Is it possible that another advanced civilization existed on this planet before ours?

We don’t!

We know because there is no fossil record.

Do you mean another intelligent species capable of building something similar to our civilization? You don’t say.

If so- no. We pretty much know of the evolution of life on earth which is about 4.5 billion years old- in terms of large complex organisms starting with the age of amphibians, then lizards, then dinosaurs and finally mammals. Homo sapiens (modern humans) come at the very recent mammalian age and are the only surviving hominid species that go back several million years.

I've wondered the same thing. Wouldn't there be some vestige of their existence, though? The oldest remains of human like creatures go back millions of years, but before that Wouldn't the earth still be settling down? It's an interesting thought, though, and I've went down many rabbit holes over the years about ancient civilizations.

Reverse ‘planet of the apes’

Among other factually incorrect bullshit in your post, R3, your statement that modern humans go back millions of years is complete horseshit. Try 300,000 years.

The earth is 4.5 BILLION YEARS old. The fossil record is nothing close to dispositive on this question. The dinosaur fossil record represents, on average, a random animal that came along every 20,000 years or so. It’s not like the fossil record includes everything that ever exist. It’s not even close to that.

This is called the Silurian Hypothesis and has been discussed to death. There are many videos on YouTube about it, but essentially there is no evidence at all to support it. 🤔

Wouldn't the fossil record show some trace of fossils from these ancient civilizations? Not everything but surely there would be something.

r9 exactly. OP mentioned an ADVANCED civilization. Evidence of such a civilization would exist even if only in small traces.

Our human ancestors almost died our 900000 years ago.

[quote]Evidence of such a civilization would exist even if only in small traces.

Link from a reputable source please.

No question OP. The earth is so old any trace would be gone. Why are we egotistical to think otherwise? It's not like they had vast cities or space ships but maybe they did?

[quote]Today less than 3 percent of Earth’s surface is urbanized, and the chance that any of our great cities would remain over tens of millions of years is vanishingly low, says geologist Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester in England.

r12 what does this question even mean? The oldest fossils are 3.7 billion years old. Any 'advanced civilizations' would still exist in the DNA record. Humans have some Neanderthal DNA even today. There is no possibility that an advanced civilization could have evolved on this planet because it didnt have time.

Interesting theory but ultimately there isn't any there there. I'm convinced there would be some trace, some random things that survived at least partially, buried or sealed off somehow. That's what I think but who knows?

If the people from Scientific American (or whoever) want to check just to make sure, have at it.

Is it possible? Sure. But not probable. There's not any evidence for it.

What, OP, have you been reading Rene Noorbergen?

[quote] Why are we egotistical to think otherwise?

It's not egotistical to want evidence before belief. It's basic science. And really basic truth-seeking.

Unless the civilization was so advanced they could wipe out every record of them being on earth, we would know.

We have been able to trace very well the history of living organisms over the course of this planet. Things leave record.

And earth is not that old. It's about 4 billion years old. Our galaxy has been around for around 13 billion years.

It is true that the surface of the planet has undergone so much change over several billion years that nothing is left of anything that occurred before a certain time. But the evolutionary developmental course, informed by the extant fossil record, does not indicate sufficient time for self-aware, tool-making, advanced life, much less technologically savvy life, to have appeared amid what we have found.

The planet's climate has to be considered, too. A lot could have been and was lost but considerable climatic change, with mass extinctions, whether geologically caused or driven initially by extra-planetary events (e.g. meteors), also would have subverted such development. It is hard to imagine such conscious life arising in periods of much higher temperatures and unstable weather conditions. We see no route for such evolutionary lines.

The absence of evidence tells us something, certainly, because of the evidence that [italic]does[/italic] exist.

The question is will there ever be an advanced civilization…So far I am not impressed!

There could have been civilizations outside of what we consider as "homegrown," R20

Where's the evidence of that ever happening, R22?

There isn't any.

We still don't know how the Giza pyramids were built and what they were for. So maybe, OP.

Maybe we will find some interesting things once most of the ice sheets at the top and bottom of the planet melts.

Jebus, r25, thank all gods I'll be dead by then.

We must keep an open mind and consider that there are other dimensions beyond the third dimension, and many frequencies of light, all of which we cannot see with our eyeballs or process with our brains. We are locked into the third dimension. So perhaps there have been other civilizations or things going on and we don't see the record of it because it exists outside of the visible spectrum.

