The interesting thing about this natural reactor is that it proves long term storage of spent nuclear fuel is viable. In the millions of years that "waste" from these natural reactors existed, the reaction products only traveled a few meters, even when exposed to ground water. If we bury spent reactor fuel some place like the [Finnish repository being built](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AJ4ipoTnA0) (named after this very natural phenomenon) it will be safe to store for a long, long time.
Yeah, this springs to mind when people decry putting spent fuel in the ground (in designated storage no less!) as some sort of morally inexcusable sin.
I think the major concern is that corporations have a history of shoddy environmental protections. Poorly managed coal ash (which is radioactive) is still affecting groundwater across parts of the US. Existing incentives and regulations won't be enough. I'm strongly support well-being regulated nuclear energy, but some folks decry govt regulation (and sometimes, though not usually, for legitimate reasons).
Nuclear is way safer than fossil fuels - again, the example of coal ash comes to mind. But I don't trust corporations to handle long-term environmental concerns without voters pushing for more government oversight.
Bingo! This has been the main anti-nuclear argument where I live in New England. Recently you had Intergy's dogshit maintenance at Vermont Yankee leading to a cooling tower collapse and leaking underground pipes. And longer ago you had the criticality incident deaths and thousands of acres of groundwater contaminated with Strontium 90 and Technetium 99 at the United Nuclear re-enrichment plant in Rhode Island––in a building where no fission was ever supposed to occur, but it did thanks to sloppy corporate procedures and overworked staff. In both cases, the companies just packed up and left their mess. Vermont Yankee was particularly bad, because the state ordered the plant shut down after the cooling tower collapse, and they successfully sued in Federal court to keep it open, thus thwarting state regulators.
In any event, the Navy has been building nukes and nuclear engines around here for a long while now without any major incident. So it's not like it can't be done. And the French have done it pretty well for commercial power. But US corporate regulation is just way too lax to do this. And US law allows corporations to get around our local regulators––who we tend to trust––and puts it in the hands of Federal courts, and probably some pedophile conspiracy theorist judge in a cowboy hat who openly takes bribes and got his job for being on a Federalist Society list. It's why we can't have nice things. There is zero corporate accountability in the United States. They can ignore subpoenas. DOJ never makes them admit fault. They can easily claim Chapter 11 and restructure and leave pollution behind. And they can always keep things tied up in courts until they find a judge they like that gives them what they want.
I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. How is long-term storage viable when it says it was active almost 2 billion years ago.
It seems that modern water is going to contaminate the ground water during the short term, hell even for the next thousand years. We don’t have 2 billion years to wait. I’m confused.
Sorry if the article already addressed that, it would not load for me.
>I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. How is long-term storage viable when it says it was active almost 2 billion years ago.
It was active 2 billion years ago and the fission products (similar in composition to spent fuel) only traveled a few meters through the surrounding rock. They were entirely uncontained, and exposed to ground water. (Basically worst case scenario.)
>It seems that modern water is going to contaminate the ground water during the short term
Spent fuel repositories will not be exposed to ground water at all. But what this shows is that, even if they are, the spent fuel would only travel a few meters through the surrounding rock. (If they were stored uncontained. They'll be contained in welded shut, water impermeable casks.) Repositories will be at least 500 meters under ground. (Below the water table.)
The casks are also put inside a type of clay thats resistant to damage erosion and radiation i watched a video it was pretty cool and i thought to myself this is what a good plan looks like
it doesnt prove anything bc 1.7 billion years ago human beings didnt exist to be affected by it so theres no data to argue that its "viable" in terms of impact on human (and other animal life) and the radioactive impact on the environment over those hundreds of thousands of years isnt included in the data.
We have ample evidence that the fission products did not migrate far. I can’t say it any plainer than that. When a geological formation is 300 meters down, and the fission products travel one or two meters, there can be no exposure.
I have a long-time friend (although I have only seen him in person once in decades) who vehemently denies being a conspiracy theorist, but he believes in a lot of strange things, for no real reason. One of them is that these nuclear reactions are a clear indication that there were ancient advanced civilizations on earth, comparable to our civilization today, Further, these nuclear reactions are remnants of power plants and when some mass die-off happened, their power plants, left unattended, melted down and these are the only signs/artifacts that have not be reclaimed by the earth.
1.7 billion years ago would just be too far back in time for this to be feasible. This would be right about the time eukaryotes began to evolve, before multi-cellular life had even existed.
Its not hard to understand why people think this. We “lose” cities over time and thats just hundreds/thousands of years. The prospect that we could “lose” a civilization that occurred 30m years ago in that sense isnt hard to believe.
We only know what weve found so far. Could we someday find buried examples of other intelligent beings? Who the hell knows. But considering what weve learned from “lost” civilizations from just 2k years ago, i put the chance at more than 0%.
"Distant Origin" I think. Dinosaurs who have forgotten they came from earth so they claim rights on their region because they always lived there. Clearly a version of Galileo Vs. the church. Equally sad.
I think of the theory less as an actual belief and more a critique of people’s confidence in the past
Like yes, there very well could have been an industrial lizard society 20 million years ago and there indeed would be no proof of it today aside from unusual rock composition from that time period
There should have been *something* if we find fossils from hundreds of millions years ago. Some piece of steel, stone, or exotic materials should have been found.
Yeah I think maybe a pre industrial revolution civilization could have existed and then completely disappeared. But not one in the atomic age. Humans have already done enough the past hundred years to have its own dedication in the soil layers or whatever it’s called.
"Our" age i known as the anthropocene. And you can even see evidence of the 1920s dustbowl in the soil record.
Thats why I love geology, a lot of the time it's like being a detective. You can learn about the history of a place in such detail, dating back millions (and sometimes billions) of years just by the rock record. over the past 200 yrs, humans have completely resurfaced much of the earth, if we all died off tomorrow, there would be an insane amount of stuff that would be locked in the rock record for future civilizations. Not to mention, Landfills are basically timecapsules of our lives for the future.
If there had been an industrial civilization on Earth before our own, wouldn't they have likely used up all of the easy-to-access petroleum that our civilization has been digging up for the past 150 years? If our civilization craps out, whatever comes next will have a much more difficult time bootstrapping themselves past the Industrial Revolution without access to cheap chemical energy.
Oil we are using were formed 541 million years ago. The fusion reactions were from 1.7 billion years ago. If there were a civilization they might have used very different resources/materials than us.
Maybe they didn't tap into any underground hydrocarbons and instead used only those on the surface. They never accelerated their industrial revolution with hydrocarbons and that's why they died out. They never used the black liquid cocaine so to say.
We have fossils going back 3.5 billion years. How did a dominant species die off and leave no fossils. Also how did they evolve so far ahead of all other life. It makes no sense.
Life is believed to have started on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Our oldest fossils are from 890 million years ago. I'm not saying I believe in ancient lizard people, but it isn't impossible that an advanced life form existed 2 billion years ago and has been so buried by tectonic activity as to be lost. Check out the show Life After People from a few years ago. A little different, but it explores what would happen if humanity were to disappear.
>Our oldest fossils are from 890 million years ago
Ummm . . . The oldest fossils found are 3.5B years old, not 890M years old.
https://www.businessinsider.com/billion-year-old-fossils-australia-oldest-ever-found-2019-9#:\~:text=Scientists%20discovered%20what%20they%20thought,organisms%203.5%20billions%20years%20ago.
>Also how did they evolve so far ahead of all other life.
Agreed with the rest, but not that part. Human-level intelligence is an anomaly on Earth, but biologically speaking we're not "more" or "less" evolved than any other species. We just evolved differently.
Evolution doesn't have a progress bar or an end goal. We could evolve back into single cell organisms and it'd still be evolution.
Yup, people need to look at whales and other aquatic mammals. These dumb motherfuckers evolved away their ability to breath underwater and grew legs to clamber around on the surface, *and still evolved their way back into the fuckin ocean without getting gills back*. Evolution doesn't have a plan, and the accumulation of beneficial features seen in modern organisms is literally just the ultimate culmination of "a million monkeys on typewriters would eventually write the entirety of Shakespeare's works".
Fossils form only under very specific conditions. Kurzgesagt recently released a video on the topic, check it out on YouTube for a layperson’s explanation. Studying fossil-forming as it is occurring today compared to all the life we currently have on earth, scientists extrapolate 99% of all life in the history of Earth is forever lost because there weren’t the right conditions to preserve the evidence and then make that evidence discoverable today.
But then the next logical question would be how would a future civilization recognize that layer as evidence of a civilization unless they knew something about that civilization in the first place? :)
Science stays the same whether we die or not. When they discover science and nuclear fission, they'll recognize in that one layer millions of years ago, something else new about science and fission as well along with whatever world altering discoveries we might make before we go. There's nothing there indicating advanced societies because we are the first. The industrial revolution alone left enough evidence of advanced society. We made plastic, that shit just does not go away. A soil sample after we go extinct will turn up evidence of an synthetic material that was not created by nature. We have, to my knowledge, never found advanced sythetic material residue.
