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What if we always had evidence of Ancient Civilisations?

A

Accelerator

Banned Forever
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So remember all those things? All those conspiracy theories and their so-called 'evidence'?
What if the evidence was a lot more extensive?

During archaeological digs, people always find.. things. Metals, below layers of stone age. Refined metals, in fact, that were impossible to have been made during times before they discovered how to smelt bronze. Cities, or their foundations, equal to or larger than the metropolis today, with carbon dating saying that this was before men even started inventing agriculture. Heck, there were even concentrations of metals far beneath the earth, too refined and to pure to be anything but artificial. In the dark places of earth, the surfaces where no one lives, and has been abandoned for a long time... they find structures. Tech. They don't understand it, and no one knows how they work, but it is obviously technology. And high ones, at that, looking at the sheer intricacy and such. Heck, it was more precise and more intricate than microelectronics, with evidence of construction on the nanoscale.

And then, beneath the waves, they find cities. Sure, most of it is rubble.... but there are cities. Massive ones, all sunk, all destroyed, all rusted away. But cities.

Then they get into space. They send out Sputnik. They land on the moon.... and then they stumbled on a city. The atmosphere's gone. The power's out. Windows smashed in. Evidence of a massive battle, craters where artillery struck, places in the walls where it could only have been melted down by energy weapons, and bodies and corpses, all preserved in the vacuum. Heads smashed by some great force. Bodies wrecked and destroyed. A veritable tomb. And the tech.... yes, it was working. Yes, its working. And there are recordings...

More probes are sent, to the solar system. And what they find is not reassuring. More outposts and cities, everywhere. Bodies. Great mausoleums. Shattered ships and satellites, in deep space, out of power so they were mostly indistinguishable from the rocks surrounding them.

So what happens?
 
Accelerator said:
Humans. Some genetic drift. But recognisably humans.
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What about their ethnicity?

Mind you. There is no good answer to this. Purposefully so, because the implications of a pre-existing civilization are...Yeah I'll wait until I get an answer but I got the feeling the more realistic interpretations are ultra fun in a deeply shit way.
 
Arkalest said:
What about their ethnicity?

Mind you. There is no good answer to this. Purposefully so, because the implications of a pre-existing civilization are...Yeah I'll wait until I get an answer but I got the feeling the more realistic interpretations are ultra fun in a deeply shit way.
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Um..... does it matter?
 
Accelerator said:
Um..... does it matter?
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Absolutely.

Look at the occult side of some of the people involved in Nazism. Look at the search and fabrication of a myth of a "pure" people and the attempt at constructing ethnic ideals based on historical fabrications. Sure, not all nazis were into it, but like...

The idea of finding cocnrete proof of the existence of a superior ethnicity- One which is superior by dint of its "enhanced" biology- Did not puff into the brain and minds of Nazi scholars one night. It was the result of a century of movements interested in the existence of past civilizations as a result of a variety of cultural factors. Humans have always looked at matters of ethnicity and geographical positioning, and they've always been the source of conflict, so to speak. So to generalize.

So like, yeah, how an ancient ethnicity of advanced technology users looked like would matter. In the extreme, I say.
 
Arkalest said:
Absolutely.

Look at the occult side of some of the people involved in Nazism. Look at the search and fabrication of a myth of a "pure" people and the attempt at constructing ethnic ideals based on historical fabrications. Sure, not all nazis were into it, but like...

The idea of finding cocnrete proof of the existence of a superior ethnicity- One which is superior by dint of its "enhanced" biology- Did not puff into the brain and minds of Nazi scholars one night. It was the result of a century of movements interested in the existence of past civilizations as a result of a variety of cultural factors. Humans have always looked at matters of ethnicity and geographical positioning, and they've always been the source of conflict, so to speak. So to generalize.

So like, yeah, how an ancient ethnicity of advanced technology users looked like would matter. In the extreme, I say.
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To be blunt? Completely varied, and unlike any other culture. Their tech was such that they could easily alter their own hair and skin colour at will, like changing clothes, and they did not have the same hangups and ethnic conflicts we had.

