Timeline for Sapience Pulsar - Could Intelligence Come in Waves?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
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| Oct 16, 2016 at 22:30 | comment | added | EvilSnack | Or at the small end of the scale, jewelry. Barring an incident that melts it down, the wedding band I am wearing right now will be recognizable as artificial in origin for many thousands of years, and unless looted, will endure until the sun swells to a red giant and swallows the Earth a few billion years from now. | |
| Jan 19, 2015 at 15:04 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | @MasonWheeler Well, yes and no. The amount of European's DNA from Neanderthals is microscopic, but the amount of our Genome is about 4% (that's the highest measured value according to Svante Pääbo's book), and much lower for non-Europeans. That's significant wrt our genome content, but does it indicate true assimilation? Well, it's a matter of some dispute, but IMHO, that seems more like occasional cross-breeding than real assimilation. Had we truly assimilated them, I would expect numbers in the 20-30% range. | |
| Jan 17, 2015 at 3:05 | vote | accept | user3652621 | ||
| Jan 15, 2015 at 10:41 | comment | added | Alex Celeste | Major cities are another big one. Even if all the surface buildings collapse, a construct like Manhattan would be blatantly obvious to a geologist. Being so many times larger and made of tougher materials (concrete, steel) than the ancient cities that we think of as having disappeared over thousands of years. | |
| Jan 15, 2015 at 1:14 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler |
That's almost certainly because we out-competed them (whether intentional or not). As I understand it, we actually assimilated them, or at least some of "them". Genetic research has shown that humanity, and particularly the Caucasian race, contains a non-trivial percentage of Neanderthal DNA, which is believed to be the ultimate origin of several more-or-less common traits, including red hair.
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| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:54 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | @SerbanTanasa thorium? sure. But understand, the types of radioactive material that are really useful for reactors tend to be near the head of the decay chains. The wikipedia article explains this, and how the half-life process cause it to have a combination of the original elements with descendant decay products. | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:45 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | Really, hiding the fact that a race like us existed only 50K years ago would take technology, resources and effort that would exceed any other project that the human race has ever attempted by several orders of magnitude. | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:43 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | @SerbanTanasa They could re-spawn hominids if that was their goal. And they succeeded in finding some. (But that's a lot more feasibly that covering up our existence). | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:42 | comment | added | user3652621 | Is, say, Thorium on some "richer" element's decay-path? Such as, say Uranium-235? | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:41 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | @SerbanTanasa 50k years isn't nearly enough time to turn it all into lead. Instead, it will be largely "depleted", that is, mostly decayed into other, weaker, but still radioactive materials that are too spread out and/or too weak to be useful for power generation. | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:39 | comment | added | user3652621 | and a departing race could re-spawn the destroyed hominid pool, leaving just an odd gap in the fossil record... | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:38 | history | edited | RBarryYoung | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:33 | comment | added | user3652621 | Great Reply! Thanks! But how would we be able to tell? Say there were immense amounts of easily accessed uranium lying about, heck, even natural reactors, and the previous set used it, leaving less valuable coal and oil in the ground. How would we know that didn't happen? We would just see lots of lead lying about. | |
| Jan 14, 2015 at 22:31 | history | answered | RBarryYoung | CC BY-SA 3.0 |