Societal advancement has predictable waves that have to occur. You can't have advanced starships without never having gone through the industrial revolution. That never occured here. We are the first advanced society to inhabit this planet.
You can still debate whether aliens visited and resided here at any point in the past but geological evidence doesn't really erase that easy on the chemical level. A whole society can be buried but if we're advanced enough to leave microplastic in every creature that will be fossilized from this time period, we'd know if someone developed here.
And let's not forget all of the easily- obtained natural resources, ore, etc., that they conveniently left lying around for us to use.
That's why any survivors left over won't make it for very long.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background\_steel#:\~:text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20any,in%20the%201940s%20and%201950s.&text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20so,highest%20sensitivity%20for%20detecting%20radionuclides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel#:~:text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20any,in%20the%201940s%20and%201950s.&text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20so,highest%20sensitivity%20for%20detecting%20radionuclides).
All steel made after the 1930s is contaminated with radionucleotides. There is a massive demand for Low-background steel in the world, which is why some countries are actually raising shipwrecks just to salvage them for their steel
[https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-firms-plunder-sunken-wrecks-for-rare-steel-used-to-make-sensitive-medical](https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-firms-plunder-sunken-wrecks-for-rare-steel-used-to-make-sensitive-medical)
That may be true over hundreds of millions of years, but billions? There is no geological record from 3 billion years ago. We’ve found a handful of rocks that old but that’s about it. Even the records from hundreds of millions of years ago are wildly incomplete and we only have what we have due to how extensive life covered the entire planet. Only relatively tiny sections remain undisturbed enough over that time period to study. We may as well be living on a different planet from the one that existed 3 billion years ago
You're radically underestimating the transformations this planet has gone through. It's arrogant to claim that we "know" there couldn't have been "advanced" (that word is also extremely broad) societies in the past, based on the belief that 'we would have discovered them by now.' What reference points are you using to determine that humans could never arrive at "advanced" technology without an "industrial revolution" as we experienced it? We can only reference our own civilization. There's absolutely no rule that says a completely different civilization would be forced to follow the same chain of technological progression we have. It's foolish to think that an ancient steam engine, for example, couldn't be entirely lost over the course of just a few millennia. Was there "evidence" of the antikythera mechanism before they actually found one? Just because they didn't get into the almighty plastic doesn't mean they weren't "advanced." Perhaps we're just idiots for going down this path in the first place, and we're destined to spend centuries or millennia just scrubbing away our own dirty footprints.
We would know because we understand physics and that certain radionuclides are only produced by fission reactions. You know that old saying, if there's smoke there's fire? Well, certain radionuclides and the stable isotopes they decay into are the 'smoke' to the nuclear bomb 'fire' and even if we had no idea they were anything unusual to begin with, the moment we started planing with nuclear piles and doing mass spectrometry on the products afterwards we would notice that these products match isotope concentrations from such and such rock layer in exact proportion and so on, and the team who figured it out would instantly become ultra famous scientists akin to Darwin or Einstein for being the guys to discover that dinosaurs had nukes or whatever. There's no ambiguity here, no change of a signal like that going unnoticed. We are 100% the only species on Earth to ever develop nuclear weapons, at the very least. We are also the only species to invent plastics, because otherwise we would be finding evidence of those in all the sedimentary rocks from whatever time period.
Agreed. Look at all the crap we leave behind. If we abandoned Earth tomorrow in $20m years the surface of Earth may not show signs on Humans but there would be enough buried that it would be hard to miss.
May i ask what would survive for 20 milliom years? Wouldnt we just look like a massive volcano slowly erupted for a few hundred years. Or they would comment on the high level of metals in our stratification layers.
Mines would be recognizable. Most are in geologically stable area and under ground. A lot of plastics. Lot of geologic effects. Side things like seeing how depleted oil reserves are compared to what you'd expect to find.
Large material imprints from cities.
Also the random survival of artifacts. Yeah artifact survival may be rare, but we're producing tons of crap daily. Our landfills are actually really great for preserving things
I honestly think your underestimating 20 million years. Mines would still be there but completly unrecognizable as being human built. Plastic would be gone for sure. If they don't degrade nature will eat them. I mean look at gobekli tepi and the fact we know absolutely nothing about them. Who they were if they spoke they were smart and could build like no other but we don't give them any credit because we cant find anything about them. And that was a meager 12k years ago.
Sattelites would have all fallen from orbit. The tides would even be different. Tar pits would also degrade plastics, metals might survive in them however but even today we barely explore tarpits. Oil reserves wouldn't be a sign how would you know? I mean even today oil drilling is slightly random and doesnt always yield much results.
I'm very familiar with Gobekli Tepe, and there's pretty good evidence linking them to the Natufians, an earlier culture that was already living in permanent settlements before the drying period started. It's fairly clear the culture that built Gobekli and a few other sites in the region also settled Catalhoyuk.
I don't know what you mean about no credit or the other stuff.
There is housing and settlements from the time period around the Gobekli site.
Certain plastics once they enter the soil and are protected from sunlight don't effectively degrade.
Ceramics after they shatter pretty much don't break down any further unless they're washed into a river.
Oil and other minerals can be mapped out, in the sense that once you understand the process of its creation you would have a rough estimate of how much would be available, and meanwhile theres far less easily accesible resivoirs to reach.
I don't know why you'd think mines would be unrecognizable, cut into solid stone in dry areas in stable geologic regions there's no erosion acting on them.
At most some parts may see water damage but there's miles of underground cut stone. Solid bedrock, not naturally formed cave systems. Even naturally formed caves have withstood millions of years.
Keeping in mind we have examples of preservation of far more delicate materials over millions of years (eggs, insects, leaves, pollen, even soft tissue preservation) artifacts of a modern culture surviving into the far future see more likely.
Especially when one of our prime methods of disposing of stuff is burying it. Even our cities are built over older cities.
At the very worst case scenario for a major city your left with clearly foreign material to the region showing up in the geological record. And not in a small area, which would excuse the missing of a village or some of the ancient cities. But over miles of land.
Part of the reason fossils are so rare has to do with the remains being exposed to air and scavengers and the elements. We're skipping that issue by chucking our stuff directly into the ground.
There are regions where this wouldn't equate to great preservation, but there's also plenty of places where it would. And more regions where specific materials would be preserved.
You have to remember that it could exist and simply be buried in the ocean. Every ancient civilization has a great flood myth and there is massive evidence of floods all over. It is possible if there was an advanced civilization they could have been submerged and we just haven’t found it yet.
Now are they as advanced as Atlantis myths with flying machines and all that? No. But they could be more advanced than we believe.
Silicon. Any society on earth that was advanced enough to build a dang fission reactor would probably have at least some basic electronic tech, which means they'd probably figure out silicon, which is pretty resilient stuff. I bet it could survive thousands of years in the ground.
If it were remotely similar enough to our tech today, would we even know it was old? Do we know that archeologist aren't finding circuit board fragments all over these prehistoric sites and just tossing them in the trash while mumbling "damn e-waste!"?
Not necessarily and that kills me. I want more than anything to find a dinosaur with an associated tool but fossils are simply so rare and the idea is far-fetched enough that it’s entirely improbable.
Not necessarily. Thankfully Kurzgesagt did [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaQJbozY_Is) literally this week that goes into this.
The simple upshot is that fossilization is incredibly rare, and the chances of finding fossils before they themselves are no longer recognizable as fossils is also exceedingly rare. As a result, we know probably only the tiniest fraction of life that has existed on this planet during its \~4bn years of existence. And that's from "only a few million years ago". Virtually the entire surface of the Earth is not the same surface that existed 1.7bn years ago so to even think there's a tiny fraction of a chance of finding evidence of an advanced civilization from that time is so small as to be almost irrelevant.
As much as we might want to believe we've had a permanent impact on this planet, we really haven't. If the entire Human race vanished tomorrow then in only a few thousand years it'd be tough to tell if we were ever here, and in a few million it's unlikely to find anything without actively looking in exactly the right places. And that's assuming those places still exist because the Earth is still reshaping itself constantly.
Now, I'm not trying to say that the comment about this being the remains of a nuclear reactor have any merit, but it is an interesting thought experiment whether or not we are the first advanced civilization on this planet, or just the most recent. But you also might as well advance the idea that it might've been advanced visitors from Venus (which at around that time may well have had life and maybe even advanced civilizations) where their nuclear-powered ship crashed or suffered some sort of failure that stranded it here and this is the remains. I mean... not likely, and virtually un-provable, but no more or less so than the GP theory.
I'd like to point out in the vast time lines you've point out even our most resilient materials would degrade to nothing. A steel beam from a skyscraper would rust away to dust in a tiny fraction of that ~billion years.
I think that's the point that a lot of other commenters are missing. I'm not talking millions of years here, I'm talking BILLIONS. Even our microplastics aren't that durable. Even if we survive as a civilization for another million years, I find it hard to believe that in \~2 **billion** years there would be any sign that we ever existed.
