Where would we look for ancient civilizations from a billion years ago?

If it was and advanced space faring civilization, your best bet would be in space or the moon.

The Earth is like a meat grinder. Tectonic plate movement, volcanoes, flooding, ice ages (a few times to where they reached all the way to the equator), plants and animals, and then just normal weathering from the Earth's climate.

All those things have something on their side: Time.

It wears things down, and in many cases can completely erase things.

A billion years is a long time. It's 1,000 million years.

Take a look at ruins that we have of ancient civilizations that are from only a few thousand years ago. Look at what only a few thousand years have done to them. Most that are preserved well are those that were buried in many cases. And even then, that's not a sure thing to preserve them. They can be subducted into the Earth by plate movement. Once that happens, it's gone forever.

As it's been mentioned in this thread: even mountains can not stand the test of time. They get worn down just by the weather alone. It takes a long time, millions of years, but again, a billion years is 1,000 million years.

You get the idea.

So, the best bet to find something would be in space. Even then it's not a sure thing. Orbits can change and something could end up impacting something else, fall into the sun, or flung out of the solar system.

The moon: might survive there, but might end up buried under debris from meteor impacts, or worse: directly impacted.

And that's ONLY if the civilization was advanced enough to put something there.

originally posted by: eriktheawful

So, the best bet to find something would be in space. Even then it's not a sure thing. Orbits can change and something could end up impacting something else, fall into the sun, or flung out of the solar system.

Lagrangian point

The Lagrangian points (/ləˈɡrɑːndʒiən/; also Lagrange points, L-points, or libration points) are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can maintain a stable orbital configuration with respect to two larger objects (such as a satellite with respect to Earth and Moon).

The Lagrange points mark positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to orbit with them. A satellite at L1 would have the same angular velocity of Earth with respect to the Sun and hence it would maintain the same position with respect to the Sun as seen from Earth. Without Earth's gravitational influence, a satellite of the Sun, at the distance of L1, would have to move at a higher angular velocity than that of Earth.

I wouldn't just investigate only 'Earth' Lagrangian points, we have 8 other planets each with their own

NASA, Get cracking!!

a reply to: dawnstar

I know. I just said that.

The Drake equation suggests that civilizations last for several thousand years before collapsing. As SETI, etc, also extrapolate this to space then i would suggest that we would not have a cat in hells chance of finding any evidence for a civilization a Billion years old.

If anyhting had been left behind, it would long have been obliterated by extreme weathering, asteroid collision, supernova, loss of atmosphere on planets, etc, etc, etc.

The only hope we may have would be to find something floating in space emitting a signal but then how could something be powered for that length of time to be discovered?

Some eminent scientist believe that we would never discover signs of alien civilizations for this very reason. By the time we had the technology to communicate and travel to whatever is out there, we would have crashed and burned as a civilization.

a reply to: Flavian

The only caveat being wether or not wormholes as a means of transportation is a viable technology. If it is, then a certain number of civilizations will reach it eventually. With a whole galaxy that may support life, any number might. Over a billion or two years. If that kind of technology is feasible we may find aliens, or their remains eventually.

Got that idea from Ian Banks scifi novel, "The Algebraist." Def one of my favorite books. Highly recommend it.

a reply to: Xeven

As Nukedog point's out there may be traces found off world if such a civilization existed and had that potential, so why might they have left the earth if that was the case, look up snow ball earth theory.

The snow ball earth theory is gaining growing acceptance among the geological community, it postulates based on some geological evident that over two billion years ago the who earth froze over even to the equator freezing the ocean's so places like Malibu would have looked like Hoth from the THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK now this means the earth would have become almost uninhabitable with likely only chemosynthetic life forms such as those found today near the ocean floor vent's able to survive the cold but likely simple lichen life plant life may also have survived though they supposedly never showed up until about some time after the Cambrian epoch.

The Snow Ball earth is postulated to have come to an end about 750 million years ago followed about 650 million years ago by the Cambrian explosion, now the Cambrian explosion is a period when life simply exploded into new forms based on geological fossil evidence from the period but there is problem with that evidence, you see most of the earth surface and therefore any fossil's is recycled over that period so finding fossils from that far back is hard even if they were incredible common life form's which are the ones they do find and any rocks that are older are usually weathered out from what then were deep layers so no fossil evidence is likely to be found in them anyway even if the world had been teeming with life 2.3 billion years ago and before and the same goes for attempt's to analyse the atmosphere from that long ago as once again the exposed and therefore atmospheric isotope rich rocks have mostly been eroded away or geologically destroyed over this period, add to this the 1.75 approx. billion year period of super ice age glaciation (which begs the question with there being ice ages now for the last 4 to 5 million years was the entire period of the last 750 million years merely an interglacial period).

