As usual, Shadowofwind, your logic is impeccable, your perception clear, and in my most instinctive opinion you are absolutely right.
But, just for yucks, and perhaps to point out that sometimes what we don’t know is our own fault as well as a natural given, let me respond to some of this:
Before I start, it should be noted that your post seems to carry a sort of geologic theory of mind: your proofs confirming that civilizations could not have existed before known history all assume that those civilizations would be just like ours in terms of technology and our human need to alter our environment. This could be true, but it seems a bit limiting.
Now:
If our civilization were to end, would there still be clear evidence of it having existed, 10,000, 100,000, a million, ten million, or a hundred million years in the future? Yes definitely:
Not so much definitely, I think… we have enough trouble identifying cultures that disappeared just a couple thousand years ago, much less 10,000; I think even our stone structures would be long buried, along with any “genetic” memory or alterations to the landscape, or any other signs of us after a million years, much less 100 million. Don’t put too much stock in the works of men -- they may have been built to last, but in the end everything is ephemeral. Even stone.
1. List of man-made objects on the Moon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. There will still be a lot of junk in orbit indefinitely also.
Assuming no celestial archeologist came along and helped himself to those objects! Seriously, even the Moon undergoes changes, and one or two asteroid hits would very likely obliterate all the objects we left behind -- not to mention that those objects are very small, and could be overlooked by future cultures.
2. Quarries, mines, roads, and home foundations cut into rock will still be obvious. There are millions of such features all over the world, and it doesn't go away even in hundreds of millions of years except where it gets scoured away or buried. Such features don't scour away easily or everywhere, and they don't get buried indefinitely everywhere, they get buried in some places and exposed in others. And they can be dated with a fair degree of accuracy using a variety of techniques.
But, when unearthed, would they be recognized as artifacts, rather than just so much natural formation? There is a theory that the Amazon basin was once vast tracts of farmland, replete with irrigation and mounds separating the fields, and these fields were tended by a very large population of prehistoric men. The theory is in great dispute, though, both because science doesn’t seem to care to admit that human actions may have obliterated an entire race, but also because the evidence doesn’t conform with our expectations of what should have been left behind. That, and it seems real important to us to think of the Amazon rain forest as eternal, virgin land.
3. Its not as if we built our whole society on a single island or small continent, while somehow never affecting the rest of the globe. And its not as if it makes geologic sense for anything that big to disappear quickly, as if Newton's laws of force, friction, and inertia don't apply to rock.
That would, after tens of thousands of years, only make the human-caused scars ubiquitous, almost natural. Who knows? Some well-intentioned future geologist might simply attach a name to the strange right-angled rock formations than form patterns of indentations across great swaths of land, thus making “natural” the foundational remains of all those subdivisions. The same sort of misidentification could happen to the remains of cities as well, though their structures might also be attributed (correctly, I suppose) to mysterious prehistoric tribes -- sort of like we do with places like Stonehenge.
4. We exist in a biological context, and not in some other context. The ecosystem we are a part of will still be preserved in fossils. This contrasts, for instance, with the 400 million year old rock that was dug up when my house was built in Ohio. Those rocks were packed with coral and various shelled animals, so well preserved that at first I thouht I was looking at something only a few thousand years old. But the types of that age are all primative, with the highest animal being a nautilus that doesn't have a modern equivalent. So we can say with some confidence that there were no civilizations when those rocks were formed.
I have a lot of trouble believing that all life gets fossilized. Indeed, who is to say that the burial practices of previous civilizations didn't render fossilization impossible? In other words, that small quantity of primitive life on earth that was fossilized should not be deemed all life on earth, or even an accurate representation of that life.
In regards to past civilizations, the first point doesn't say much, other than that it appears that previous civilizations didn't launch satellites into high orbits. The second and third points pretty much completely eliminate the possibility of past technological civilizations, in my opinion, aside from relatively recent ones such as recognized by mainstream archeologists and paleontologists. The fourth point is more problematic I think, and is what is driving so much of this speculation to start with.