Depends what you mean by advanced. We, us humans are terrible judges of this because we mostly think in terms informed by our own experience. Even to say advanced is a box because obviously any “advanced”civilization would leave behind wires and microchips and plastic trash because that’s what we believe it means to be advanced. Just because we ourselves are fast going to leave the earth a heap of trash and horror doesn’t mean we are advanced. Quite the opposite I would argue. To be advanced would include living in a graceful and intimate way with the mechanisms and systems of nature. So yes I think it is entirely possible there were civilizations that were here before us that were very advanced in terms of having a harmonious and sensitive interaction with their environment. Ones that didn’t leave physical evidence of themselves.

Apparently they weren't advanced enough to invent plastic because if they did, it would have been choking the oceans like ours is.

I think it’s very possible

When and from what did these organisms evolve r28? They had to branch off of some evolutionary tree. And what happened to their bodies, how did they manage to be advanced civilization that was the alpha species of their era and left nothing in the fossil record.

[quote]R24: We still don't know how the Giza pyramids were built and what they were for.

Yes, we do. They were tombs, built during the lifetimes of the pharaohs who commissioned them, by Egyptian laborers who specialized in building them. The first pyramid was built at Saqqara by Djoser, and three more were built by Snofru (the Collapsed Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid, and the Red Pyramid) at Meidum and Dahshur. All of these exhibit a clear line of development before the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. After that, the projects diminished, became smaller, and less complex. Subsequent pharaohs allocated fewer resources towards them, and eventually stopped building them. In Egypt, there's a total of 118 pyramids. All of the pyramids contain sarcophagi; there's no reasonable dispute as to what they were for.

Who are you? Ben Carson?

[quote]any “advanced”civilization would leave behind wires and microchips and plastic trash because that’s what we believe it means to be advanced.

I'd argue that a more dispositive proof would be in the particles we leave behind such as radiation and/or other evidence that doesn't disappear in cosmically-short periods of time. For example, Chernobyl and Fukushima will provide evidence of our existence long after our bones have completely disappeared even considering fossilization, and even that won't be around for that long. After all, when we look into the cosmos for signs of life, we aren't looking for beings or their relatively temporary artifice, but instead for the damage to the atmosphere of their planet(s) as evidence of their existence. And we have to assume that not every species will be as destructive to their environment(s) just because we are.

Oklahoma =

Africa

Cuba

Ancient advanced swords

More pre-flood ruins are being discovered =

Spain =

Yes, if Before Trump (BT) counts.

Oh for fuck's sake. As an elderghey I assure you that this "chariots of the gods" secret, advanced civilizations bullshit comes around from time to time. Nothing ever comes of it. People just like weird stories and fantasies.

Those who desperately need to believe this shit will buy into it (again) and the rest of us won't.

Wouldn't it be easy to just ask Cher about this?

I doubt it. I do believe though that we've been visited during the time of the pyramids or those funky lines down in South America.

Yeah the idea that a species from somewhere else in the galaxy visited is not so crazy. It's impossible to know.

The idea that an advanced species evolved on this planet and had a civilization on this planet is against all evidence.

The Gaia Hypothesis indicates that whatever the living mechanism, it instinctually must feed off of itself and eventually digests, destroys and decomposes to oblivion.

There's no evidence anything preceded modern humanity's path.

[quote]R45: I do believe though that we've been visited during the time of the pyramids or those funky lines down in South America.

Why? Based upon what evidence?

To think that about either the pyramids or the Plain of Nasca, you would have to have bought into some von Däniken or Tsoukalos bullshit somewhere along the way.

"We know because there is no fossil record."

Where to start??? First of all, FYI archeologists don't typically look for fossils, they look for non-fossil evidence of human activity, such as shaped stones, ancient metalwork, fired ceramics, and the occasional preserved earthwork or bit of charcoal. And they typically look in places that aren't covered with icecaps, or areas where repeated floods, tropical rot, volcanoes, or abrasive sandstorms haven't destroyed all evidence, and even then they can usually only find evidence of people who've left metal, stone, or ceramic evidence.

