(June 17, 2025 at 3:13 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: What are they using for energy? 2LOT demands that any energy use will leave residue or evidence. That may be chemical. That may be structural. That may be hydrogeographic. We see evidence of hominid species using technology as simple as burning wood or knapping blades. More complex technology should almost certainly leave more complex -- and more to the point, more durable -- evidence.
What are these supposed high-tech primordials using to power their civilization, and do we see things like effluents, pollutants, residuals, or evidence of the infrastructure that would be required by a high-tech society? You write: "But if the human race vanished, within a few hundred million years, any direct evidence of our society – or a previous one like it – would almost certainly be gone."
But the fact is that we humans, even with our limited scientific understanding, have found direct evidence, not of civilizations, but of invertebrates at least half-a-billion years old. Don't you think if we can find evidence of charnia as small as one centimeter that we might be able to find evidence of the energy-production plants that would be required to power any advanced civilization, which must of course be immensely larger?
Smells like bunk to me.
Ever wonder what happens to a reactor core or a spent fuel pool after the grid fails and the last of the backup generators run out of diesel? Very Bad Things. Even assuming humanity doesn't extinguish itself with a thermonuclear firestorm, we're going to leave a pretty interesting layer of chemical and nuclear residue. Advanced civilizations don't sneak worth a damn.