Of course there are thing's such as the Klerksdorp spheroids which look artificial and at first no geologist could come up with en explanation though now they have Created a Raft of explanations but no can be proven to be right so those explanations are really merely supposition based on modern ideas and observations which mean's they may still be ancient artifacts of non natural production.

Then there is waffle rock, crystallization can create interesting patterns but it is interesting that when they built a damn in the valley where the rock had been found they saves the least artificial looking part and dynamited the rest of it which account's claim looked more artificial leaving only one enigmatic piece of rock that can be explained as forming through crystallization while the rest of it may have proven far more problematic.
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.legendsandchronicles.com...
www.viewzone.com...

The sad fact is though that there is no likely hood of finding anything even if there had been a starwars like civilization here on earth back then, but out there in the solar system though ravaged and damages, pockmarked and atomically disintegrated over that time by temperature fluctuation and both partical and radiation bombardment there may still be evidence (And I believe there is).

I hope this is useful

I thought that snowball Earth was a major event in the evolution of life ?

All the oxygen that was form before that time got stuck frozen in ice, once the ice started to melt , all of the accumulated oxygen from the previous billion years was released at once.
Only then there was sufficient oxygen around for it to be enriched into ozon to create a shield big enough to protect life from the radiation of the Sun., what was a direct cause of life to get on land.

Tough one. As noted by others your best chance is in space. On earth your best opportunity would be by identifying sedimentary rock laid down in that time period (Geologists know this type of info) and hope that something from that 1 billion year old civ was left there, the impression of which, or fossil of, will be your evidence. Beyond that its pretty much chance. Probably another possibility would be to look at places were fossil life has been found before (multi-cellular) of course its leaves only small traces itself.

a reply to: Hanslune

True remember though the oldest Known sedimentary rocks are found today in Greenland, this area has been both ocean bottom and sub crustal plate at various epoch's but is now continental rock that is part of both Scotland and Newfoundland left isolated by the crustal expansion and plate drift that opened up the Atlantic, now geologists tend to model the crust as a plastic or fluid with high viscosity and continental rock therefore is seen as flowing over time to the sea and also as life is believed now to be far older than previous estimates with a possibility (though in my opinion remote unless panspermia was at work and even then that would suggest life far earlier in the universe) of single cellular simple organisms within just a few million years of the earth's formation well before the previous guestimate of about 3.6 billion years ago to possible over 4 billion years ago and maybe as far back as over 4.2 billion years.
Here is that Rock,
www.lpi.usra.edu...

Remember also that this Sedimentary rock was for a long time compressed, exposed to geological process including heat and overlaying strata so chemical analysis and even micro fossils (most of which would have been destroyed) would be inconclusive except to verify there existence and the existence of various gasses in the atmosphere based on remaining residual isotopic absorbtion, this can be extracted a number of ways either by heating and fractal distillation with would destroy most sample of gas or by mass spectrometry and derivative techniques were a small section is vaporized and samples of it's spectral absorption taken by comparing a polaryzed lights spectrum in a computer (Which is not idea as it all depends on the sensitivity of the CCD, how fine the ADC/DAC (analogue to digital conversion is based on a nearest sample to the appropriate voltage and the best way to describe its downside is the argument about digital versus analogue audio) is etc and by studying radio isotopes by powdering a section and exposing it to suitable transducers or analogue radio photographic absorption materials.

Still all of this is subject to analysis of small remnant materials whose exposure and locality is at best subjective to our opinions and therefore we have no real clear idea of the past epoch's only circumstantial evidence to support already formulated hypothesis and then of course we face the old catch 22 of it is accepted so your theory can not be right because Doctor Bla de bla has already proposed this with which doctor bla de bla two concurs and many good scientists have either lost heart over such or else been relegated unfairly to obscurity usually because they never wore the right colour school tie.

a reply to: LABTECH767

My eyes started to glaze over about three sentences deep into your second paragraph. I'm just going to star it and walk away slowly.