Case in point, the "Lost Civilization of the Amazon". Now the first Europeans to explore the Amazon river reported a widespread civilization, with many impressive villages and cities made of wood, connected by a network of roads. Later explorers found nothing but isolated tribes living a Stone Age existence, and assumed the first explorers were lying. But... late in the 20th century deforestation and the invention of LIDAR radar mapping began to reveal that, for real, there had once been a wide network of villages and cities connected by public roads in the Amazon Basin. Archeologists hadn't been able to dig in the rain forest (until the deforestation), and there were few preserved artifacts as the people had made their stuff out of wood and other organic matter and left it in a rain forest. So, I don't know if all of you would call that an "advanced" civilization, but it's an example of what can escape the notice of archeologists for centuries. What else is still out there.

In Jesus time.

[quote] More pre-flood ruins are being discovered

Which flood?

R48 aren't you on the Christian bullshit?

Love that stuff r49. There are real lost civilizations that we can explore, all over the globe, and that is more interesting to me than unseen lizard people from a million years ago.

[quote]R52: aren't you on the Christian bullshit?

Beg pardon? Explain, please.

I'm the antitheist who has consistently argued that Jesus didn't exist.

Official alien disclosure from Mexican government =

China UFO =

Re: R55:

"José Jaime Maussan Flota (born May 31, 1953) is a Mexican journalist, television personality, 𝐡𝐨𝐚𝐱𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭."

R34 / R35 / R36 / R37 / R38 / R40 / R41 / R55 / R56, stop flooding the thread with crap from ufomania.com.

Woo.

𝐔𝐅𝐎 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐚 𝐈𝐬 𝐎𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥. 𝐏𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩.

Most likely no. Evolution is slow.

It seems that there are two questions on the table. One is the OP's, and the second one which is concerned with have UFO's/ET's ever visited Earth.

I don't think many people doubt that UFOs have visited and had a look-see around.

Advanced civilations developing and then completely disappearing from Earth is a much harder sell.

"I don't think many people doubt that UFOs have visited and had a look-see around."

No. Every sensible person doubts that alien civilizations have visited the Earth, because doubt is what you feel when you don't know something for certain.

The hard-headed monitories are those who absolutely insist that aliens in spaceships have or have not visited, but the fact is neither of those sides have any hard evidence.

There's not even an advanced civilization on this planet now

What to the UFO and ET possess?

Earthlings are Martians. Or mixed-race Martians. Somehow we came from there, either in a chunk of ice or a spaceship.

Do you know entire civilizations are covered by ocean water? For instance, the North Sea didn't use to exist- there was just land from what is now the UK to Scandinavia.

They were so advanced that when they left they took everything with them because they didn't want anyone to have their stuff.

R66, did the have great asses?

R65 = Roddy McDowall

I'm so sorry, R62, I'll just say that among myself and all of the people I have ever known, there is a belief that UFOs have visited the Earth for at least a drive-by. Do we have evidence of it? Nope. Do we believe it anyway, yes we do. It seems so silly to believe that in the vastness of the Universe there is not a single more advanced civilisation than ours Further, it seems silly to believe that none of them have had a look.

Perhaps other advanced life forms don't exist anywhere in the Universe and if they do have never bothered to even have a look at us, R62, but I don't actually believe that.

[quote] I'll just say that among myself and all of the people I have ever known, there is a belief that UFOs have visited the Earth for at least a drive-by.

Where do you live? Rural Kentucky?

"Do we have evidence of it? Nope. Do we believe it anyway, yes we do."

Dude, the difference between being sensible and not being sensible, is right here.

Because there is no proof either way, I think it's possible that UFOs have visited the earth even though there's no proof, and think it highly likely that We Are Not Alone. But you BELIEVE, even though you know damn well you have no proof. Therefore, I am being sensible and open-minded, and you and your crowd are being credulous. And with that, can we end the fucking thread hijack? We were talking about ancient civilizations, which is archology, not "UFOlogy".

All threads on the Datalounge are open threads. We take them wherever we want to take them and we have no moderators here. I'm so sorry that doesn't suit you. There are millions of websites where you can visit and be moderated to a fare thee well. Bon voyage!

People who can't fathom that more advanced life forms may exist in the Galaxy are quite puzzling to me.

I suppose it's the inability to look at the Universe and be open-minded about what it may and probably does contain. It's like the flat-earth society in bigger dress but that's just my opinion.

