Reminds me of the Silurian Hypothesis that raises the question if we would ever find evidence if there was an industrial civilization millions of years before us.
I imagine it would be extremely difficult to know or even detect any non industrial civilization with much confidence that long ago.
Glass and pottery fragments both last "forever" if they're left someplace relatively dry, or get buried, or otherwise protected from physical and chemical weathering. A glass bottle thrown away on the beach will be eroded to nothing in mere years to decades, but a glass bottle thrown aside and buried by some soil can stay there for millions of years easily. Stone artifacts are similarly robust. These relatively permanent traces get left behind long before a civilization gets "industrial". Pottery and glass predate our own industrial revolution by thousands of years.
For such a civilization to develop and go unnoticed to historians, their influence must have been very small, they must have been geographically limited. For instance maybe they lived in low-lands and rising sea levels erased all trace, but this would still require that their artifacts rarely if ever got carried up hills where they might have been untouched by the rising oceans. It seems deeply implausible.
Certainly there was nothing even remotely like our civilization in the past. There are glass beer bottles laying around on virtually every corner of the planet, on mountain tops, in caves, in landfills. Just everywhere really. It will take longer than a mere few million years to erase all these.
It sort of makes me happy to think that millions of years after civilization is consumed by fire and humanity goes extinct, all that will be left is the beer bottles.
Geological processes, given enough time, will probably destroy your glass bottle. And everything else. Assuming the Earth doesn't stop being geologically active, I would suspect that eventually, everything will get churned through magma.
Wouldn’t they have used up most of the energy dense liquid that we currently pump out of the ground? At least in some part of their civilization’s lifespan? That we still had superficial oil fields suggests to me no one extracted oil because no industrial civilization existed before us on this planet.
Or that society formed long enough ago that oil has had a chance to form. The OP did say millions of years ago, which would be needed for this.
We could put a bound on this. ~90% of oil deposits come from the Mesozoic or later. So the latest we could see a society show up, use up the easily accessible oil/other fossil fuels, collapse (presumably from energy crisis), and still have the fossil fuels we see today would be the late Paleozoic or possibly the early Mesozoic before it's fossil fuels have formed (~250 million years ago).
I used to invest pretty heavily in the energy sector in general and I learned a lot of the science along the way and I really have no idea what fraction of the earth's surface has been geologically surveyed.
I would imagine if someone wanted to seriously pursue the theory (if they'd be permitted to do so, probably not) the way I'd do it is find "disappointing fields" and look for peculiar correlations between them WRT odd permeability test results. So is that field disappointing because its permeability is really low (frac it!) or is it disappointing because all the geology points to a good salt dome and the permeability is great but there's nothing there? The old fashioned way to explain fields that look good but don't produce is the permeability is so high it all leaked out millennia ago (among other explanations boiling down to "we don't know").
I would think you'd find weirder evidence of tailings piles around solid mines and a lack of open pit mines. That would be easier to find than an oil well. Also I expect there would be really weird patterns in sediment related to mercury and similar waste products. "They" never did leaded gas if there's no lead layer in the sediment, etc.
Some of it is sophistry. No civilization beyond monkey tribes could possibly exist 3M years ago because there would be nuclear reactors and space ships laying around everywhere, as though there's no intermediate step between monkey tribes and nuclear reactors. Well, what if they never advanced beyond (fill in the blank with some group that's not very advanced in 2023)? Still centuries beyond a tribe of monkeys, yet culturally interesting none the less. We could detect the industrial revolution from England if it happened in Italy 2000 years previous. But... could we detect the Roman Empire if it happened before in Australia in 4000 BC? or 3M BC? I don't know about that, kind of an open question. If the Roman Empire or similar happened in the USA upper midwest before the mile tall ice sheets scrubbed everything, could we tell today? My educated guess is "no" we could not. It would still be culturally interesting even if no nuclear reactors and space ships were built here 50K years ago. I think it quite likely that bioidentical humans were up to all kinds of nonsense in prehistory that we've never discovered or never could discover. They were as smart as us, and healthier than us, until agriculture was invented.
> They argue as early as the Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago) "there has been sufficient fossil carbon to fuel an industrial civilization comparable with our own".