Any racism or prejudice would be like the Germans versus the English, or the French versus the Italians. Based upon things, other than skin colour or any other physical thing.
 
Their names- Invented or not- Would still be used to start wars, justify land grabs and purges and religions and political choices and philosophies and the like. The course of history would probably be irrevocably altered from the moment it becomes history, with the modern instance of the world resembling this in very few ways. There would be no Sputnik. There would be no Russian Federations. No Tzars. I would even go as far as to suppose that there could be things similar to them, but they would sure not be called the same.

You've glossed over all the details that would make any sort of discussion legitmately meaningful. Like how dnagerous their technology is. How easy to activate it is. How sturdy the leftover buildings are. Whether they contain materials dangerous to humans.

Like that's stuff that determines how people interacted and interact and will interact with their cities. With the remnants.
 
I would expect there would be a lot of "epic" weapons and armor in existance. stuff lighter, stronger, and/or sharper then any iron weapons/armor.
Humans are a resorcefull bunch, if they dig up strange metal's, they will test their durribility and make weapons/tools out of them. If they are in the right shape already, they might ben be good ones.

The breast plate of Julius Ceaser, successfully deflected dozens of dager strikes during his assassination in the roman senate, though a stab to the back of his neck got him in the end.
 
Ok guys. This is going to be a bit incoherent. So bear with me for a bit.

You want to know how the civilization was? Think of a mixture of eclipse phase, Nanoha, and Fullmetal alchemist.


Nope, no transhumanism. At least, not to that level. But there was gene editing, and they literally could edit in, not only intelligence, strength, speed, stamina, but also lots of nifty other things. Like, say, super computers, magic powers, no need to sleep, eat, drink, or defecate, summonable monsters, and other shit like that. Their understanding of genomics and proteomics is…. Well, compare it to us today and Gregor Mendel. Their understanding of physics, humanities, and manufacturing, was the same.


The magic system? Mana-based, generated by their bodies, and later, by machines that could either produce it wholesale or convert heat and electricity into it. It was basically the equivalent of programming. Put in the math, and make things happen. And like programming, different languages, i.e. magical styles could specialise in different things. In the simplest terms, mana allowed a person to do seemingly superhuman things. At the lowest level, it could be used to move the body faster, make it stronger, and more durable. But to get to the higher level, one needs a method to describe it, more precisely and more coherently than visualization and instinct. And so magic systems were born. And, well, mathematics were used. So were other ones, such as a series of movements, ritual diagrams using complex geometric shapes using mana-reactive material that manifested a certain effect when mana was generated, and even songs. But most used pure mathematics, with assistance from a local calculator called a Device. Different styles had different strengths. Some were meant to alter the surrounding environment. Some were made for bursts of combat. Others were meant for mass manufacturing and such, capable of matching a modern factory with a single mage and a Device.


As for what it could do?.....


Many things. The main limitations were: Can it be described in mathematical terms? Does it violate the law of conservation of energy? Does it break the speed of light?Then its possible. It might be hard, difficult, really inelegant, but not impossible. They could do shit like alter space and dimensions, making pocket dimensions and bags of holding. They had eclipse phase style cornucopia machines. They could alter the local laws of physics in a small area, and do ridiculous things, like suspend the force of gravity, or make fusion reactors the size of a shoebox. They could do things like make solid holograms, and alter the properties however they wish, with the more exotic properties being expensive, and some properties being outright impossible, like having no inertia. But who cares! Cause they can literally conjure room-temperature superconductors and clothing out of thin air. They could literally do things like make a garden, and then launch it into space….. because they had literal force fields that could keep all the air and water in, and only let in suitable amounts of sunlight. Have to move fast? Heh, no need to take a car. Just teleport. Just alter the coordinates you're in. You want more material? Transmute that block of iron into gold, or copper, or some kind of ultradense material currently not on the periodic table.


They didn't even use normal cloth as clothes. They just created solid holograms to protect themselves from outside influences, and then layered on an illusion.