To each his own, I wish you gentlemen the best of luck.

The aliens came, looked around, took some photos, and our planet ended up on one of their "Tasteful Friends" threads.

Criticisms within that thread included:

"WTF! .. Only one moon!?"

"Those two poles at opposite ends don't match at all !!"

"Round? .. There's no way that circumference is round! .. And who wants to live on a egg? .. A small on at that!"

Well, if you like water ...

"Hard pass. .. Looks fit for lizards."

"No thanks. .. That one HUGE landmass looks totally unstable, like he could break apart at any minute."

"Seriously? .. You can tell it already has termites."

"Any hot fudge in the middle?"

[quote] we have no moderators here.

Editor! Flames and Freaks!

We're assuming advanced civilization has a physical form. Think of dandelion puffs. Who's to say there wasn't an advanced civilization of dandelion puffs which dissipated into the air? How do we consider a brain and intellect? I think we're looking at a civilization so deviant from our knowledge and beliefs. Who can prove it either way?

[quote]R62: The hard-headed monitories are those who absolutely insist that aliens in spaceships have or have not visited, but the fact is neither of those sides have any hard evidence.

'Bothsiding' it the way you're doing, it sounds like you don't quite understand the rules of evidence and the burden of proof. One neither seeks nor requires evidence that 'aliens in spaceships' ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑛'𝑡 visited; it's not necessary to demonstrate a negative. The burden of proof is upon those making the positive claim, i.e., aliens ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 visited.

The fact is that there's no evidence that they have, and those "hard-headed monitories" who point that out do not have the same shaky standing that those who claim they have do.

[quote][R65] = Roddy McDowall

R68, that's a photo of Paul Comi, not Roddy McDowall.

[quote] that's a photo of Paul Comi, not Roddy McDowall.

R78, it’s a link to the Wikipedia article about the Twilight Zone episode in which Roddy appeared as an Earthling who travels to Mars only to be placed in a zoo by the Martians.

Yes, R79, I know the episode. Per R65, did anyone in 'People Are Alike All Over' make the claim that Earthlings had originated on Mars? The Martians didn't seem to think so, since they put the surviving human on exhibit in a cage. (What was it with Susan Oliver and cages?)

Yes, Generation Z: It was called Reality pre-2023. Now log off that Instagram account and from your TikTok page.

[quote]Wouldn't the fossil record show some trace of fossils from these ancient civilizations?

r9 We still haven't discovered every living organism in the depths of the ocean, yet.

Okay, we haven't discovered every living organism in the ocean, R82.

Wouldn't there be *some* fossil record of *something*? It doesn't have to be everything but it has to be something.

It's pretty obvious that at least one highly advanced society existed prior to our own.

One has only to look at the gargantuan megalithic structures around the globe that defy modern explanations as to how and who.

That there was an NE flood but for a few "teacher" survivors who live in legends as Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, and others also seems evident.

Oh, and r9/r83? Those megaliths are your "fossils." They exist. They were built. We have no idea how or by whom, but we don't need millennia-old bones to know these structures aren't natural.

One of the best episodes of Star Trek Voyager involved a story about the dinosaurs that evolved billions of years before humans emerged and they had attended advance civilization. They were so advanced that they built spaceships and left earth way before humans evolved and they established himself on another planet. That episode was so good it was good as a good episode of Star Trek the next generation.

R54 of course Jesus existed. Haven’t you seen the fossils? Or the movie ;)

OP needs to see an Indiana Jones movie. Or at least hear of the Romans, who had sewerage systems "we" didn't have until the 19th century.

Mexico is talking about it OP =

Puma Punku!

Gobekli Tepe!

R90, Scorn as you will, but you cannot explain!

Isn't the guy presenting the "aliens" to the Mexican government an established fraud?

[quote]R84 /R91: One has only to look at the gargantuan megalithic structures around the globe that defy modern explanations as to how and who.

The explanations are not deficient; believers in ancient aliens scorn the explanations, and refuse to accept them.

My understanding is that if we went exctinct, in a million years or so you wouldn't see ANY evidence that we were here. Not even plastics. So I think it's one of those things we just couldn't ever know.

New Scientist has an article on that subject.

The rock that fell to Earth.

