will have changes many times over the course of time, and the objects of an even more ancient civilization may be lost in the crust of the earth somewhere.
Or perhaps in some of the worlds most mysterious and energetic places.

think.. Lake Vostok in the antarctica. Look that one up too, thats an interesting thought provoking topic

reply to post by flexy123


well, seeing as mars has high wind speeds, low atmospheric pressure and high ultra violet light, lots still could be in tact. The main thing though is did they build underground or up top. If its down below, depends on how much mars has changed. (Little I would imagine.) If up top chances are all structures (depending on material) would be withered by wind and sand. May even appear as landscape to us.

MY guess would be in orbit. Or the asteroid belt......

mars looks like its been through hell....maybe underground.

Io?

other such places that maybe in the distant past had more habitable atmospheres....I personally think the earths atmosphere has changed significantly since its unrecorded past....the large nature of everything in creation.....plants, animals, everything was massive....large dinosaurs couldnt even fly in our atmosphere.....how was this possible on a widesread scale on earth?....I think that earth had a differnt atmosphere long ago and so maybe other planets too.....so look there,,,,where human hand has not passed to steal, destroy or change in his image.....

As for mars, if there is evidence of ancient intelligent life, it is buried deep in sand and debris. It would have been countless generations ago that life would have been possible there, and time would have hidden any artifacts.

As for earth....Antarctica. The evidence to me points to an early civilization existed there before the earth changed. Our society today is derived from their flee from Antarctica.

If man or whatever achieved space flight in pre history, the best place to leave a mark would be the moon.

The moon is a perfect milestone for showing that a society has been high tech. If I were an Alien I would leave a plaque on the moon saying . You finally reached us. Now just pick up the phone under plaque and call us. We have been waiting.

If the moon has nothing ancient that is artificial then I would take that a conclusive proof that man or alien have not reached the moon before history.

Becoming a high tech civilization requires exploitation of natural resource deposits, and as you know, industry leaves scars on the land. Unless they skipped the fossil fuel stage entirely and ignored the easy to reach deposits on the surface, there should be evidence in the missing resources. However if we are asking if there was civilization greater than 65 million years ago the issue becomes more complicated, because I would imagine there is a large amount of variation in exactly what resources were on the surface then compared to now. From what I understand there is no evidence of industrial and mining activity before this current cycle of civilization, but then again TPTB wouldn't want you to know that would they?

I agree with Mkoll that looking for evidence of mining and or missing resources may lead to discovery. I would try the opposite. I would look for lenses of minerals or metals that should not exist together.

reply to post by Mkoll


High-Tech does not alway imply abundance. If there is not a large population, large amounts of resources are not needed. Things such a large scale mining that scar the land are not required to produce the required resources. A truely high tech, intelligent, low populated civilization wouldn't leave much of a trace unless they created something that would endure thouands, if not millions of years.

Originally posted by flexy123
What...if at all...would remain for us to "find"? Would everything be gone, withered away? Would structures survive millions...possible billions (!) of years?

Satellites.
In orbit around Mars, its Moons, the Sun, and very probably Earth as well if they were like us and investigated it.
Before Sputik, no satellites were seen around Earth... or anywhere else for that matter.

I like the idea of examining easily available resources for signs of pre-human use. Empty oil wells etc.
Overall though, I think that searching for prehistoric mass industry (would be needed, assuming that all technology follows the same path) is more difficult than some might suspect.

The world now is in the first baby steps towards sustainable technology; it's easier to imagine, extrapolating from the current tech trends that perhaps in the future, all our architecture and industry might be easier to build/take down. I'm thinking advanced nanotechnology that repairs the landscape after we've done what we need. Perhaps some technology which can convert unwanted plastics back into oils.
The end game would be all the benefits of advanced technological civilization, with none of the planet-rape.

Problem with ancient tech civ theory is that it definitely requires some reworking of certain basic understandings of history. If the theory is correct, then clearly there are gross misunderstandings of the data, like say, the age of surface oil/ore deposits. Also, everyone is terrible at predicting the nature of our own future societies (what sorts of drives, ethics, advancements and ills will dominate us), let alone some ancient, unknown society's "future".

It's just a thought here...but what might be left? How about a massive magnetic anomaly on the shore of a lake cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years? How about the air space above it and the water in it are above freezing and the air seems to indicate evidence of on going organic activity?

I think your question may be answered...and the place is Lake Vostok, Antarctica. The Russians were last said to be breaking through for a proper look into the deep past of an alien ecosystem sometime this season.