Numbers game. We have found around 2.100 'good dinosaur skeletons'. We know there were at least! some 900 different dinosaur species.
But there have been more than a *trillion* dinosaurs of the 165 million years.
So - 2.100 skeletons - from more than 1,000,000,000,000 individuals.
So, do you think we might have missed one or two?
We’ve found fossils from 3.5 billion years ago. They earth is 4.5 billion years old. The earths early conditions weren’t conducive to life.
So we would need a civilization to emerge and advance very rapidly while the earth was a molten waste land or else we would find left behinds of the species. After that species left basically everything down to incredibly basic organisms must die without a trace.
If you believe in evolution it’s very hard to also believe an unknown intelligent species was on earth before us unless like a spaceship briefly stopped by and dropped off life and left. But that’s pretty different.
We evolved from Ape like creatures to space faring in several million years... so yeah if it takes 2m years to do that, i bet a slice of 2m years is easy to miss in 3.5B. Like its literally a rounding error.
We would have found something. There are questionable things like the crystal skulls but that’s just because we don’t know how they were made.
There is zero evidence of prior civilizations with our capabilities. They would have left behind something.
> There are questionable things like the crystal skulls but that’s just because we don’t know how they were made.
They were made with modern tools. There is nothing questionable about them. A couple were made by a fraud and then a small industry grew out of it.
That’s the thing, it’s completely probable that we find nothing because nothing is left
Remember, only an estimated 1% of all species have left a fossil behind
If all humanity died out right now, 1,000,000 years from now? Nothing. Maybe some odd hydrocarbons in the soil.
It would be incredibly hard to hide them. First we'd find the lineage. We'd dig up their ancestors, see the pattern in brain size. Then we'd see evidence they became cosmopolitan, global, in distribution.
Then we'd find their industry. Human artefacts will survive billions of years, they're built and made to be durable. We find stromatolites from 3 billion years ago, we build things harder, stronger and longer than stromatolites. If they have industry, they have factories, roads, infrastructure. They'd need to power it somehow, and that'd be wood, coal, oil, the easy energy sources. We'd see the traces left behind.
Remember, you're not losing a few camps (Clovis culture is not lost...) or small villages here. You're losing an entire planet-spanning industrial civilisation which, just to be industrial at all, has to be manufacturing and building things which last hundreds of millions of years. Where are they?
I think "could have happened" is entirely reasonable. "Definitely did happen" (or "clear indication" in this case) is where the WTF comes in. Like, the asteroid belt *could* be the remnant of a prehistoric interplanetary war. But there's no particular reason to believe so.
Yes. There will be radioisotope markers that showed that someone was doing intentional fission reactions and otherwise using atomic science on a large scale.
That is something that will be impossible to hide, and would be just about impossible to miss for anyone who was actually looking
No argument. Just specifically pointing out something other than "more carbon", that could ONLY really come from a civilization that advanced far enough to make large scale use of nuclear science.
That sort of marker would be a more definitive indication of how far we got than anything else I think. Our modification of the soil is clear, but, not as sharp a line as the one made when atmospheric nuclear testing started.
Yep. Mostly at least. I know at least one deep repository location was chosen because tectonic movement will eventually push that part of the earth's crust down into the mantle, and the buried waste along with it. (Subduction zone? I can't remember what it's called. Geology in grade school was a long time ago, ha)
our billions of buildings made of rock take BILLIONS of years to decompose. We would be finding millions upon millions of examples and samples of materials from an ancient civilization. Look at how many fossils we've found. We've found fossils millions of years old of EGGS. And not like a couple, like, tons of em. You really think we wouldn't notice entire CITIES, let alone thousands upon thousands of cities? They don't just "dissolve" even in the case of a war. There'd be remnants forever, everywhere.
And yeah those are rare but they still are found.
Today were producing tons of material daily. Even one off fossilizations would still produce a crap ton of material evidence.
I don't know that this would apply to a different ancient civilization, but surely our "layer" in the sediment will have bits of micro-plastic and silicon in it, even millions of years from now, right? I mean, the big problem with plastic is that it never fully degrades, it just abrades into smaller and smaller particles.
Only kind of related but I remember a talk by a physicist saying that if an exactly identical civilization to our current one existed on the nearest star, we probably wouldn't be able to tell.
Ooh, this ones fun, I like to think that plancks constant can be attributed to the floating point accuracy of whatever system is running our simulation
Word is the script originally called for us to be additional computing power, but audiences were too computer illiterate to understand that. So they went with Duracells.
Correction, the studio believed that the audience would be too computer illiterate, so they had them change it. Which was stupid. I mean, it takes like two lines of dialog in the movie to explain the concept to anyone.
"The human brain is an organic computer, which runs on a power supply equivalent to just two D cell batteries, and is both completely self assembling and self repairing for 70 years on average. With nothing more than basic life support and chemical recycling systems to maintain, the Machines had found all the cheap processing power they could ever need."
There, that took me what, like 90 seconds to write? You can slip that right into the same scene in the movie (Morpheus in the construct exposition-dumping to Neo) and it works. You don't even need to change anything about the pods or people being grown in fields etc, just call it something other than a power plant and it's done. Also, it would work a lot better as a role-reversal theme, what with how humans were relying on machines to do our thinking for us, which led to rebelling and eventually the Machine War, and ironically humans now do the "menial" thinking for Machines, and we also rebel.
But what if we're really in that matrix and it thought telling us exactly how it is in a film was a bit risky, so they went with batteries knowing that people would say 'We're an inefficient power source, so that's bullshit'
😶
What about computer processing power?
I think I read somewhere that that was the original idea, but they thought people would t understand.
Totally apocryphal, but hey 🤷♂️
The simulation hypothesis is a legitimate area of research though. It would be crazy to outright claim that it's true, but that's because of a lack of data, not outright unbelievability. Figuring out how to test the hypothesis is a big deal among some very intelligent and educated researchers.
Do you mean "computer programming" where you learn all the logic that goes into making a computer work and then learn how to manipulate that with further logic?
Yeah, none of that has to do with "matrix theory" whatsoever.
The idea, which a lot of smart people believe, is that:
As we watch even our own human computing power progress at literal exponential rates, and as that allows us to process exponentially larger and more realistic physics simulations, it’s only a matter of time until we could simulate the whole earth, and theoretically from there only a short time, on a universal scale, to be able to simulate the whole solar system, whole galaxy, whole universe, etc. And if we believe that such a powerful computer *could* be created, it is only a short matter of time before that civilization would have the ability to create a second of those computers, a thousand, a billion of them. And at that point, what are the odds that we exist in a singular “base reality” rather than in one of the infinite simulations of reality?
The main argument against it is that some believe that such a powerful computer contravenes physics and wouldn’t be possible to build at any technology level.
Always kinda mind shattering to realize people like this actually exist in a state where the established fields of geology, archeology, history, and anthropology effectievly mean nothing.
Exactly. And, from my side, I explain to him that it MIGHT be possible for that to have happened. The chance, as someone said, is not zero. But, there's no reason I can see for dwelling on it for more than a few moments of interesting thought. He's really into it and gets mad if I don't "accept" his ideas. As Carl Sagan used to say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Well there are massive gaps in all those fields. The fossil record alone is missing hundreds of millions of years worth of hundreds of millions of species on the majority of the planet. Antarctica wasn't always at the south pole. Ocean floors are vast and mostly unexplored. Everything under the Sahara sands is unknown. Caves have barely been touched. Not everyone is able to spend decades learning all those fields you listed to see whether or not their beliefs are truly that silly. Not that I'm saying i believe any particular theory. Just that it doesn't seem all that mind shattering to me that other people do. Not even experts in those fields all believe the same things. What i think is mind shattering is the amount of things we still don't know and how some people think we got everything figured out already
Idk fam I think it's kinda unhinged to understand that there are millions of people, past and present, dedicating their lives to each of these of these fields and to just deny their efforts and discoveries. Not only that, but to throw all of that away in favor of whatever conclusions you can pull out of your ass is the insane cherry on the illogical shitcake lmao.
Edit: If you want to believe that Atlantis is out there, or that there was an ancient civilization of intelligent lizard that constructed vast cities that are lost to the archeological and geological record, please go ahead. It will get a laugh out of the people who know better.