You’re assuming here that past civilizations would have developed the same sort of technologies that we did, or even that past civilizations even cared about technology. On both sides of that spectrum: what if a civilization developed a completely organically based technology, growing not only their food, but their shelter, vehicles, and energy sources? That may sound absurd, but humankind could well be doing that in a few generations, as nanotechnology and biosciences develop. And yes, being humans, we would likely, over time, erase all vestiges of the structures that predated the new technology -- it's what we do. Though this may fall into the realm of proving a negative, I really don’t think that it must behave just like humans is a fair assessment of sentient life.
A dynamical system …My view is that if there is a piece missing, its another piece that we haven't thought of yet. Maybe it has something in common with other ideas, such as cycles of earth, water, air and fire ages for instance. But none of those ideas work in their present form, they don't actually match the evidence that we have, and believing in them requires ignorance, misunderstanding, or outright denial of much of that evidence. On top of that, for an average person the real evidence is buried in a mountain of fabrication, brought to us for the sake of History or Discovery Channel ad revenue. Or Disney before that. It amazes me that people who have so little regard for big corporations or capitalism in general will also put so much faith in the output of profit-seeking media organizations. I guess it all depends on what they're selling.
I tend to agree with all that, except for one idea that seems to run through it: Yes, imaginative humans have a nasty habit of filling in missing spaces with something that makes sense to them, and, because those fill-ins are based on little more than breathless conjecture centered on our current historical context, they are likely invariably and fantastically wrong (i.e., I thought about writing a short story once about the building of Stonehenge, positing that it was a gazebo constructed by a wealthy landowner/amateur astronomer who got sick of his wooden pavilions burning down; why not?). Just because we’re really bad at attaching or even identifying the truth behind prehistoric civilizations doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist -- only that we can’t know about them. Also, for what it’s worth, you sort of make my point for me when you note that human civilization has existed for an extremely short amount of time, and our development is downright unnatural… why couldn’t this have happened previously?
But I do share a big part of the motivation, that it seems there is a piece missing.
Based on my own experience, its clear to me that there is 'synchronicity' in life which has some kind of supernatural or paranormal nature. This must apply to biology as much as to anything else. If anything, in my experience, such forces are stronger in relation to reproductive direction than almost anything else. And so evolution is directed, it isn't blind. That must be at least a part of the missing piece. Things really do evolve faster and more abruptly than they would otherwise, and they do so according to some kind of plan. Though who knows what that plan is, how it works, or what its aim is.
Agreed. Also, for that matter, who knows how many times that plan has unfolded? How many times might it have been revised, reinstituted, or scrapped altogether in the name of some new design? There was certainly enough time on earth for lots of separate -- and thoroughly erased -- attempts. Who knows? The current chaotic state of human existence could mark our entry into the first throes of erasure. [This BTW is the place where I think Creationists truly err when arguing against evolution: if there were a higher plan or force overseeing our existence, there’s no reason to argue against any evidence -- God could have created the entire universe yesterday, but made it appear old for aesthetic reasons.]
In addition to this, I think we also feel conditions in other civilizations, and we try to make sense of those feelings. For the first half of my life, I could fly or levitate in all of my dreams. (The primary reason I don't fly in dreams now is I rarely dream of having a body. And I think part of the reason for that is I'm more aware of my sleeping body, which limits the freedom of my dream body.) I think that part of the reason for dreams of levitation and flying, is that my sense of weight, buoyancy, and inertia is no longer being driven by my senses when I'm asleep, and so it just floats. And I think part of it is an instinct for swimming, which I imagine as flying, since I don't spend a lot of time under water. But I think there's somehow more to it than that. Other people feel this too, and it appears to me that this motivates a lot of the speculation about other times where various forms of flying are possible. Likewise for other powers like mind reading or manifesting objects. We feel these to be real, and compelling, so we try to build those feelings into a picture that makes sense.
I think I agree with that, and I think it nicely portrays the theory of mind that may attach a bit too much of our own, understood, context to things about which we are incapable of knowing
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