Campaign seed: Prior Indigneous Technological Species

[thrash]

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.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by thrash

Prior Indigenous 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.

[Irish Wolf]

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.)

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by thrash

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.

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

[ak_aramis]

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...

[(E)]

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.

[dcarson]

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.

[dcarson]

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.

[lwcamp]

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

[Flyndaran]

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.