Could we one day be an advanced ancient civilisation ledgend?

How quickly would traces of human civilisation vanish? This is a subject I have often pondered in some of my more bored moments at work!

At first I thought it could take forever and that traces of a giant worldwide civilisation could never just disappear. But on reflection I actually think it may be more possible than I ever thought.

This is just an example and I am in no way stating that any of this is likely to happen, but imagine if one of our modern day fears such as avian flu took hold. Ok let’s say it gets so bad that it actually does decimate the population of the planet. All over the world society would cease to function, With no one able to keep important structures such as power stations and hospital functioning things would get bad very quickly, Anarchy would most likely break out very quickly in the survivors and people would be forced to look after themselves.

Over the years that pass people would be so concerned about just basic day to day survival that all of our great modern day achievements would simple be forgotten, A few generations down the word and all we would really have are old artefacts such as computers that no one would be able to use, with our digital history wiped out we would loose a mass of information that we all take for granted today.

With out schooling and society human values would not really be concentrating on the material, we would be just making sure we could eat and have a shelter to sleep in. Our old cities would soon be forgotten. Nature would regrow quickly and natural disasters would start to erode our old cities and towns away, with no one able to repair the damage and maintain the old infrastructure it would soon be useless

Another couple of hundred years later and if humans are still around and surviving we would more than likely be living in harmony with the environment, we really would not have the time to talk about the “old days” over many years all of this could simple be forgotten. Forward a few thousand years and I honestly don’t think there would be much a record left except for collapsed buildings and unidentified remains.

Obviously providing we survived I am sure we would eventually thrive and become a dominate species on the planet, but we would be back to square one. All of the things we take for granted today would eventually come around again, but this time developed by a civilisation that knew so little about us.

And so the cycle continues!!!

I wasn’t really a subscriber to the ancient technology advanced civilisation theory until now but I guess it is possible. We seem to be concluding that mankind is an awful lot older than what conventional teaching say, so I guess its good to keep an open mind on the subject.

Anyway thanks for letting me rant!

Regards

Paul


Edited for spelling

[edit on 31-7-2008 by Hope_for_reason]

Given human nature we would probably re-invent. After only a few hundred years millions of tons of artifacts would still be clearly visable on the surface of the earth.

Looting and reuse of this material would probably be a well establish procedure. Given that we re-developed natural history and other aspects of science the legend would be quickly backed up by facts.

If you keep stretching the time back the artifacts and information that would point to this civilization would go back tens of millions of years. The only way to complete eliminate all artifacts and indications of our past cvillization would be to have crustal areas we lived on subducted back into the magma.

The stuff in space would last hundreds of millions of years.

Most houses in any village near you that stood 500 years ago are no longer standing. There are only a few scattered remains of the huge Roman Empire standing around here and there...if we didnt have texts telling us about the Empire we´d have never believed they were that huge and rich.

Much less a chance of anything significant lasting millions of years.

reply to post by Hope_for_reason


Hey Hope -

Talk about sendipity, I just posted a thread the outlines the Mass Extinction of civilizations during the end of the last Ice Age. There is a lot of new and compelling evidence that what you are describing, and Hanslune as well i.e magma crust displacement, actually took place.

There is even a paragraph in there where the first researcher to publish the thoery describes the impact on the exisiting civilizations of the time. So, if you're interested in that check it out it's called ""Sudden Global Cataclysm" Science Proving 'Flood Myth' At Last!" here's the LINK

Given the title you can see where I stand on what your musings. It can happen and it did. Cheers!

Most houses in any village near you that stood 500 years ago are no longer standing. There are only a few scattered remains of the huge Roman Empire standing around here and there...if we didnt have texts telling us about the Empire we´d have never believed they were that huge and rich.

Much less a chance of anything significant lasting millions of years.

Nope, the knowledge is in the ground. That house foundation will be detectable for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, unless the ground it was built on is eroded away or the crust it stands on is destroyed.

If we didn't have text we'd have tens of thousands of similar ruins of Roman buildings, roads and ships. We'd have burials of Roman soliders with the same equipment from Scotland to Mesopotamia to the 2nd cataract to Roumania. The non textual evidence for the Roman empire is immense and unmistakable-beside all the coin hordes that have been found.

If we got knocked off a follow on archaeologist with a late 19th century skill levels would be able to detect a civilization of our type without great difficulty. Just like we can detect the stone tools and bones of our ancestors for millions of years ago - but we would have left a trillion x trillion times more stuff

Discounting cataclysms, disasters, floods, comet impacts, robbery, recycling and re-use, smuggling and other unknown factors that might be true Hanslune.

Originally posted by Skyfloating
Most houses in any village near you that stood 500 years ago are no longer standing. There are only a few scattered remains of the huge Roman Empire standing around here and there...if we didnt have texts telling us about the Empire we´d have never believed they were that huge and rich.

