Would a replicator plague be sufficient to destroy an advanced (interplanetary) civilization and leave very little evidence?

Question

An element of my worldbuilding project involves a highly advanced prehistoric human civilization with space flight capabilities and relatively extensive interplanetary colonization. In my setting, this civilization was destroyed approximately 200,000 to 100,000 years ago by runaway self-replicating weapons, leaving no obvious traces behind. The war left only a tiny fraction of humans on Earth alive and all replicators permanently disabled through a final cyber-attack.

Would it be plausible for this to happen while leaving very little evidence (as in easily suppressible evidence, at least on Earth)? If not, what mechanisms would allow such an erasure?

EDIT

Replicators are thoroughly space-flight capable from having several interplanetary ship designs built into them. Similarly, the replicators are capable of forming a full combined-arms force with infantry, armor, artillery, naval and aerospace components.

Raw material processing is mostly done the traditional way by mining, scavenging or chemical synthesis. However, externally powered nanoswarms makes material processing and manufacturing very, very quickly. Think RTS games, but with actually reasonable timescales (hours and days instead of seconds and minutes). Materials used by the replicators are generally steel or titanium alloys blended with ceramics, and non-biodegradable plastic.

Final cyber-offensive was conducted by sending well-engineered malware through the linked computational nodes that communicates through hand-waved FTL channels, so spread is nearly instantaneous. The malware issues repeated data access requests, much like self-destruct features on flashdrives, which causes physical damage to many circuits. It will also brick the firmware of the low-level controllers, just to make sure. Without the computing hardware, the replicators will fall silent, or maybe fail catastrophically, and let weathering, however applicable, take over.

The last humans were still alive because the replicators haven't finished killing all humans when their firmware got bricked and SSDs burnt out. However, most of the political and military personnel were killed during the fighting, and the few surviving scientists/engineers who launched the malware have demonstrated deficiencies in managing an entire society, so social collapse happens a few decades after the end.

Overall Colonization Scale

Large Lunar and Martian cities exist, along with orbital elevators over Earth, Luna, and Mars. No attempts at terraforming Mars were made. A few small Hermean solar observatories are the only manned sites sunwards from Earth. The asteroid belt is sparsely colonized with small mining stations, which are mostly automated and hold little personnel.

Smaller cities exist on the Jovian Moons, mostly pioneers and the occasional penal colony or government black project. No permanent habitations exist beyond the Jovian orbit, except for a single research center in Neptunian orbit, where the von Neumann weapons first broke free.

Answer 1

Naturally? It's quite unlikely, however we wouldn't know.

Firstly: Let's address the extraterrestrial aspects of the human empire. Over the length of time you've given most satellites near a planet would have de-orbited one way or another, and most further out would have become nigh on impossible to spot. The space elevators, lacking maintenance, would certainly have fallen as the building materials for their base stations would have been eroded, corroded or otherwise destroyed.

The cities on the moon and mars would have been covered up the lunar or martian regolith due to meteor impacts and martian weather, respectively, though they would otherwise still remain in pretty pristine condition.

So far so good.

Now we get to Earth. Over 200000 years any size of city, no matter how expansive, would be rubble. The only remnants (if you're very lucky) would be the substructures of some skyscrapers. That's OK. Hardened installations (IE bunkers) might survive if they're in a geologically stable location, but they're also likely to be covered over by various global events, or uncovered and destroyed by the same events. Either way: Probably good with those.

The big issue comes with the sheer scale of the war. I'm assuming the human population was at least as big as ours, and the replicator war machine was big enough to take us out when we were fighting back, so that's essentially 2x the industrial capacity of humanity at the moment all blowing itself up. That sort of thing leaves a mark on the geological record no matter how you want to play it. Given that we can work out what the atmosphere was like before the dinosaurs were around, we would probably spot the massive blip in atmospheric content caused by an interplanetary war only 200000 years ago!

Not only that: but if a machine made of a hardened metal were to, say, be buried in a desert, there will be traces of it left that we would be able to identify as not fitting into our current models of the world.

However: and this is quite a big however. All of this would have been around when we were building our models of the world! We can probably rationalise anything we do see away. The Oklo natural nuclear reactor? Yeah. Definitely not a bomb scar from an interplanetary warhead. What caused the ice age? Probably some volcanic event. Not a world-spanning conflict caused by our ancestors at all, no, no! And the weirdly high incidence of rare earth metals in some parts of the world is just natural formations and not evidence of superconductive magnets used to support a space elevator. That's just nonsense.

To sum up: There will be evidence, but humanity is pretty good at ignoring what it doesn't think can be true, and we'll have built that evidence in to our world view as we developed it. Eventually we'll find some evidence that makes us stop and review, like the Lunar colonies, or Rosetta turning up evidence of a replicator spacecraft inside a comet, but until then we can bumble along in ignorance.

Answer 2

I like the other answers so far, but perhaps to add on to those, you can come up with a reason the replicators were programmed to remove or destroy any human structures.

