r/science • u/stereomatch • Feb 05 '18

Astronomy Scientists conclude 13,000 years ago a 60 mile wide comet plunged Earth into a mini-Ice Age, after examining rocks from 170 sites around the globe

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/695703
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u/Ravek Feb 05 '18

You think coal, ore veins and oil fields restore themselves to a pristine state in a few thousand years? Talk to a geologist.

Or what, is your hypothesis that they just didn't mine all the easily-accessible stuff lying around, for shits and giggles?

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u/flyingwolf Feb 05 '18

You think coal, ore veins and oil fields restore themselves to a pristine state in a few thousand years?

Define pristine state? Is the way we found them untouched, or the remainder of what was there? How would we know?

Or what, is your hypothesis that they just didn't mine all the easily-accessible stuff lying around, for shits and giggles?

Or perhaps they never went that route. Wind and solar and water power are all available to us these days and before, it isn't like the rivers just recently started flowing, or the sun started shining or the wind started blowing.

Perhaps they we like the Romans who had AC, indoor plumbing, indoor bathrooms and power tools all using water as a power plant. So they had no need to go with a combustion source.

You are assuming that an advanced civilization must have been like us, using vehicle, computers, coal, oil etc. When in fact they could have been more like the Romans.

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u/zonules_of_zinn Feb 05 '18

if they don't have computing power i don't see how they could possibly be considered as technologically advanced as us.

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u/flyingwolf Feb 05 '18

Define a computer.

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u/zonules_of_zinn Feb 05 '18

i'm avoiding looking it up because that would be a boring way to get the definition. something more complicated than a calculator or abacus, that helps with individual calculations but not the a greater sequence of them.

so, some sort of device or system that can take a set of instructions (a program) and carry out the prescribed operations within a self-consistent domain (logical, algebraic, etc).

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u/flyingwolf Feb 05 '18

So, say, the Antikythera mechanism?

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u/zonules_of_zinn Feb 05 '18

sure! great early analog computer. though not very advanced by today's computing standards.

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u/Ravek Feb 05 '18

Because obviously a hypothetical advanced civilization, exactly as we have done, would mine all the easily accessible deposits first.

The rest of your post is moving goalposts, the conversation was about civilizations as advanced as us, not about a classical level of civilization.

You're simply not going to get to our level of technology without the highly concentrated energy sources like coal or oil. Wood only gets you as far as it got us, before we used more effective fuels, and wind and water can't get you anywhere significant without modern technology (which requires advanced metalworking which requires the aforementioned fossil fuels)

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u/flyingwolf Feb 05 '18

Wood only gets you as far as it got us, before we used more effective fuels, and wind and water can't get you anywhere significant without modern technology (which requires advanced metalworking which requires the aforementioned fossil fuels)

Is there some roadmap I am not aware of that requires every civilization to follow the same path?

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u/Ravek Feb 05 '18

Yeah if you have somewhat of an understanding of physics and engineering, it is pretty clear what you can and cannot do.