I see that was one sentence now...

a reply to: LABTECH767

Howdy

First 'paragraph' was fine

Number 2 & 3.........

a reply to: nukedog

Nukedog and Hanslune,
Sorry I do get carried away and for lack of a better description lack eloquence at time's in the way I phrase thing's, I got too over the top with the Jargon.
What it condensed down to is that I was saying the science is solid but it has limited data and therefore is not conclusive about that period in time, in fact we may know more about mars today than we do about the earth back then just like our lack of understanding of the ocean bed.
I will leave it there before I come out with more nonsense.
Oh and my hair is brown but other than that pretty damn close.

cool question now im certainly no expert but I did read something interesting about artifacts predating man weather it has any substance I don't know but very cool read heres the link www.messagetoeagle.com...

if it has any truth it might give more evidence to theory there are a lot older civilizations than we know of. As for finding them well if I had a wealth of understanding for technology id be in space far away from the rest of the monkeys. sadly I don't and probably wont so I will become the dust here on earth most likely what happened to a lot of the other civilizations

a reply to: SubSea

I have been told by someone I know who is a scientist, worked at Lockheed skunk works and Lawrence Livermore labs that there have been at least 3 advanced civilizations that have existed on Earth and long since left or wiped themselves out.

Saw that in the title for the thread as well, "Where would we look" not "where would we find".
How would a culture a billion years ago leave anything discernible?
The Egyptians built pyramids with the idea of weathering the elements for only a few millenniums.

The Drake equation really doesn't speak to evolutionary cause and effect.
Early civilizations moved into harsher climates and through the process of natural selection those individuals that were good at adapting and overcoming their environments evolved the culture. Those that moved to cold climates developed shelter and heating solutions, those that evolved into the desert developed deep well and irrigation technologies. Not all that different from the evolution of an elephants trunk.

The technical evolution of such a culture really only needed to evolve until it overcame the food and shelter hardships. Apparently there was some change brought about by this Darwinian process.

Kilgore Trout made a good argument that "mature" cultures like this no longer evolve the same way because technical "obsession" is no longer a necessary tool for survival. Humans invented games like chess to wile the hours away that they had previously spent developing agriculture. If chess was as boring as tic tac toe they used their minds for scientific tasks that required deep cause and effect reasoning.

Certainly in a billion years time an Earth culture could reach the point we have and dream of expanding civilization off the planet more than once. They did that in places like Egypt and New Grange Ireland. The alien in the Boyd Bushman video looks like it was genetically modified, perhaps for breeding purposes with humans. My theory is that Boyd found a Rosetta stone which the aliens knew he would translate into his own language.



There was also a warning about the dangers involved when an alien race comes back and trys to repopulate the Earth.
When a thread on ATS gets closed for staff review there may be more than alien cattle mutilation.

Oh right alien cattle mutilation...

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: Cauliflower

You are out there. Like bad Asian spam out there.

a reply to: sheeporshepherd

I see nothing in your link about artifacts predating "man."

a reply to: LABTECH767

You've got some great ideas and know a lot of things! Just remember to use your periods!

originally posted by: LABTECH767
a reply to: nukedog

Nukedog and Hanslune,
Sorry I do get carried away and for lack of a better description lack eloquence at time's in the way I phrase thing's, I got too over the top with the Jargon.
What it condensed down to is that I was saying the science is solid but it has limited data and therefore is not conclusive about that period in time, in fact we may know more about mars today than we do about the earth back then just like our lack of understanding of the ocean bed.
I will leave it there before I come out with more nonsense.
Oh and my hair is brown but other than that pretty damn close.

Hey it was good stuff just a tad difficult to read thru the first time!

a reply to: nukedog
sorry your right that was simply an article with some interesting artifacts but if you do a little research there are literally 100s of unexplained ones that they simply cannot date or cannot fathom a date and some of these artifacts are much much older than the civilizations we know of today. here is a thread with a little of those objects blog.world-mysteries.com... some aren't special at all but some are pretty interesting to think about. im no expert on this but if you do a little internet grazing there are to many of these found to count I think there was an interesting one found in the states of what looked to be a man made tool embedded in a piece of coal ........ we all know coal takes a long time to form like long long so strange to find a man made tool in coal that's supposedly 60 million yrs old? could all be bull but makes for a nice read

a reply to: sheeporshepherd

There's a sticky thread in this forum on things like that. It has a list of the many threads here on ATS from over the years were members had talked about them, and other things.

Give it a read, you might find something interesting in it:

www.abovetopsecret.com...