I think the experience of "invasive species" from the last few centuries prove that there were no civilization that made regular trips between the continents for a few dozen million years.
During my time in college I managed to sit in on a group of archaeology students making Oldowan stone tools in the university quadrangle. I had no idea how much knowledge and skill it takes to make these seemingly simple tools. It is not just banging rocks together, it requires finesse.
I felt a sense of awe when I realized just how much trial and error must have went into learning how to make such tools. With how many cuts and bruises we inflicted on ourselves, I came to view the technology as something invaluable and precious. We had the benefit of washing our hands, who knows just how many of our pioneering ancestors had gotten an infection and died while trying to make a better cutting tool - or lost an eye from a rock chip? And these folks may well have been “the crazy ones” or the more intelligent members of the tribe.
I could easily see how countless generations would wind up making the same tools with the same process. If you asked me how to make more ‘advanced’ hand axes I’d struggle to come up with something better.
All of those have been reinvented in the past century or so, mostly in terms of materials and manufacturing processes. Humanity went from bronze spoons to stainless steel spoons in a shorter time than from those stone tools to these stone tools.
Why would every mainstream religion we still have some knowledge of on earth be based on the same basic stories retold.
What if the gods are just that advanced civilisation, who built humanity and then left, millions of years ago. and somehow our global consciousness has been able to recall our origins still to these days.
Maybe everyone just makes same kinda stuff up to justify existance, I dunno. Seems weird cultures can vary so much on everything, and yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations
> Why would every mainstream religion we still have some knowledge of on earth be based on the same basic stories retold.
Most of the world was explored by Christian missionaries like Jesuits, who also educated the informants who in turn told them about foreign cultures. You'd be surprised how many Noah's-ark-like myths the informants told the Jesuits only after the Jesuits told them about Noah's ark. Or, to use another example, a number of books on Greek myth and tragedy retell an Inca story about the emperor opening a box and unleashing smallpox on the Incas, as an independent parallel to the story of Pandora's jar: but the source of the Inca smallpox story was himself a Jesuit-educated native informant who had learned the story of Pandora from the Jesuits before inventing the story of the Inca emperor. The contact between two cultures is a two-way street: the informants who report stories may contaminate them with the stories learned from those they are informing.
They share the same root, and have simply been adapted to allow for more effective exploitation in specific events or regions.
Difficult merchant guilds want a special god of their own? Invent the concept of saints and name a celebrated dead guild member the saint of commerce and prosperity.
Backwards locals won't stop celebrating their fake goddess Ēostre? Create fake story about "Easter" to push instead.
"yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations"
My explanation would be, that religion was mostly used as a political power tool and power logic is the same and universal. If people believe, they are low and the emperor is a god - they won't rebell so easily.
But apart from that, they are very different, so of what foundations are you talking about, exactly?
It seems to me that religion, or spirituality if I may call it that, predates emperors. If you are truly talking about organized religion, then perhaps I might be more generous in agreeing with you. But when I think religion I think of small tribes bringing about paranormal explanations for mundane phenomenons and for their own existence.
one possibility is that these religions literally originated from the same story. it doesn't necessitate that the story is true to have translations of a story in many places.
I can think of the simple structure he's talking about, it's best documented in Zoroastrianism aka the struggle between good and evil. The conquerors were good and the defeated savages were evil, and the conquerors often faced unsurmountable odds. Origin stories of civilization and religion follow this structure quite often.
You’ll need to define civilization first, if you are talking about a global industrial civilization then the likelihood of that is about zero especially in the time frame of 1-5m years.
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I imagine it would be extremely difficult to know or even detect any non industrial civilization with much confidence that long ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
For such a civilization to develop and go unnoticed to historians, their influence must have been very small, they must have been geographically limited. For instance maybe they lived in low-lands and rising sea levels erased all trace, but this would still require that their artifacts rarely if ever got carried up hills where they might have been untouched by the rising oceans. It seems deeply implausible.
Certainly there was nothing even remotely like our civilization in the past. There are glass beer bottles laying around on virtually every corner of the planet, on mountain tops, in caves, in landfills. Just everywhere really. It will take longer than a mere few million years to erase all these.