Needless to say, it wasn't anything like Earth.


The computers were good. Very good. But they seemed to frustrate at creating true artificial intelligence. Sure, their expert systems. Were smart. Very smart. Very good. But… not true artificial intelligence.


Society-wise, as you would realize by now, was mostly post-scarcity. Sure, there were mages running the factories, and ruling, and coordinating…. But with this level of automation, most people were basically on welfare. Or on a UBI. Of course, it wasn't all perfect. Humans are humans, and so there was crime, depression, suffering, hate, prejudice, and all the other ills. On prejudice, let's say something here. The society had by this time colonized the entire solar system, and so the old divisions on the main planet were basically…. Forgotten. Racism based on skin colour didn't make sense when one could simply alter their hair and skin colour the way they changed clothes. They just made new ones. Some old guard on the earth may take pride in their heritage, and perhaps look down on those who left. While others living in the asteroids or pocket dimensions, would look down on those 'old timers'. Some hated the transhumans, who had altered themselves to be able to cast magic instinctively and be born with more magic power. They weren't oppressed, they just didn't like each other. Humans were like that.


And, like humans, war broke out. It was hard, difficult, and really hateful. Their artificial intelligence sucked, and so they needed actual boots on the ground. Ennui, caused by the sheer abundance and the lack of work, was whipped into a frenzy by propaganda, demagogues, and misinformation. So war occurred. And it was a war. Nukes were considered firecrackers by then. Teleporting antimatter missiles were considered the standard infantry load-out, backed by quantum-based computer systems and detection that could see individual moon dust on the moon, from the Earth's surface. And most limitations of weaponry, was circumvented by magic. Lasers? They lose coherency after a long time.


But when backed by a spell, so that every single photon travelled in parallel, and only lost energy absorbed by intervening space dust, and they were also homing? Well, things changed.


The scale was colossal. The advancements spurred on, made it so that detection overpowered 99% of all stealth. Asteroid habitats? Destroyed. Civilians cowering in a bunker? Destroyed. Ship in power-down mode, hoping to ride out the rest of the fight? Destroyed. Everything burned, smashed apart by self-replicating nanites, all-devouring spells, or other exotic weaponry. The last battle was at earth, with everybody else in the solar system dead. There, the last attack was unleashed. By this time, everyone had gene-modded themselves to produce as much magic as possible.


So…. When the last enemy released a plague meant to kill anything with more than average magic, they died quickly. If they were at full strength, they could have made a cure. But with 99 out of 100 cities nuked…. Well, they couldn't fix anything in time. Most died, with the last few genemodding themselves so that they lost their magical powers, and created a last few descendants with no magic so as to make sure the human race doesn't go extinct. With the apocalypse, the loss of magic, and the destruction of infrastructure, the past was lost. The solar system went from having 50 billion inhabitants, to a scant million. Literally everything was lost. The infrastructure deteriorated, and they were reduced to the stone age. Crop plants? Hah! Without human intervention, and with the mass extinctions, they were bred out of existence by wild varieties. The animals themselves went feral. Humanity had to learn how to reforge bronze. Then relearn agriculture. Then begin selective breeding. Basically, start all over again. And they did. And now it's the modern day.
 
all of this would have been incredibly useful to know in the OP, I am going to note. Because it kind of completely changes the tone and implied goal of the thread.
 
Inherit the Stars, written by James P Hogan, first published 1977.

Astronauts exploring the moon find a human corpse in a spacesuit, lying in a cave. They don't recognize the technology, and the corpse is carbon-dated to be something like 100,000 years old. That's, like, chapter one.
 
Whaaat ...! It was in their free library when I first read it.

Anyhoo, the synopsis is this, spoilers ahoy:
1) Astronauts at moonbase find that human corpse in a spacesuit.
2) Nobody recognizes the spacesuit, at the level that it's designed and built completely differently than ours, and the labels are in a completely unrecognizable writing system.
3) The biologist is absolutely certain that it's a human-human from Earth, not some human-looking alien.
4) They find a military installation buried under Far Side that has canned fish that are definitely not Earth Life.
5) An expedition elsewhere in the solar system finds a significantly more advanced civilization (in the form of a big spaceship) that was around millions of years ago, not hundreds of thousands. There are animals on board (like a field collection) of earth life from then, as well as alien life that has the same body plan / anatomy as that weird canned fish.