Much less a chance of anything significant lasting millions of years.

Millions of years? Perhaps not. But it would far outlast 500 years.

The argument of "old villages that stood 500 years ago" not standing anymore is flawed, since most of them have been purposely leveled a dozen times since then. Add on top the fact that fires where a constant source of destruction for the cities at this time and it gets even worse.

I've often thought of it myself when just out travelling. What would we leave if we just vanished into thin air? How long would it last?

Some people argue that nature will take over our cities quickly: perhaps it would, I dont know. But would all trace of us disappear? HECK NO!!! We have molded NATURE ITSELF to our liking. And nature cannot "regrow" a mountain that's cut in half by an 8 lane super highway. Well, maybe in a million years...

reply to post by TheWayISeeIt


Thanks very much will check that link out nows, sounds intresting.

We haven't been making super-durable materials for very long, but we've been making up for lost time. I read somewhere not too long ago that a glass pop bottle can last a million years. So if nothing else, a lot of our refined alloys, glass, some plastics, and other material bits of our civilization would probably survive, particularly in high-density population areas. Along with that, even with massive geologic upheaval, the beds of our highways, if not the reinforced concrete surfaces, would still manage to offer some clue as to the size and technological ability of our civilization. Some of our stuff in space might last a while, too.

So unless a future civilization is completely retarded, once they developed a comparable level of technology, they would probably be able to recognize that stuff as coming from a relatively advanced civilization, so we wouldn't be so much a myth to them as an actual fact as shown by the large amount of still-existing evidence.

Thanks for all the replies, got to say I do think we would leave loads of evidence, about around everywhere, but how much could the land mass actually change before we were able to catalogue it? A lot of what we leave behind could end up at the bottom of an ocean. This could be plausible with past society I think.

True about space junk though, I wonder if there are any ancient satellites still up there!!!

Cheers

Paul

We've been making long term stuff for 16,000 years - pottery. Its almost like rock and will last millions of years.

Sky

Despite all that disaster we are still able to detect early civilization and mans ancestors - in particular his stone tools. Tens of thousands of them all over the world.

Originally posted by Hanslune

Despite all that disaster we are still able to detect early civilization and mans ancestors - in particular his stone tools. Tens of thousands of them all over the world.

Indeed stone is something that lasts...obviously.

reply to post by Skyfloating


That's why a lot of gods in past civilisations were immortalized this way so it would last for the duration of humanity. They would be remembered. In essence one could call a god a person that runs the whole planet.



[edit on 31-7-2008 by menguard]

I would say that they used stone for the various statues of gods as it was a luxury item and people tend to portray there gods with expensive stuff.

Of course in many areas they used what they had available, wood, ivory, bone and etc.

Our legacy will be our landfills. Anybody with a shovel will be able to find mountains of our greatness in the form of old TV sets and washing machine parts packed in amongst the eternal plastic-coated diapers.

Yeah baby - there will be some great archaeology in 2-3,000 years - because mixed into that will be stuff from other earlier times - like arrow heads collected, nicknacks taken from various sites etc.

You would be surprised how little time it takes. I watched a documentary about this very thing and it fascinated me as I pondered many time the same thing. I couldn't find the actual doc but these are along similar lines.



Actually, I think I did find it...

Google Video Link

[edit on 31/7/08 by Prote]

reply to post by Prote


Yeah I remember a bbc show a few months back that looked at a situation of humanity vanishing overnight, was quite shocked at how quickly nature took everything back.

Will have to watch those videos. Also whoever mentioned landfills, gotta admit never considered those, guess they would be around for a long long time.

Regards

Paul

All it took was one eruption to make this road useless, how many more would it take before it doesn't exist?





The only question is how many years does it take to completely wipe our existence out, not many if it's all melted away.

I've been using computers since 1986 - with each generation of computer hardware & software if I have files that I want to keep I have to make sure they're readable by the next generation, so one must convert the files every few years in order to view them not just a readable format but actual media that you have the hardware to read.

Not too many people keep 5 1/4 floppy drives around to read those old backups, or old tape backup drives that become obsolete. Of course I can print them, but eventually the paper & ink will deteriorate.

It's allot of work actually to keep your presence from being erased by nature because eventually everything gets recycled.

Yep nature is relentless, its estimated that 99.9% of stuff doesn't survive past a certain number of years (there is no agreement on that number by the way)

However even with that with between 35-65 billion humans having lived since around 200,000 years ago - that is a lot of stuff surviving.

By looking at what has survived you can get an idea what of ours might survive.

Example:

Stone age wood - 400,000-year-old wooden weapons found

The javelins

The earliest stone tools appear in the fossil record around 2.6 million years ago.

Fossils go back to nearly the beginning of life.

I would also point out that the road itself has been destroyed- the asphalt melted but the crushed stone matrix road bed is going to nicely preserved by the lava.

[edit on 31/7/08 by Hanslune]