We could put a bound on this. ~90% of oil deposits come from the Mesozoic or later. So the latest we could see a society show up, use up the easily accessible oil/other fossil fuels, collapse (presumably from energy crisis), and still have the fossil fuels we see today would be the late Paleozoic or possibly the early Mesozoic before it's fossil fuels have formed (~250 million years ago).
I would imagine if someone wanted to seriously pursue the theory (if they'd be permitted to do so, probably not) the way I'd do it is find "disappointing fields" and look for peculiar correlations between them WRT odd permeability test results. So is that field disappointing because its permeability is really low (frac it!) or is it disappointing because all the geology points to a good salt dome and the permeability is great but there's nothing there? The old fashioned way to explain fields that look good but don't produce is the permeability is so high it all leaked out millennia ago (among other explanations boiling down to "we don't know").
I would think you'd find weirder evidence of tailings piles around solid mines and a lack of open pit mines. That would be easier to find than an oil well. Also I expect there would be really weird patterns in sediment related to mercury and similar waste products. "They" never did leaded gas if there's no lead layer in the sediment, etc.
Some of it is sophistry. No civilization beyond monkey tribes could possibly exist 3M years ago because there would be nuclear reactors and space ships laying around everywhere, as though there's no intermediate step between monkey tribes and nuclear reactors. Well, what if they never advanced beyond (fill in the blank with some group that's not very advanced in 2023)? Still centuries beyond a tribe of monkeys, yet culturally interesting none the less. We could detect the industrial revolution from England if it happened in Italy 2000 years previous. But... could we detect the Roman Empire if it happened before in Australia in 4000 BC? or 3M BC? I don't know about that, kind of an open question. If the Roman Empire or similar happened in the USA upper midwest before the mile tall ice sheets scrubbed everything, could we tell today? My educated guess is "no" we could not. It would still be culturally interesting even if no nuclear reactors and space ships were built here 50K years ago. I think it quite likely that bioidentical humans were up to all kinds of nonsense in prehistory that we've never discovered or never could discover. They were as smart as us, and healthier than us, until agriculture was invented.
the Silourians first depleted fossil fuels in the first hundred years of their energy technology journey
they subsequently realized the folly of this after they pretty much made the planet uninhabitable for them
they injected back into the ground biologically produced synthetic substitutes using organically captured solar energy
this large scale carbon-capture project, being entirely organic and sustainable has left no trace
I felt a sense of awe when I realized just how much trial and error must have went into learning how to make such tools. With how many cuts and bruises we inflicted on ourselves, I came to view the technology as something invaluable and precious. We had the benefit of washing our hands, who knows just how many of our pioneering ancestors had gotten an infection and died while trying to make a better cutting tool - or lost an eye from a rock chip? And these folks may well have been “the crazy ones” or the more intelligent members of the tribe.
I could easily see how countless generations would wind up making the same tools with the same process. If you asked me how to make more ‘advanced’ hand axes I’d struggle to come up with something better.
What if the gods are just that advanced civilisation, who built humanity and then left, millions of years ago. and somehow our global consciousness has been able to recall our origins still to these days.
Maybe everyone just makes same kinda stuff up to justify existance, I dunno. Seems weird cultures can vary so much on everything, and yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations
Most of the world was explored by Christian missionaries like Jesuits, who also educated the informants who in turn told them about foreign cultures. You'd be surprised how many Noah's-ark-like myths the informants told the Jesuits only after the Jesuits told them about Noah's ark. Or, to use another example, a number of books on Greek myth and tragedy retell an Inca story about the emperor opening a box and unleashing smallpox on the Incas, as an independent parallel to the story of Pandora's jar: but the source of the Inca smallpox story was himself a Jesuit-educated native informant who had learned the story of Pandora from the Jesuits before inventing the story of the Inca emperor. The contact between two cultures is a two-way street: the informants who report stories may contaminate them with the stories learned from those they are informing.
Difficult merchant guilds want a special god of their own? Invent the concept of saints and name a celebrated dead guild member the saint of commerce and prosperity.
Backwards locals won't stop celebrating their fake goddess Ēostre? Create fake story about "Easter" to push instead.
My explanation would be, that religion was mostly used as a political power tool and power logic is the same and universal. If people believe, they are low and the emperor is a god - they won't rebell so easily.
But apart from that, they are very different, so of what foundations are you talking about, exactly?