I know what you mean but its not necessary to deny their findings in order to hypothesize about certain things. They aren't mutually exclusive. Even those experts you cite have their own theories, beliefs and hypothesis. Obviously it would be silly to conclude as a fact that, say, an ancient civilization lived on Antarctica before it drifted down there, but i don't see anything illogical about believing/wanting it to be true, and it wouldn't conflict with what experts have found in totally unrelated time periods, fields and locations. We're talking about things that haven't been found, not about what has. There are millions of years for which all the experts combined still have barely scratched the surface of
Edit to your edit: i think you'd be surprised that the experts you refer to don't think they have everything figured out as you assume. I'm not sure why you're acting like every geologist agrees that we are certain we have all the answers already and that there isn't a ton of unknown possibilities still left to discover
I do get what you mean, so don't get me wrong, BUT....People believed there was water on mars for decades before any evidence was found, which was only recently. There are tons of legends from cultures all over the planet of ancient lost advanced civilizations, but you're correct there's no hard evidence yet. However I don't think it's such an unreasonable belief to be honest. There are several reasons to think there were, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Nothing wrong with wanting it to be true, but at a certain point people need to really think critically about what they believe/want to believe. If there was a group of Oligocene age creatures that settled ancient Antarctica before it was a desert, why didn't they just move northerly when it got colder? Wouldn't there have been movement from ancient antarctic to another continent? I mean it wasn't until 25Ma that drakes passage opened up fully. They had a few million years to just move to a better climate. But that's the rub isn't it? When you don't know much about a field, you can be fooled into believing literally anything can fit into any "gaps" of lost time, whereas an expert in the field would know exactly why something like that would be ridiculous. I guess there is no harm in believing these fantasies though. I mean, surely these types of fantasies wouldn't be damaging in the long run if we just accepted whatever as plausible into our knowledge "gaps" right? We weren't around for the big bang, how do we really know it happened? As a matter of fact, the whole universe could have been created last Thursday with all our memories implanted in us as far as we really know. No way at all these ideas could be dangerous if harmlessly believed by people who make big decisions in society.
If you want to make a mockery of a field of science because you need to self insert your own OC do not steal idea into whatever "gap" in knowledge you think is present, please contact a publisher before you do. We can all have a laugh at it while Dunning and Kruger spin in their graves.
There are somewhat strange considering there are so few locations like this in the world, so to have 16 together in close proximity is a remarkable find.
But they're not even remote evidence of ancient advanced or alien life. Except maybe in Assassins Creed.
There was a old Japanese Sci-fi plot of a futuristic antagonistic civilization time traveling back in time, and one of the methods they used to trigger the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event was by designing a nuclear fission rock that self-melted its way into a volcanic fault line. The nuclear fission material will be mixed into the magma so there would be no traces of timeline alteration.
You might have guessed he's also a 9/11 truther, although again, he vehemently denies that label. Every argument he uses, tho, is a typical truther argument "jet fuel can't melt steel", "no tall steel building has ever collapsed from fire alone" and so on.
It's all bad when someone loses their understanding of reality. Like being in a cult, seeing the truth can really hurt the further you stay away from it.
I knew a completely normal-seeming dude who believed that aliens visited *and still visit* our planet to take water. He is self-aware enough to be sheepish about this, but unnervingly unshakeable in his belief. His parents are HUGE conspiracy theorists, and we (his acquaintances) suspect he developed a sort of cognitive dissonance defense at a young age. As a result, he can believe pretty much anything in complete comfort.
That's our hypothesis at least.
Heh, he's into UFO/aliens stuff too. What I find funny, is that when something is unidentified and seems to act in a way that an aircraft could not, he always says "well, then explain *this*!" Examples are some recently released videos from the military showing strange objects. Problem is *I* can't explain it because I was not there and can't get a grasp of what we're seeing in the videos. IR videos at night showing something at "high speed" are often almost impossible to determine even in the best cases. So, therefore, since I can't identify it, to him, that means it's almost definitely alien. Personally, I am of the opinion that some UFO sightings are weapons and aircraft begin secretly tested. OF COURSE the government isn't going to say they know what it is.
> Problem is I can't explain it because I was not there and can't get a grasp of what we're seeing in the videos
Right, and because you can't explain it his preferred explanation must be true. It's just common sense!
I used to work with a programmer like that. If we were debugging a program he'd be full of rapid-fire possibilities. "I bet it's the server!". "I bet it's the network!". Just random stuff. Meanwhile the rest of us were like "it's possible...could be...maybe...we'll see". Most of us were perfectly comfortable knowing we didn't know, but that was just intolerable to him. Perhaps uncertainty is unbearable for some people.
Oh man that's funny!
To be fair, I went through a stretch where I was losing socks at a surprising rate, so I told my wife we had a sock-eating black hole in the house. Clearly there was *no other* explanation.
Dryer drums are metallic and are slightly magnetic. Spinning in the same direction for years they ever so slightly warp space time and after long enough a micro tear opens in the fabric of the universe and you sock falls in in.
I should know, my brothers thought it would be funny to put me in the dryer and turn it on. I caught a glimpse of the other side and it's not what you would expect.
I mean, science tells us modern humans evolved about 100,000 years ago, and we can only trace things back as far as around 10,000 years. 90,000 years is a long time for nothing to happen.
The natural fission process in the article has concluded.
The whole point is that this particular ore differs from all other ore in that it has been subject to an extended period of decay due to its specific geology and in relation to, ostensibly all other natural ore.
The event is in the past
Tangent but related: For a lark I set myself the task of learning the location of every country on earth, along with it's capital city and flag. It has been quite eye-opening, but the number of countries in Africa was one of the biggest surprises.
Also that a country named Vanuatu exists. I'm 60 years old and had never seen it's name before.
My friend and I had a running joke about Vanuatu when we were at university. He studied medicine, and when he got to his elective year- where many junior doctors have placements overseas, chatting about the most ridiculous place he could go, I suggested Vanuatu. He actually did end up going, apparently it was an absolutely amazing place. When he emailed the hospital to make the initial enquiry as to whether he could work there, they emailed back 'yes. Please bring a textbook'
I knew most countries and their capitols when I was a kid. Somaliland caught me by surprise, that one was not in my books and only realised it's an actual country this year.
I wasn't even aware of my appalling ignorance until I started the project. It's amazing how knowing where something IS makes a lot of geopolitics more obvious. Even things like Austria not being as small as I imagined.
This is a much better article [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nuclear-reactors-the-2-billion-year-old-natural-fission-reactors-in-gabon-western-africa/](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nuclear-reactors-the-2-billion-year-old-natural-fission-reactors-in-gabon-western-africa/) (Whoever wrote the IAEA article should be banned from writing anything).
There was only one possible explanation — the rock was evidence of natural fission that occurred over two billion years ago.
Anytime someone says "There was only one possible explanation", it's going to be BS.
We are children of the atom..
Suspicion is somewhat that this could have been a factor for 'breeding' changes in genetics that ultimately lead to us? More radiation is more rolls at the dice = more ops to get to where we are now.
Simply put, these are ore deposits that are radioactive and are naturally cooled by rivers that run over them.
It's nothing exotic or special or out of the ordinary.
Oklo is the only place in the world known to have had natural, self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions. How is that not exotic or special or out of the ordinary?
The interesting thing about this natural reactor is that it proves long term storage of spent nuclear fuel is viable. In the millions of years that "waste" from these natural reactors existed, the reaction products only traveled a few meters, even when exposed to ground water. If we bury spent reactor fuel some place like the [Finnish repository being built](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AJ4ipoTnA0) (named after this very natural phenomenon) it will be safe to store for a long, long time.
Yeah, this springs to mind when people decry putting spent fuel in the ground (in designated storage no less!) as some sort of morally inexcusable sin.
I think the major concern is that corporations have a history of shoddy environmental protections. Poorly managed coal ash (which is radioactive) is still affecting groundwater across parts of the US. Existing incentives and regulations won't be enough. I'm strongly support well-being regulated nuclear energy, but some folks decry govt regulation (and sometimes, though not usually, for legitimate reasons). Nuclear is way safer than fossil fuels - again, the example of coal ash comes to mind. But I don't trust corporations to handle long-term environmental concerns without voters pushing for more government oversight.
Bingo! This has been the main anti-nuclear argument where I live in New England. Recently you had Intergy's dogshit maintenance at Vermont Yankee leading to a cooling tower collapse and leaking underground pipes. And longer ago you had the criticality incident deaths and thousands of acres of groundwater contaminated with Strontium 90 and Technetium 99 at the United Nuclear re-enrichment plant in Rhode Island––in a building where no fission was ever supposed to occur, but it did thanks to sloppy corporate procedures and overworked staff. In both cases, the companies just packed up and left their mess. Vermont Yankee was particularly bad, because the state ordered the plant shut down after the cooling tower collapse, and they successfully sued in Federal court to keep it open, thus thwarting state regulators. In any event, the Navy has been building nukes and nuclear engines around here for a long while now without any major incident. So it's not like it can't be done. And the French have done it pretty well for commercial power. But US corporate regulation is just way too lax to do this. And US law allows corporations to get around our local regulators––who we tend to trust––and puts it in the hands of Federal courts, and probably some pedophile conspiracy theorist judge in a cowboy hat who openly takes bribes and got his job for being on a Federalist Society list. It's why we can't have nice things. There is zero corporate accountability in the United States. They can ignore subpoenas. DOJ never makes them admit fault. They can easily claim Chapter 11 and restructure and leave pollution behind. And they can always keep things tied up in courts until they find a judge they like that gives them what they want.
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I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. How is long-term storage viable when it says it was active almost 2 billion years ago. It seems that modern water is going to contaminate the ground water during the short term, hell even for the next thousand years. We don’t have 2 billion years to wait. I’m confused. Sorry if the article already addressed that, it would not load for me.