So they conclude that the humans were probably collected by these other aliens a way long time ago, and then those humans developed an independent technological civilization. It was basically a whodunnit; there were some other threads, like the fact that they decoded these peeps languages and the calendar was for a year that was like three times longer than ours, and that they used "big" and "small" as the light/dark metaphor for "good" and "bad" (and then the aliens that picked them up ended up being like four meters tall).

That was kind of, the basic thrust of the narrative.
 
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It depends on what you mean by "tech."

I mean, the Pyramids are still standing today, right?

That's a pretty glib thing to say, but I think there's some fundamental truth to it. Like, my pocket cell phone wouldn't last too long, but a big old rocks-and-concrete building can last a heck of a long time. Especially somewhere dry and not too windy, were neither plants nor weather would wear it down. So that kind of monumentalist architecture would be around for a heck of a long time, and you'd at least be able to infer some things about the scale of their civilization based on that.

Going back to my cell phone --
archiving digital information is basically something that we-as-a-civilization have not figured out. But that's as much because of format churn, from magnetic tape reels, to 5" floppies, to 3.5" floppies, to external discs, to hard-drive farms. And there's a lot of discussion in the world of librarians and archivists about how to maintain books long term, and there are US government agencies that have miles of magnetic tape that they still need to maintain, and would very much like to move into a low-hassle high-durability format. We don't have that invented yet, but some kind of "super microfiche" is a very real possibility.

...And that's discounting the idea of something like a time capsule that's designed to be a durable hermetically sealed bunker of documentation for theoretical future people to access. I was just reading about the Crypt of Civilization, which was a time capsule that was designed to last, like, 6,000 years. (It was also basically a monument to Southern Racism, which raises some interesting implications all of it's own for your theoretical Ancients; what if it was only the backwards Sore Losers of Ancient Social Conflicts that built time capsules?)
 
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daniel_gudman said:
It depends on what you mean by "tech."

I mean, the Pyramids are still standing today, right?

That's a pretty glib thing to say, but I think there's some fundamental truth to it. Like, my pocket cell phone wouldn't last too long, but a big old rocks-and-concrete building can last a heck of a long time. Especially somewhere dry and not too windy, were neither plants nor weather would wear it down. So that kind of monumentalist architecture would be around for a heck of a long time, and you'd at least be able to infer some things about the scale of their civilization based on that.

Going back to my cell phone --
archiving digital information is basically something that we-as-a-civilization have not figured out. But that's as much because of format churn, from magnetic tape reels, to 5" floppies, to 3.5" floppies, to external discs, to hard-drive farms. And there's a lot of discussion in the world of librarians and archivists about how to maintain books long term, and there are US government agencies that have miles of magnetic tape that they still need to maintain, and would very much like to move into a low-hassle high-durability format. We don't have that invented yet, but some kind of "super microfiche" is a very real possibility.

...And that's discounting the idea of something like a time capsule that's designed to be a durable hermetically sealed bunker of documentation for theoretical future people to access. I was just reading about the Crypt of Civilization, which was a time capsule that was designed to last, like, 6,000 years. (It was also basically a monument to Southern Racism, which raises some interesting implications all of it's own for your theoretical Ancients; what if it was only the backwards Sore Losers of Ancient Social Conflicts that built time capsules?)
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Oh my. Thank you. Its just that, I have several ideas. One thing, was to take inspiration from Transformers 3, and basically have some astronauts walk through the facility, and then start exploring.

The exploration logs should be interesting. What about areas where space-time has been altered? Like, say, rooms far too large, or looping corridoors, or straight up portals?

And another thing I'm planning to have some artifact survive. Like, the magitech equivalents of photo albums, recorders, vinyl tapes, and phonograph records.
 
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