If We Weren’t the First Industrial Civilization on Earth, Would We Ever Know?

Re:If We Weren’t the First Industrial Civilization on Earth,... by jjk166 on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:34PM (#23901100)

Our civilization, and presumably any other industrial civilization on earth, utilizes huge quantities of steel reinforced concrete. While the structures may only last decades, the material would be recognizably unnatural for hundreds of millions of years. There is no natural process which would produce limestone with veins of high concentration iron ore running through, nonetheless produce it everywhere on earth in a huge variety of conditions. Further, all the deposits of this weird mineral combination would form at the same time, and this period would be a blink of an eye geologically speaking. While there may be theories other than industrial civilization put forward, but it would be obvious to everyone that something incredibly weird happened at the time that civilization existed, and detailed investigation would certainly find other technosignatures once they knew where to look.

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Re:If We Weren’t the First Industrial Civilization on Earth,... by m463 on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:55PM (#23903691)

Here's a thought experiment.

Could you have a very high-tech civilization based on biological manipulation?

Biological structures are extremely efficient and strong and hearty at the molecular level.

It might not be "industrial" in the mining/cement/roads sort of sense.

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Re:If We Weren’t the First Industrial Civilization on Earth,... by jjk166 on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @08:19AM (#23906252)

Biological structures are very efficient, having been refined by many millions of years of evolution, but in absolute terms they are not especially strong or hearty. Wood for example is a great building material for many cases, but a wooden beam is never going to compare to a steel girder. While you probably could make most things through some sufficiently convoluted biological manipulation, any high tech civilization would recognize that there are much easier ways to achieve the same goal. Any advanced civilization would inevitably be composed of beings who evolved to be intelligent, and evolution would inevitably favor those who use their intelligence to choose simple and effective solutions to their problems. Any civilization that actually arose naturally would - in broad strokes - look similar to ours because they are governed by the same forces of nature as ours.

The only exception would be if for some reason they could not follow our path of technological development. For example if a marine species developed intelligence, they obviously could not easily utilize fire, which in turn would make any advancements in metallurgy nearly impossible. If you can't readily smelt large amounts of steel, of course you can't produce large quantities of reinforced concrete. Under such a circumstance, biological manipulation may be the only way to produce many things we take for granted. However this would require the devlopment of biological manipulation technologies without utilizing those other "conventional" technologies, which very likely isn't possible in practice.

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