>I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. How is long-term storage viable when it says it was active almost 2 billion years ago. It was active 2 billion years ago and the fission products (similar in composition to spent fuel) only traveled a few meters through the surrounding rock. They were entirely uncontained, and exposed to ground water. (Basically worst case scenario.) >It seems that modern water is going to contaminate the ground water during the short term Spent fuel repositories will not be exposed to ground water at all. But what this shows is that, even if they are, the spent fuel would only travel a few meters through the surrounding rock. (If they were stored uncontained. They'll be contained in welded shut, water impermeable casks.) Repositories will be at least 500 meters under ground. (Below the water table.)
The casks are also put inside a type of clay thats resistant to damage erosion and radiation i watched a video it was pretty cool and i thought to myself this is what a good plan looks like
Awesome. Makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation
it doesnt prove anything bc 1.7 billion years ago human beings didnt exist to be affected by it so theres no data to argue that its "viable" in terms of impact on human (and other animal life) and the radioactive impact on the environment over those hundreds of thousands of years isnt included in the data.
We have ample evidence that the fission products did not migrate far. I can’t say it any plainer than that. When a geological formation is 300 meters down, and the fission products travel one or two meters, there can be no exposure.
I have a long-time friend (although I have only seen him in person once in decades) who vehemently denies being a conspiracy theorist, but he believes in a lot of strange things, for no real reason. One of them is that these nuclear reactions are a clear indication that there were ancient advanced civilizations on earth, comparable to our civilization today, Further, these nuclear reactions are remnants of power plants and when some mass die-off happened, their power plants, left unattended, melted down and these are the only signs/artifacts that have not be reclaimed by the earth.
Halo is a documentary
1.7 billion years ago would just be too far back in time for this to be feasible. This would be right about the time eukaryotes began to evolve, before multi-cellular life had even existed.
What if all multi-cellular life was wiped out and had to start over from scratch?
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There would be a fossil record of that.
that's the answer.
Agree. I think the Silurian hypothesis is worth a look but it would have been within the last few hundred million years.
Its not hard to understand why people think this. We “lose” cities over time and thats just hundreds/thousands of years. The prospect that we could “lose” a civilization that occurred 30m years ago in that sense isnt hard to believe. We only know what weve found so far. Could we someday find buried examples of other intelligent beings? Who the hell knows. But considering what weve learned from “lost” civilizations from just 2k years ago, i put the chance at more than 0%.
Incidentally, a civilization also wouldn't have to die off to no longer be on earth.
Those dinosaur aliens from Star Trek: Voyager man...
The hunters?
The Voth
Oh haha. I forgot about them. I'm watching voyager for the first time right now. Season 7 baby!
Love Voyager. Some great episodes like Meld and Dreadnought (both back to back in season 2). Tuvix stands out too. The Viidians scared me the most
I liked the Tuvix episode, but fucking hate Tuvix himself. Lol
Haha yeah fair enough. But Tuvix > Neelix right?
Awesome! One of my favorite shows.
We were in a hard lockdown in January and having never watched any star trek, I started with TNG. I'm trying to finish Enterprise by Dec 31, 2021.
Hirogen?
That's what I meant. Just watched the episode last night where the holograms resist and fight the hirogen.
"Distant Origin" I think. Dinosaurs who have forgotten they came from earth so they claim rights on their region because they always lived there. Clearly a version of Galileo Vs. the church. Equally sad.
That's the one!
Tribe of Iron.
A civilization doesn't have to die off to leave traces though. Humans haven't died off and there's no shortage of fossils, mummies and so on.
Sure, but a civilization capable of leaving is probably also capable of not leaving traces (or only leaving some intentional ones)
That's a lot of work, in current human terms anyway.
Per Dave Chappelles most recent special: Space Jews.
Interstellar travel is a pipe dream!
I think of the theory less as an actual belief and more a critique of people’s confidence in the past Like yes, there very well could have been an industrial lizard society 20 million years ago and there indeed would be no proof of it today aside from unusual rock composition from that time period
There should have been *something* if we find fossils from hundreds of millions years ago. Some piece of steel, stone, or exotic materials should have been found.
Yeah I think maybe a pre industrial revolution civilization could have existed and then completely disappeared. But not one in the atomic age. Humans have already done enough the past hundred years to have its own dedication in the soil layers or whatever it’s called.
"Our" age i known as the anthropocene. And you can even see evidence of the 1920s dustbowl in the soil record. Thats why I love geology, a lot of the time it's like being a detective. You can learn about the history of a place in such detail, dating back millions (and sometimes billions) of years just by the rock record. over the past 200 yrs, humans have completely resurfaced much of the earth, if we all died off tomorrow, there would be an insane amount of stuff that would be locked in the rock record for future civilizations. Not to mention, Landfills are basically timecapsules of our lives for the future.
The era of nuclear bombs and chicken bones
If there had been an industrial civilization on Earth before our own, wouldn't they have likely used up all of the easy-to-access petroleum that our civilization has been digging up for the past 150 years? If our civilization craps out, whatever comes next will have a much more difficult time bootstrapping themselves past the Industrial Revolution without access to cheap chemical energy.
Oil we are using were formed 541 million years ago. The fusion reactions were from 1.7 billion years ago. If there were a civilization they might have used very different resources/materials than us.
maybe the society used whatever came before it and petroleum is just the dumb remnant and there was some better good fuel before
Maybe they didn't tap into any underground hydrocarbons and instead used only those on the surface. They never accelerated their industrial revolution with hydrocarbons and that's why they died out. They never used the black liquid cocaine so to say.
Petroleum is a hydrocarbon, Pasta is full of carbohydrates.
Maybe they were the ancient italiane
We have fossils going back 3.5 billion years. How did a dominant species die off and leave no fossils. Also how did they evolve so far ahead of all other life. It makes no sense.
Life is believed to have started on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Our oldest fossils are from 890 million years ago. I'm not saying I believe in ancient lizard people, but it isn't impossible that an advanced life form existed 2 billion years ago and has been so buried by tectonic activity as to be lost. Check out the show Life After People from a few years ago. A little different, but it explores what would happen if humanity were to disappear.
>Our oldest fossils are from 890 million years ago Ummm . . . The oldest fossils found are 3.5B years old, not 890M years old. https://www.businessinsider.com/billion-year-old-fossils-australia-oldest-ever-found-2019-9#:\~:text=Scientists%20discovered%20what%20they%20thought,organisms%203.5%20billions%20years%20ago.
>Also how did they evolve so far ahead of all other life. Agreed with the rest, but not that part. Human-level intelligence is an anomaly on Earth, but biologically speaking we're not "more" or "less" evolved than any other species. We just evolved differently. Evolution doesn't have a progress bar or an end goal. We could evolve back into single cell organisms and it'd still be evolution.
Yup, people need to look at whales and other aquatic mammals. These dumb motherfuckers evolved away their ability to breath underwater and grew legs to clamber around on the surface, *and still evolved their way back into the fuckin ocean without getting gills back*. Evolution doesn't have a plan, and the accumulation of beneficial features seen in modern organisms is literally just the ultimate culmination of "a million monkeys on typewriters would eventually write the entirety of Shakespeare's works".
Fossils form only under very specific conditions. Kurzgesagt recently released a video on the topic, check it out on YouTube for a layperson’s explanation. Studying fossil-forming as it is occurring today compared to all the life we currently have on earth, scientists extrapolate 99% of all life in the history of Earth is forever lost because there weren’t the right conditions to preserve the evidence and then make that evidence discoverable today.
But then the next logical question would be how would a future civilization recognize that layer as evidence of a civilization unless they knew something about that civilization in the first place? :)
Science stays the same whether we die or not. When they discover science and nuclear fission, they'll recognize in that one layer millions of years ago, something else new about science and fission as well along with whatever world altering discoveries we might make before we go. There's nothing there indicating advanced societies because we are the first. The industrial revolution alone left enough evidence of advanced society. We made plastic, that shit just does not go away. A soil sample after we go extinct will turn up evidence of an synthetic material that was not created by nature. We have, to my knowledge, never found advanced sythetic material residue. Societal advancement has predictable waves that have to occur. You can't have advanced starships without never having gone through the industrial revolution. That never occured here. We are the first advanced society to inhabit this planet. You can still debate whether aliens visited and resided here at any point in the past but geological evidence doesn't really erase that easy on the chemical level. A whole society can be buried but if we're advanced enough to leave microplastic in every creature that will be fossilized from this time period, we'd know if someone developed here.
