Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

I cruise the arXiv fairly frequently, looking for papers of interest. Every so often, though, one jumps out as more than unusual:

Prior Indigenous Technological Species

The author (who seems to be a serious exoplanet researcher) speculates that not only might there be artifacts of non-human civilizations to be found in the Solar system, but some of those civilizations might have originated here in the distant past. He considers pre-greenhouse Venus and warm, wet Mars as possible locations and talks about the kinds of evidence that might persist.

Regardless of the scientific merit of his work, here is a ready-made basis for a campaign of discovery. It could be time travel, traditional archaeology, recovery of artifacts left in orbit, or Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

He's stretching plausibility pretty hard with his criteria for previous technological species on Earth. His suggestions for further research on that front seem unlikely to attract funding. Creative design of a project about the history of isotope ratios in the Solar System might work.

It's certainly a fertile field for games, although we have enough imaging of major Solar System bodies that setting it in another system might work better. I played in a campaign where the first interstellar expedition turned into this, although sadly it did not endure.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Heck, the Halo game series is based on this - the Covenant hate humans because they worship the Forerunners, and it's blasphemy to alter Forerunner technology. And humans have this habit of adapting the old tech to meet their newer needs...

(There was a later retcon about an ancient technological human civilization that came into conflict with the Prometheans, the race later known as Forerunners, during the last Flood incursion, but I'm not sure I buy it.)

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Yeah that's very Golden Age of Science Fiction stuff.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

The problem being, if it was in the first 2 billion years, we'd be entirely unlikely to find any evidence, and further, whatever was there is unlikely to be recognizably intelligent.

Then again, it WAS the premise behind the Chigs of Space: Above and Beyond...

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Altered carbon had the same idea, the archeological remains were either biological, in space or required very high TL archeological tools to recover meaningful information.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Boundary which is free as a get you into the series by Spoor and Flint has extraterrestrial colonists back at the time of the KT boundary found by a paleontologist. Since the didn't have FTL they were here for multiple generations.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

I read that one artifact that would show for a long time from our civilization is old oil wells. When abandoned they get filled so you have a anomaly that reaches through many layers of rock and is found in clusters.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

A prior civ might not have had access to oil to dig wells for it... And Alcohol makes a decent enough rocket fuel.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

He sadly spends most of his time analyzing what places could preserve generic evidence of technology, rather than actually exploring what traces could be left, which is a shame.

Though if I'm being honest with myself, I'm actually more interested in what a modern city or town would look like after 10, 50, or even 200 Myr of abandonment (and accompanying erosion, burial, ect). Would the high iron content stand out? What would all the glass turn into? would the concrete look like normal limestone or would it be distinctive? would our mixture of building materials give us away as a technological species? Are there any objects that would survive long enough due to strength and resistance to corrosion.

Nuclear waste might leave a recognizable mark, particularly that which comes from Plutonium rather than uranium: Neptunium has a half life of 2.5 Myrs, and even after everything decays into stable forms, the exact ratio of elements and isotopes is unique to the starting product. At least I think its unique. And Plutonium doesn't occur in reasonable amounts in nature.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Glass is actually pretty stable. Obsidian is volcanic glass, and we use tektites as evidence of ancient impacts. Metals corrode and dissolve so easily they probably don't hang around millions of years, but provided they get buried fast enough, there's no reason to expect brick or concrete or glass or ceramics or cut stone not to last millions of years.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

That article had me considering whether the ancient precursor beings in my setting might have colonized Venus with only occasional visits to Earth. Unfortunately, I've pegged their existence quite firmly to the late Ediacaran/early Cambrian, and geological evidence shows that Venus hasn't had running water for over a billion years so there goes that idea.

Luke

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

I also think that Venus had that massive full or near full surface turn over around 1/2 a billion years ago that would have obliterated all evidence existing previously.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

So archeologists looking at human remains will find a "boundary layer" composed of crushed concrete, brick, glass, and other ceramic chunks that marks where humans once lived? cool.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Would it be possible for one species of dinosaur to have developed a TL8 civilisation comparable to our own but the evidence has been overlooked?

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Very unlikely, given the amount of seismic and ground penetrating radar surveys that have been done looking for oil, and archeology sites.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Probably. It's been said that the characteristic marker of human archeological sites might be our toilet bowls - extremely common, geologically durable, and constrained enough by human anatomy and cultural history to be clearly human products rather than artifacts of some other extinct sapient species.

One other point that doesn't get made much that probably should is that in principle anything can fossilize. The fossils we find are of living things because that's what there were a lot of that had sufficiently well defined shapes we can identify them, but it's possible far future paleontologists may end up scratching their heads trying over fossilized egg cartons and twist caps.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Possible? Yes. Likely? That's hard to say with confidence, because it depends on a bunch of assumptions either way. Within the limits of what we think we know about geology and the effects of time, erosion, chemistry, and geology, it looks unlikely. But there are a lot of assumptions built into 'what we think we know', too.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

"Possible" includes their hypothetical civilization being confined to the general area of Chicxulub.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

The north shore of the Indian landmass or the south shore of Nepal/Bhutan would probably not show many recognizable remains, either.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

How well explored is Antarctica? Could there be a hidden city there similar to that described in: At the Mountains of Madness?

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Places in Antartica not covered by the ice sheet can be largely ruled out. Even large areas under the ice sheet might have been radar mapped. For example we know of a large active volcano under the ice.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

Under the ice, though, it's partly a matter of the nature of the ruins. If the city, like the one cited in At the Mountains of Madness, is made mostly of rock and stone, it might easily be mistaken for a natural formation, esp. if it didn't follow our rectilinear architectural tendencies.

Re: Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species
 

https://www.quora.com/How-thick-is-t...-in-Antarctica

....has the average thickness being about 2100 meters with the greatest areas being under twice that much ice.

Not only is this an enormous amount of mass but the ice moves from the center of the continent to the periphery. Basically we're talking about what are not only the biggest glaciers on earth but the longest-lasting c. 30-40 million years at least.

For an essentially hollow structure such as a building to survive not only the downward pressure but the sideways push for that long .......well "sanity destroying" might be one way to describe the material properties.

Then there's the question of how to get through that much ice.

I'd put my ruins some place else.