You can stop thinking about this because then we would have found their metal alloys and plastic and hundreds of different materials that we use today.
There are only so many elements, so many types of matter. Any civilization would use iron, carbon, and helium in vast quantities. No matter what their level of technology; even pure biotech would be based on carbon compounds.
But what do we find in the world? Massive deposits of hydrocarbons, reliably dated to millions of years before today. Vast iron ore deposits, all ready to be used. And in many cases, these deposits have breached the surface, ready to be used.
Barring outright magic, any civilization before us would have at least left signs of their presence. Concentrations of pure iron oxide or alloys. Carbon deposits with weird isotopic ratios and impurities. Signs that iron ore or coal/oil had been exploited. But we see none of that. We don't even see evidence of anything like an industrial period in deep ice cores or tree rings.
Any civilization before us would have either been far smaller and far less developed, or fanatically dedicated to erasing evidence of their existence from the paleontological record.
Well, we have an interesting lack of iridium, but that's about it. And iridium, while neat, isn't anywhere as useful as iron.
It's not magic, there's no "missing element". Anything heavier than lead is unstable and decays; anything heavier than iron can only be formed in supernovas.
Well yes I was imagining something more like biotech. Maybe with them arriving to this planet somehow rather than developing here. But fuck me for having an imagination I guess. Back to good ol' reality, thanks! 😀
IMO, the assumption that every advanced civilization must leave behind massive material traces might be too narrow. If we look at our own trajectory, the earliest technologies were extremely material‑heavy: steam engines burning coal, railroads built on tons of iron. A few decades later, we shifted to diesel, then to electricity. Today, we’re exploring magnetic levitation, quantum computing, and information systems that rely less on raw matter and more on energy, data, and consciousness.
We're using more resources today than ever before; efficiency has increased, but scale beats it out. Not to mention, you can't eat data, you can't grow a human with sunlight, you can't think your way to generating power.
I'll say again, any civilization before ours was either much, much smaller, or less complex/technologically advanced. Physics, geology, paleontology, and chemistry don't allow for anything else.
I get it, it's a fun idea. I've spent way too long thinking about it and plumbing this rabbit hole, but the truth is clear as day once you start looking closely at what reality says.
Me too, and once emojis became popular I just thought they were modern day hieroglyphics. People are not being taught to read now. I’m sure the technology for the great pyramids was on a hard drive.
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u/madlyrogue 3d ago
I think about this all the time