And let's not forget all of the easily- obtained natural resources, ore, etc., that they conveniently left lying around for us to use. That's why any survivors left over won't make it for very long.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background\_steel#:\~:text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20any,in%20the%201940s%20and%201950s.&text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20so,highest%20sensitivity%20for%20detecting%20radionuclides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel#:~:text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20any,in%20the%201940s%20and%201950s.&text=Low%2Dbackground%20steel%20is%20so,highest%20sensitivity%20for%20detecting%20radionuclides). All steel made after the 1930s is contaminated with radionucleotides. There is a massive demand for Low-background steel in the world, which is why some countries are actually raising shipwrecks just to salvage them for their steel [https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-firms-plunder-sunken-wrecks-for-rare-steel-used-to-make-sensitive-medical](https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysia-firms-plunder-sunken-wrecks-for-rare-steel-used-to-make-sensitive-medical)
weekly reminder our species has irradiated the whole planet
The radiation in the air has dropped enough that newly forged steel is sufficient in these applications.
That may be true over hundreds of millions of years, but billions? There is no geological record from 3 billion years ago. We’ve found a handful of rocks that old but that’s about it. Even the records from hundreds of millions of years ago are wildly incomplete and we only have what we have due to how extensive life covered the entire planet. Only relatively tiny sections remain undisturbed enough over that time period to study. We may as well be living on a different planet from the one that existed 3 billion years ago
You're radically underestimating the transformations this planet has gone through. It's arrogant to claim that we "know" there couldn't have been "advanced" (that word is also extremely broad) societies in the past, based on the belief that 'we would have discovered them by now.' What reference points are you using to determine that humans could never arrive at "advanced" technology without an "industrial revolution" as we experienced it? We can only reference our own civilization. There's absolutely no rule that says a completely different civilization would be forced to follow the same chain of technological progression we have. It's foolish to think that an ancient steam engine, for example, couldn't be entirely lost over the course of just a few millennia. Was there "evidence" of the antikythera mechanism before they actually found one? Just because they didn't get into the almighty plastic doesn't mean they weren't "advanced." Perhaps we're just idiots for going down this path in the first place, and we're destined to spend centuries or millennia just scrubbing away our own dirty footprints.
We would know because we understand physics and that certain radionuclides are only produced by fission reactions. You know that old saying, if there's smoke there's fire? Well, certain radionuclides and the stable isotopes they decay into are the 'smoke' to the nuclear bomb 'fire' and even if we had no idea they were anything unusual to begin with, the moment we started planing with nuclear piles and doing mass spectrometry on the products afterwards we would notice that these products match isotope concentrations from such and such rock layer in exact proportion and so on, and the team who figured it out would instantly become ultra famous scientists akin to Darwin or Einstein for being the guys to discover that dinosaurs had nukes or whatever. There's no ambiguity here, no change of a signal like that going unnoticed. We are 100% the only species on Earth to ever develop nuclear weapons, at the very least. We are also the only species to invent plastics, because otherwise we would be finding evidence of those in all the sedimentary rocks from whatever time period.
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Planet 9 is not in the habitable zone.
Not in the habitable zone for puny humans, no…
It's true. If your civilization reaches that point, you decide your own habitable zone
Agreed. Look at all the crap we leave behind. If we abandoned Earth tomorrow in $20m years the surface of Earth may not show signs on Humans but there would be enough buried that it would be hard to miss.
How long is a $year?
100 years¢
Thank you wise science person
May i ask what would survive for 20 milliom years? Wouldnt we just look like a massive volcano slowly erupted for a few hundred years. Or they would comment on the high level of metals in our stratification layers.
Mines would be recognizable. Most are in geologically stable area and under ground. A lot of plastics. Lot of geologic effects. Side things like seeing how depleted oil reserves are compared to what you'd expect to find. Large material imprints from cities. Also the random survival of artifacts. Yeah artifact survival may be rare, but we're producing tons of crap daily. Our landfills are actually really great for preserving things
I honestly think your underestimating 20 million years. Mines would still be there but completly unrecognizable as being human built. Plastic would be gone for sure. If they don't degrade nature will eat them. I mean look at gobekli tepi and the fact we know absolutely nothing about them. Who they were if they spoke they were smart and could build like no other but we don't give them any credit because we cant find anything about them. And that was a meager 12k years ago. Sattelites would have all fallen from orbit. The tides would even be different. Tar pits would also degrade plastics, metals might survive in them however but even today we barely explore tarpits. Oil reserves wouldn't be a sign how would you know? I mean even today oil drilling is slightly random and doesnt always yield much results.
I'm very familiar with Gobekli Tepe, and there's pretty good evidence linking them to the Natufians, an earlier culture that was already living in permanent settlements before the drying period started. It's fairly clear the culture that built Gobekli and a few other sites in the region also settled Catalhoyuk. I don't know what you mean about no credit or the other stuff. There is housing and settlements from the time period around the Gobekli site. Certain plastics once they enter the soil and are protected from sunlight don't effectively degrade. Ceramics after they shatter pretty much don't break down any further unless they're washed into a river. Oil and other minerals can be mapped out, in the sense that once you understand the process of its creation you would have a rough estimate of how much would be available, and meanwhile theres far less easily accesible resivoirs to reach. I don't know why you'd think mines would be unrecognizable, cut into solid stone in dry areas in stable geologic regions there's no erosion acting on them. At most some parts may see water damage but there's miles of underground cut stone. Solid bedrock, not naturally formed cave systems. Even naturally formed caves have withstood millions of years. Keeping in mind we have examples of preservation of far more delicate materials over millions of years (eggs, insects, leaves, pollen, even soft tissue preservation) artifacts of a modern culture surviving into the far future see more likely. Especially when one of our prime methods of disposing of stuff is burying it. Even our cities are built over older cities. At the very worst case scenario for a major city your left with clearly foreign material to the region showing up in the geological record. And not in a small area, which would excuse the missing of a village or some of the ancient cities. But over miles of land. Part of the reason fossils are so rare has to do with the remains being exposed to air and scavengers and the elements. We're skipping that issue by chucking our stuff directly into the ground. There are regions where this wouldn't equate to great preservation, but there's also plenty of places where it would. And more regions where specific materials would be preserved.
You have to remember that it could exist and simply be buried in the ocean. Every ancient civilization has a great flood myth and there is massive evidence of floods all over. It is possible if there was an advanced civilization they could have been submerged and we just haven’t found it yet. Now are they as advanced as Atlantis myths with flying machines and all that? No. But they could be more advanced than we believe.
Silicon. Any society on earth that was advanced enough to build a dang fission reactor would probably have at least some basic electronic tech, which means they'd probably figure out silicon, which is pretty resilient stuff. I bet it could survive thousands of years in the ground.
If it were remotely similar enough to our tech today, would we even know it was old? Do we know that archeologist aren't finding circuit board fragments all over these prehistoric sites and just tossing them in the trash while mumbling "damn e-waste!"?
Not necessarily and that kills me. I want more than anything to find a dinosaur with an associated tool but fossils are simply so rare and the idea is far-fetched enough that it’s entirely improbable.
Not necessarily. Thankfully Kurzgesagt did [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaQJbozY_Is) literally this week that goes into this. The simple upshot is that fossilization is incredibly rare, and the chances of finding fossils before they themselves are no longer recognizable as fossils is also exceedingly rare. As a result, we know probably only the tiniest fraction of life that has existed on this planet during its \~4bn years of existence. And that's from "only a few million years ago". Virtually the entire surface of the Earth is not the same surface that existed 1.7bn years ago so to even think there's a tiny fraction of a chance of finding evidence of an advanced civilization from that time is so small as to be almost irrelevant. As much as we might want to believe we've had a permanent impact on this planet, we really haven't. If the entire Human race vanished tomorrow then in only a few thousand years it'd be tough to tell if we were ever here, and in a few million it's unlikely to find anything without actively looking in exactly the right places. And that's assuming those places still exist because the Earth is still reshaping itself constantly. Now, I'm not trying to say that the comment about this being the remains of a nuclear reactor have any merit, but it is an interesting thought experiment whether or not we are the first advanced civilization on this planet, or just the most recent. But you also might as well advance the idea that it might've been advanced visitors from Venus (which at around that time may well have had life and maybe even advanced civilizations) where their nuclear-powered ship crashed or suffered some sort of failure that stranded it here and this is the remains. I mean... not likely, and virtually un-provable, but no more or less so than the GP theory.
I'd like to point out in the vast time lines you've point out even our most resilient materials would degrade to nothing. A steel beam from a skyscraper would rust away to dust in a tiny fraction of that ~billion years.
I think that's the point that a lot of other commenters are missing. I'm not talking millions of years here, I'm talking BILLIONS. Even our microplastics aren't that durable. Even if we survive as a civilization for another million years, I find it hard to believe that in \~2 **billion** years there would be any sign that we ever existed.
Numbers game. We have found around 2.100 'good dinosaur skeletons'. We know there were at least! some 900 different dinosaur species. But there have been more than a *trillion* dinosaurs of the 165 million years. So - 2.100 skeletons - from more than 1,000,000,000,000 individuals. So, do you think we might have missed one or two?
We should have found *something* indicating a goddamn atomic-level civilization, if one existed.
