Re:Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humans on ...
by ethbr0 on Saturday July 15, 2023 @10:03AM
(#36736857)
Some glass decomposes.
It's chemically inert like aluminum (after oxidizing, e.g. foil), so the processes acting on it are mechanical and subject to probability.
Some amount is going to be abraded, buried, etc, but you only need a few pieces to remain. Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.
Re:Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humans on ...
by carlmr on Monday July 17, 2023 @06:53AM
(#36756424)
>Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.
Yet we can barely imagine a society without wheels, but some human cultures in South America didn't get that idea.
Assuming that every civilization invented glass is very tenuous.
This is the topic of the paper, I think the authors settled on climate markers and radiation from elements like plutonium-239 as among the very few pieces of evidence that might still be around on that time scale. They also observe that there has likely been enough exploitable energy in the form of oil, natural gas etc. to support an industrial civilization since about 250 million years ago.