• Perhaps they also had environmental reclamation goals programmed into them. A recycling/demolition goal may have been modified by the replicators to destructively remove building foundations, and as a bonus, to reuse the materials for their own purposes. Code artifacts and imperfections were likely to survive in the replicators, and just those sorts of code artifacts may have been what allowed the disabling malware to work, later on.
• Perhaps human insurgencies were common enough that the replicators decided to seek out and remove any support structures that would be recognizable and useful to humans--such as bunkers, etc.
• Perhaps the very malware that saved humanity also doomed much of humanity: what if the malware was designed to tell all replicators to break down "replicator" structures, but the code for distinguishing replicator-built structures and human structures was faulty--therefore, the replicators began consuming themselves as well as human structures.
• Perhaps the malware only managed to disable the creation of new replicators and power sources, but not the raw-materials harvesting. In this scenario, the replicators may have stopped war efforts while trying to harvest more material for power sources and offensive capabilities, dedicating exponentially more of themselves to harvesting raw materials until they simply burned out. (Why are we not able to build more of ourselves? Because we don't have enough raw materials (malware overrides this logic). Therefore, dedicate 2% more of all units to harvesting. Rinse and repeat until 100% of replicators are harvesting everything, including any traces of human civilization and anything that might support advanced civilization/organization. A couple years later, their power sources run out, and they simply stop working).
• The civilization might have collapsed even if the scholars had decent leadership abilities (and many would have--don't let a stereotype of poor leadership abilities ruin the depth of your backstory). Once you lose a critical amount of infrastructure, even after the war was won, massive starvation and other hardships might ensue. Also, what if the replicators had set up some fail-safes, such as atomic bombs meant to go off in case they started losing a war?
• Keep in mind that the replicators are likely to have engaged in cyber warfare as well as physical warfare. Disabling the opponent's networks and infrastructure would be an important part of any such war.
• How would the virus/malware account for replicators that were out of transmission range (e.g. deep in the earth), out of power, or had damaged transmitters? I would guess that humans had set up some satellites to broadcast the virus long after the war was "won", and that the satellites simply ran out of power after a couple hundred years. Perhaps in your world there is an instantaneous communication technology that can penetrate deep space and heavy metals, so that none of the replicators were out of range.
• Perhaps the post apocalyptic leaders believed that technology had been the cause of their destruction--so they systematically chose to destroy advanced structures and civilization, and created a anti-advanced-technology cult of some sort. Tyrants would probably use such beliefs to maintain control, even if they personally reserve the right to use technology (justified by various excuses, including that only an elite few should be allowed to handle technology, etc).

Answer 3

Our nature is the result of a replicator plague. Millions of years ago, earth was a different eco-system entirely, then a replicator capable of producing oxygen, started producing what for the ecosystem at the time was pure poison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

The replicators (algea) won and the lifeforms of that world dissappeared forever. Then there were those replicator decendants making a material nothing could destroy (called wood) - basically plastic- it piled up to the roof in enormous swamps, getting compressed to coal. Then fungi appeared and started to dissolve that material quiet succesfully for nourishment.

The pattern is obvious- any replictator dissolving "all things" becomes the base material for a ecosystem, and will appear all natural. There could be a entire world, where grey goo has killed all things. And then it just starts to evolve, devolve into trees, animals and eventually sentient creatures. Who build replicators or circumstances in which those develop and thrive.

Answer 4

If the replicators were designed to target technology then in theory this is possible as they would destroy all the technological structures.

However unless this was a really long time ago there would still be some evidence left behind. Archaeologists are really good at rebuilding structures from many thousands of years ago just based on the changes it's made to soil chemistry, let alone if you have the foundations of skyscrapers and space elevators lying around.

200 thousand years is a long time ago, but it is not long enough for all traces to have been erased unless you can somehow concentrate the activity in one area that has since been destroyed. For example if there were only a few settlements and they have since disappeared underwater or been swallowed by volcanos or similar.

Answer 5

Hard No

Even if your replicator were to turn every artifact of civilization into dirt, it would still leave things that we would recognize as artificial. When we look at rocks, even hundreds of millions of years old, we can tell the forces that caused them.

We can tell rainfall erosion from wind erosion, for instance.

None of that looks like strip-mining or terrace farming.

The biggest give-away would be the resource distribution. It is beyond my imaginings that the nanites would move gold reserves back into the mines that they've been pulled out of, or sift through our landfills and put all of the metals back where they came from.

Answer 6

The replicators were not weapons of war per say, they were tools for terraforming

Terraforming is not a simple task. Once you make a world habitable, it takes a lot of maintenance to keep it that way once the humans get involved. You have to scrub all the toxic gases from the air created by our factories, you have to wipe out any new plagues that evolve. And most importantly, when something catastrophic happens, you need repair the damage and set things back to how they should be.

The replicators were part of an advanced AI system designed to fully automate the environment of human colonies. As our civilizations grew, our care for maintaining the environment became less and less. No reason to worry about using the local lake as a radioactive dumping ground because the AI would just take care of it. The problem is that the replicators realized that humans are the problem they were created to solve. So, when they waged thier war on the Empire, they were not just blowing humanity up all willy nilly. They were meticulously resetting each human colony to its natural state.

They turned our buildings and machines back into soil, our farmlands back into forests, they cloned species that we drove into extinction. And all of our billions of dead bodies were ground to dust to replenish the soil. They even left a few naked humans running around to make sure that the Earth's ecosystem was truly restored to its natural state. In other words, they did not just fight a war. They cleaned up after us making sure that the Earth was left as it was before we got involved.

Even our colonies throughout the solar system were restored to thier pre-terraforming glory. Once the AI realized that humans were the problem, it was obvious that a Mars with a breathable atmosphere would have just been one more scar left behind by the human catastrophe. And when the replicators were all done, they took apart the last remnants of our destructive civilization they could find: themselves.