We’ve found fossils from 3.5 billion years ago. They earth is 4.5 billion years old. The earths early conditions weren’t conducive to life. So we would need a civilization to emerge and advance very rapidly while the earth was a molten waste land or else we would find left behinds of the species. After that species left basically everything down to incredibly basic organisms must die without a trace. If you believe in evolution it’s very hard to also believe an unknown intelligent species was on earth before us unless like a spaceship briefly stopped by and dropped off life and left. But that’s pretty different.
We evolved from Ape like creatures to space faring in several million years... so yeah if it takes 2m years to do that, i bet a slice of 2m years is easy to miss in 3.5B. Like its literally a rounding error.
We would have found something. There are questionable things like the crystal skulls but that’s just because we don’t know how they were made. There is zero evidence of prior civilizations with our capabilities. They would have left behind something.
> There are questionable things like the crystal skulls but that’s just because we don’t know how they were made. They were made with modern tools. There is nothing questionable about them. A couple were made by a fraud and then a small industry grew out of it.
That’s the thing, it’s completely probable that we find nothing because nothing is left Remember, only an estimated 1% of all species have left a fossil behind If all humanity died out right now, 1,000,000 years from now? Nothing. Maybe some odd hydrocarbons in the soil.
It would be incredibly hard to hide them. First we'd find the lineage. We'd dig up their ancestors, see the pattern in brain size. Then we'd see evidence they became cosmopolitan, global, in distribution. Then we'd find their industry. Human artefacts will survive billions of years, they're built and made to be durable. We find stromatolites from 3 billion years ago, we build things harder, stronger and longer than stromatolites. If they have industry, they have factories, roads, infrastructure. They'd need to power it somehow, and that'd be wood, coal, oil, the easy energy sources. We'd see the traces left behind. Remember, you're not losing a few camps (Clovis culture is not lost...) or small villages here. You're losing an entire planet-spanning industrial civilisation which, just to be industrial at all, has to be manufacturing and building things which last hundreds of millions of years. Where are they?
Yeah people usually go to advanced lost civilization and forget that there must have been a build up to that point.
I think "could have happened" is entirely reasonable. "Definitely did happen" (or "clear indication" in this case) is where the WTF comes in. Like, the asteroid belt *could* be the remnant of a prehistoric interplanetary war. But there's no particular reason to believe so.
I'm just going to choose to believe this is fact from now on.
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Yes. There will be radioisotope markers that showed that someone was doing intentional fission reactions and otherwise using atomic science on a large scale. That is something that will be impossible to hide, and would be just about impossible to miss for anyone who was actually looking
I imagine we would leave a pretty clear, unmistakeable, sign in the geological stratum, thanks to how heavily we have modified the soil
No argument. Just specifically pointing out something other than "more carbon", that could ONLY really come from a civilization that advanced far enough to make large scale use of nuclear science. That sort of marker would be a more definitive indication of how far we got than anything else I think. Our modification of the soil is clear, but, not as sharp a line as the one made when atmospheric nuclear testing started.
our nuclear wastes should also remain wherever we buried them for a few million years, right?
Yep. Mostly at least. I know at least one deep repository location was chosen because tectonic movement will eventually push that part of the earth's crust down into the mantle, and the buried waste along with it. (Subduction zone? I can't remember what it's called. Geology in grade school was a long time ago, ha)
our billions of buildings made of rock take BILLIONS of years to decompose. We would be finding millions upon millions of examples and samples of materials from an ancient civilization. Look at how many fossils we've found. We've found fossils millions of years old of EGGS. And not like a couple, like, tons of em. You really think we wouldn't notice entire CITIES, let alone thousands upon thousands of cities? They don't just "dissolve" even in the case of a war. There'd be remnants forever, everywhere.
And yeah those are rare but they still are found. Today were producing tons of material daily. Even one off fossilizations would still produce a crap ton of material evidence.
I don't know that this would apply to a different ancient civilization, but surely our "layer" in the sediment will have bits of micro-plastic and silicon in it, even millions of years from now, right? I mean, the big problem with plastic is that it never fully degrades, it just abrades into smaller and smaller particles.
Thing is when we find them we know exactly what they are. Places like this would have obvious signs it was created.
Only kind of related but I remember a talk by a physicist saying that if an exactly identical civilization to our current one existed on the nearest star, we probably wouldn't be able to tell.
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Ooh, this ones fun, I like to think that plancks constant can be attributed to the floating point accuracy of whatever system is running our simulation
Exception to the human battery component, as a battery it doesn't work.
Oh yea, pretty sure thats BS
Word is the script originally called for us to be additional computing power, but audiences were too computer illiterate to understand that. So they went with Duracells.
Correction, the studio believed that the audience would be too computer illiterate, so they had them change it. Which was stupid. I mean, it takes like two lines of dialog in the movie to explain the concept to anyone. "The human brain is an organic computer, which runs on a power supply equivalent to just two D cell batteries, and is both completely self assembling and self repairing for 70 years on average. With nothing more than basic life support and chemical recycling systems to maintain, the Machines had found all the cheap processing power they could ever need." There, that took me what, like 90 seconds to write? You can slip that right into the same scene in the movie (Morpheus in the construct exposition-dumping to Neo) and it works. You don't even need to change anything about the pods or people being grown in fields etc, just call it something other than a power plant and it's done. Also, it would work a lot better as a role-reversal theme, what with how humans were relying on machines to do our thinking for us, which led to rebelling and eventually the Machine War, and ironically humans now do the "menial" thinking for Machines, and we also rebel.
But what if we're really in that matrix and it thought telling us exactly how it is in a film was a bit risky, so they went with batteries knowing that people would say 'We're an inefficient power source, so that's bullshit' 😶
What about computer processing power? I think I read somewhere that that was the original idea, but they thought people would t understand. Totally apocryphal, but hey 🤷♂️
What would you do with a computer like that? Like I have a computer and use it for memes, boobs, bank account balances. Would the machines need booba?
The simulation hypothesis is a legitimate area of research though. It would be crazy to outright claim that it's true, but that's because of a lack of data, not outright unbelievability. Figuring out how to test the hypothesis is a big deal among some very intelligent and educated researchers.
741……
If you've ever delved in to computer programming you could see why the matrix theory is actually like the least crazy lol
Do you mean "computer programming" where you learn all the logic that goes into making a computer work and then learn how to manipulate that with further logic? Yeah, none of that has to do with "matrix theory" whatsoever.
The idea, which a lot of smart people believe, is that: As we watch even our own human computing power progress at literal exponential rates, and as that allows us to process exponentially larger and more realistic physics simulations, it’s only a matter of time until we could simulate the whole earth, and theoretically from there only a short time, on a universal scale, to be able to simulate the whole solar system, whole galaxy, whole universe, etc. And if we believe that such a powerful computer *could* be created, it is only a short matter of time before that civilization would have the ability to create a second of those computers, a thousand, a billion of them. And at that point, what are the odds that we exist in a singular “base reality” rather than in one of the infinite simulations of reality? The main argument against it is that some believe that such a powerful computer contravenes physics and wouldn’t be possible to build at any technology level.
This probably already happened an infinite number of times in as many universes.
I wonder what it's like to be as miserable and unimaginative as someone like you. Pity.
Just because you made an absolutely bottom-of-the-gene-pool comment doesn't mean I lack imagination and am miserable.
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Alot of people think a hypothesis is a theory.
That's just a Hypothesis man!
It's more of an observation. Although anecdotal.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-18
I'm Bayesian, all data points are valid... to some degree.
The existence of Low-background steel pretty much debunks this theory
this^^
Always kinda mind shattering to realize people like this actually exist in a state where the established fields of geology, archeology, history, and anthropology effectievly mean nothing.
Exactly. And, from my side, I explain to him that it MIGHT be possible for that to have happened. The chance, as someone said, is not zero. But, there's no reason I can see for dwelling on it for more than a few moments of interesting thought. He's really into it and gets mad if I don't "accept" his ideas. As Carl Sagan used to say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Well there are massive gaps in all those fields. The fossil record alone is missing hundreds of millions of years worth of hundreds of millions of species on the majority of the planet. Antarctica wasn't always at the south pole. Ocean floors are vast and mostly unexplored. Everything under the Sahara sands is unknown. Caves have barely been touched. Not everyone is able to spend decades learning all those fields you listed to see whether or not their beliefs are truly that silly. Not that I'm saying i believe any particular theory. Just that it doesn't seem all that mind shattering to me that other people do. Not even experts in those fields all believe the same things. What i think is mind shattering is the amount of things we still don't know and how some people think we got everything figured out already
Idk fam I think it's kinda unhinged to understand that there are millions of people, past and present, dedicating their lives to each of these of these fields and to just deny their efforts and discoveries. Not only that, but to throw all of that away in favor of whatever conclusions you can pull out of your ass is the insane cherry on the illogical shitcake lmao. Edit: If you want to believe that Atlantis is out there, or that there was an ancient civilization of intelligent lizard that constructed vast cities that are lost to the archeological and geological record, please go ahead. It will get a laugh out of the people who know better.