Humanity may just be in for quite a shock in finding evidence of what the thread here is theorizing. We can hope.

After millions a lot of the Earth's surface has been "recycled" but stone tools dated at around 2.5 million years have been found. There is no reason that metals with extremely high corrosion resistance (like titanium) would not survive that long. Satellites in LEO would not survive anywhere near that long, they would be dragged down by the atmosphere. Objects in higher orbits would be subjected to perturbations by other bodies (the Moon, Venus) and be flung into solar orbits so they may still be out there but difficult to find.

After billions of years, pretty much all of the Earth's surface has been turned over. Not much chance of any artifacts surviving that long. Again, remote possibility of satellites, but finding them...

reply to post by Phage


That would be an incredible find, however. An ancient space station in a highly eccentric solar orbit.

But once again hard to find means easy to ignore.

Thousands of years ago? There would be abundant evidence. Millions of years ago? There would be nothing left. Least not on Earth. Maybe on the moon there would be artifacts, but nowhere else.

First of all, you need to get some data on the time scale.

* The solar system was basically "hot lumps of rock" until around a little less than a billion years ago. Yes, that means Mars, too. For quite awhile after, it was "cooling lumps of rock colliding." During the last part of the era, a collision causes the moon to separate from Earth.
* Earth didn't actually cool off and have water and continents (become habitable) until 600 million years ago or so.
* First fossils show up 500 million years ago.
* modern atmospheres don't show up until much later.

All civilizations leave a lot of traces. Advanced civilizations leave a LOT of traces -- from precision cut mines to garbage heaps, roads, modified land area (water storage, crops) both above and below ground. Layers of rock and soil show intrusions (someone dug foundations for something); crops modify the land.

Domesticating things produces huge change in species in very very short time periods (5,000 years or less.) Look at the changes in the dog and the horse and the cat within the past 4,000 years... likewise changes in any other animal we domesticated. It's all been very sudden and very extreme (from tiny pot bellied pigs to huge market ready hogs.)

Advanced industrialization also means people lose and abandon technology, and durable tech like that would last a very long time. Go to a city sometime, and look around at what people drop or lose... and think of thousands of years of people (or whatevers) dropping and losing things and abandoning them.

City sites are very interesting and messy from an archaeologist's standpoint. A very old city would be evident from flattened planned landscapes (like city blocks, etc) with a lot of surrounding land heavily modified (crops, landing ports, fishing ports, etc) and landfill/junk piles for abandoned and nonfunctional technology.

reply to post by Byrd

The solar system (and Earth) first formed about 4.6 billion years ago.

The Earth "cooled", (after continual asteroid bombardment and the presumed collision which from which the Moon resulted) about 4 billion years ago.

The earliest fossil candidates for life date to 3.5 billion years ago so life must have started a good time before that.
www.sciencemag.org...

Multicellular candidates go back 2.1 billion.
www.sciencedaily.com...

The first presumed animal fossils (sponges) date to 635 million years.
www.sciencedaily.com...

Your timeline is far off but I would agree that there is not any evidence of advanced civilizations to be found.

I have a saying.. any civilization, sufficiently advanced, would vanish from the historical record. The primary reason is recycling. When a civilization reaches a certain point of resource utilization, recycling becomes more efficient than mining/refining new materials. In addition, recorded material, assuming a similar tech tree as our current one, would become compressed and stored in a fashion that does not store well over time.

Eventually, it would all vanish, except for the few bits that were made of stone... those would remain and might be misinterpreted by future generations.

I thought about this ALOT. and though I can't think of any concrete way to have something that old stay preserved, I also wonder what we can do ourselves to leave as long a lasting mark as possible.

maybe erecting an extremely massive structure that can survive millions of years of weathering, but also making sure it stands in stark contrast to it's surroundings, something like an "ayers rock" in the middle of vast plains.

Originally posted by wingsfan
I thought about this ALOT. and though I can't think of any concrete way to have something that old stay preserved, I also wonder what we can do ourselves to leave as long a lasting mark as possible.

maybe erecting an extremely massive structure that can survive millions of years of weathering, but also making sure it stands in stark contrast to it's surroundings, something like an "ayers rock" in the middle of vast plains.

IMO the most visible evidence wont be what's preserved - it will be what is missing.

The asphalt of a road that cut straight through solid rock may crack and deteriorate, but the cut will not go away unless the earth itself change in a massive way (like a catastrophic mountain toppling earthquake or maybe an asteroid impact smack on top of it).