In a world in which the most powerful country is controlled by MAGAts, how advanced a current civilization are we really are, OP?

Before 'our' civilization? You mean 21st century? How about the Aztecs?

Really, how would I know?

I think I may this thread to be honest. Who bumped it?

I think I've read that after a million years or so the only evidence left would be an shift in the form of carbon deposited at a geological level due to fossil fuel burning and all the fossilized porn magazines from the 70s and 80s

A egg.

As others have said, there's no fossil evidence. Its an intriguing concept though.

There is a lot of confusion about evolutionary time here. The earth has been here for 4.5 billion years. It took 1 billion years until the very first single cell organisms appeared. The first multicellular organisms didn't appear until 600,000,000 years ago. In other words, if the earth's natural history were a clock, there was nothing whatsoever from 12-3. Then there only single cell organisms from 3-9. Every bit of what we think of as plant life and animal life of the past was squeezed into the time from 9-12, including many extinct species that were around for hundreds of millions of years, such as the dinosaurs. Human beings only appeared in the past minute.

The odds of interplanetary visitors is vanishingly small. So far as we know, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and we have no technology to bring us anywhere close to that. The closest stars are 4.3 light years away. If we could somehow gain the technology to move 1/100th of the speed of light, which we are nowhere close to, it would take 400 years to reach the closest star and whatever system is around it.

Science fiction is fun, but it's based upon dreams of what technology might bring in the future, not on any known current technology.

The “Advanced Civilization” bs came about because people wouldn’t believe that brown people could have built these great a ancient monuments we see

R106 It’s called deep time and truly incomprehensible by the human brain. I believe in quantum physics. It didn’t take that long because there was no one there to observe it. It was both instant and infinite in my opinion but will always play out in a realistic mathematical way, hence it seeming like millions of years. it is technically is from an objective point of view but I think it was immediate.

What you wrote is so profound, R108. Time truly is relative. Everything you said makes so much sense.

[quote]The first multicellular organisms didn't appear until 600,000,000 years ago.

Even if that is the case, our present "advanced civilization" was only built in the last 2 to 3,000 years. We only mastered flight 100 years ago. I think that is plenty of time for another advanced society to have been born, then lived and died.

And we would not necessarily know about it from the fossil record. We can't even dig that deep into the earth's crust.

I think anything is possible. Nothing is stranger than the things that we already know to be true.

Ask Liza Minnelli. She's been around forever.

[quote] Do you know entire civilizations are covered by ocean water? For instance, the North Sea didn't use to exist- there was just land from what is now the UK to Scandinavia.

It was known as "Doggerland," which of course stirs the imagination.

Not only is there no evidence of such a pre-human civilization, there is no evidence of anything in the distant past that had the features to really build an advanced civilization. It's not just about intelligence. Give dolphins human IQs and they aren't going to Mars or even building King Triton's castle in Alantica (fictional underwater locale from Little Mermaid). You need to be able to do more than build nests etc. You need to be able to construct tools that can be used to build things like computers and all the things that led up to it.

As for aliens, it is possible that aliens or probes of theirs have visited in the time that the Earth has existed. I am not so willing to say that is impossible despite the great distances involved. Some creative (and scientific) ways have been proposed for some form of interstellar travel. It's not practical for us, but who knows given a hundred thousand or millions of years more of technological growth. But there is no evidence yet for it. And if they had established themselves as opposed to sending a probe, certainly there would be some evidence of it. Most importantly and more relevant, .there is no reason to think that aliens have helped humans in any way. The pyramids were built by man. And you know what? That's cool as shit.

It's pretty common knowledge that evidence of humans would decay to the point of it not being recognizable in a relatively short period of time given the life of our planet is measured in billions of years and humanity has existed for less than a tiny, tiny fraction of that time. Sure, we look for a species like our own in our quest for knowledge, but even that would be extraordinarily difficult to find as everything we know and think of as permanent today is, in fact, merely transitory. The only thing we have built that will be around in 10,000 years is the radioactivity that we leave behind. Then, consider the fact that we recognize background radiation in everything, be it measured in ever-so-tiny amounts. My point is that we may not recognize evidence of a prior civilization or assume that those "building blocks" occurred without intervention by an advanced civilization.

What if dolphins and octopuses have human intelligence without opposable thumbs.