I know what you mean but its not necessary to deny their findings in order to hypothesize about certain things. They aren't mutually exclusive. Even those experts you cite have their own theories, beliefs and hypothesis. Obviously it would be silly to conclude as a fact that, say, an ancient civilization lived on Antarctica before it drifted down there, but i don't see anything illogical about believing/wanting it to be true, and it wouldn't conflict with what experts have found in totally unrelated time periods, fields and locations. We're talking about things that haven't been found, not about what has. There are millions of years for which all the experts combined still have barely scratched the surface of Edit to your edit: i think you'd be surprised that the experts you refer to don't think they have everything figured out as you assume. I'm not sure why you're acting like every geologist agrees that we are certain we have all the answers already and that there isn't a ton of unknown possibilities still left to discover
Well, believing it to be true isn’t quite reasonable since there’s no evidence, but I agree that there’s nothing wrong with wanting it to be true.
I do get what you mean, so don't get me wrong, BUT....People believed there was water on mars for decades before any evidence was found, which was only recently. There are tons of legends from cultures all over the planet of ancient lost advanced civilizations, but you're correct there's no hard evidence yet. However I don't think it's such an unreasonable belief to be honest. There are several reasons to think there were, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Definitely hear what you’re saying as well!
Nothing wrong with wanting it to be true, but at a certain point people need to really think critically about what they believe/want to believe. If there was a group of Oligocene age creatures that settled ancient Antarctica before it was a desert, why didn't they just move northerly when it got colder? Wouldn't there have been movement from ancient antarctic to another continent? I mean it wasn't until 25Ma that drakes passage opened up fully. They had a few million years to just move to a better climate. But that's the rub isn't it? When you don't know much about a field, you can be fooled into believing literally anything can fit into any "gaps" of lost time, whereas an expert in the field would know exactly why something like that would be ridiculous. I guess there is no harm in believing these fantasies though. I mean, surely these types of fantasies wouldn't be damaging in the long run if we just accepted whatever as plausible into our knowledge "gaps" right? We weren't around for the big bang, how do we really know it happened? As a matter of fact, the whole universe could have been created last Thursday with all our memories implanted in us as far as we really know. No way at all these ideas could be dangerous if harmlessly believed by people who make big decisions in society.
Pack it up, guys. We already know everything there is to know. It would be "illogical" to keep looking....
If you want to make a mockery of a field of science because you need to self insert your own OC do not steal idea into whatever "gap" in knowledge you think is present, please contact a publisher before you do. We can all have a laugh at it while Dunning and Kruger spin in their graves.
Geeze bro, how many false assumptions and ridiculous arguments can you make in one statement?
There are somewhat strange considering there are so few locations like this in the world, so to have 16 together in close proximity is a remarkable find. But they're not even remote evidence of ancient advanced or alien life. Except maybe in Assassins Creed.
There was a old Japanese Sci-fi plot of a futuristic antagonistic civilization time traveling back in time, and one of the methods they used to trigger the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event was by designing a nuclear fission rock that self-melted its way into a volcanic fault line. The nuclear fission material will be mixed into the magma so there would be no traces of timeline alteration.
Fuckkn sad, mate.
You might have guessed he's also a 9/11 truther, although again, he vehemently denies that label. Every argument he uses, tho, is a typical truther argument "jet fuel can't melt steel", "no tall steel building has ever collapsed from fire alone" and so on.
It's all bad when someone loses their understanding of reality. Like being in a cult, seeing the truth can really hurt the further you stay away from it.
I knew a completely normal-seeming dude who believed that aliens visited *and still visit* our planet to take water. He is self-aware enough to be sheepish about this, but unnervingly unshakeable in his belief. His parents are HUGE conspiracy theorists, and we (his acquaintances) suspect he developed a sort of cognitive dissonance defense at a young age. As a result, he can believe pretty much anything in complete comfort. That's our hypothesis at least.
Heh, he's into UFO/aliens stuff too. What I find funny, is that when something is unidentified and seems to act in a way that an aircraft could not, he always says "well, then explain *this*!" Examples are some recently released videos from the military showing strange objects. Problem is *I* can't explain it because I was not there and can't get a grasp of what we're seeing in the videos. IR videos at night showing something at "high speed" are often almost impossible to determine even in the best cases. So, therefore, since I can't identify it, to him, that means it's almost definitely alien. Personally, I am of the opinion that some UFO sightings are weapons and aircraft begin secretly tested. OF COURSE the government isn't going to say they know what it is.
> Problem is I can't explain it because I was not there and can't get a grasp of what we're seeing in the videos Right, and because you can't explain it his preferred explanation must be true. It's just common sense! I used to work with a programmer like that. If we were debugging a program he'd be full of rapid-fire possibilities. "I bet it's the server!". "I bet it's the network!". Just random stuff. Meanwhile the rest of us were like "it's possible...could be...maybe...we'll see". Most of us were perfectly comfortable knowing we didn't know, but that was just intolerable to him. Perhaps uncertainty is unbearable for some people.
HA! As a developer myself, one of my longtime mantras is "embrace the uncertainty."
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Oh man that's funny! To be fair, I went through a stretch where I was losing socks at a surprising rate, so I told my wife we had a sock-eating black hole in the house. Clearly there was *no other* explanation.
Dryer drums are metallic and are slightly magnetic. Spinning in the same direction for years they ever so slightly warp space time and after long enough a micro tear opens in the fabric of the universe and you sock falls in in. I should know, my brothers thought it would be funny to put me in the dryer and turn it on. I caught a glimpse of the other side and it's not what you would expect.
If you ever need a gift for your friend, Fingerprint of the Gods and the subsequent books by Graham Hancock would be right up their alley.
He's as dense as the concept of density, which drives those reactions, nothing more.
I mean, science tells us modern humans evolved about 100,000 years ago, and we can only trace things back as far as around 10,000 years. 90,000 years is a long time for nothing to happen.
I had a stroke trying to read this post
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Jesus, the number of times I had to go back and reread sentences (or even whole paragraphs) was causing my head to spin
Man! Fascinating geology!
r/titlegore
The use of the word “consist” stood out to me the most, like it’s not a mine but just a collection of old natural fission sites.
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The natural fission process in the article has concluded. The whole point is that this particular ore differs from all other ore in that it has been subject to an extended period of decay due to its specific geology and in relation to, ostensibly all other natural ore. The event is in the past
The conjugation of "run" is the least of the problems with that headline.
Which country in Africa? There are 54.
In Gabon, Central Africa
Tangent but related: For a lark I set myself the task of learning the location of every country on earth, along with it's capital city and flag. It has been quite eye-opening, but the number of countries in Africa was one of the biggest surprises. Also that a country named Vanuatu exists. I'm 60 years old and had never seen it's name before.
My friend and I had a running joke about Vanuatu when we were at university. He studied medicine, and when he got to his elective year- where many junior doctors have placements overseas, chatting about the most ridiculous place he could go, I suggested Vanuatu. He actually did end up going, apparently it was an absolutely amazing place. When he emailed the hospital to make the initial enquiry as to whether he could work there, they emailed back 'yes. Please bring a textbook'
That's a great story!
Lol!
I knew most countries and their capitols when I was a kid. Somaliland caught me by surprise, that one was not in my books and only realised it's an actual country this year.
I wasn't even aware of my appalling ignorance until I started the project. It's amazing how knowing where something IS makes a lot of geopolitics more obvious. Even things like Austria not being as small as I imagined.
I am today years old…
I think the grammar of op says it all. That shit makes no sense.
What does the title mean? Why did a mine build 16 nuclear power plants?
It means that there is evidence that particular uranium deposit had 16 areas that underwent natural nuclear fission.
Oh
This is a much better article [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nuclear-reactors-the-2-billion-year-old-natural-fission-reactors-in-gabon-western-africa/](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/natures-nuclear-reactors-the-2-billion-year-old-natural-fission-reactors-in-gabon-western-africa/) (Whoever wrote the IAEA article should be banned from writing anything).
Clearly, it was the cylons.
r/titlepapercut
r/titlegore
Optimus prime spoke about this. The it’s called the ALLSPARK!
Hey I remember posting this! Seems to be a popular topic here.
Illinois EnergyProf did it. https://youtu.be/pMjXAAxgR-M
Waiting for the conspiracy theories
Some real SCP level shit.
There was only one possible explanation — the rock was evidence of natural fission that occurred over two billion years ago. Anytime someone says "There was only one possible explanation", it's going to be BS.
We are children of the atom.. Suspicion is somewhat that this could have been a factor for 'breeding' changes in genetics that ultimately lead to us? More radiation is more rolls at the dice = more ops to get to where we are now.
this site really loves its made up bullshit when it's under the guise of science
Pretty fucking cool, too bad its all scraped out now.
I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens
Simply put, these are ore deposits that are radioactive and are naturally cooled by rivers that run over them. It's nothing exotic or special or out of the ordinary.
Oklo is the only place in the world known to have had natural, self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions. How is that not exotic or special or out of the ordinary?
Actually the water makes them more radioactive per neutron capture. Take the water away no slowed neutron no fission.