Were We the First Civilisation on Earth?

Our civilisation rose from a species that is the common ancestor of both us and a chimpanzee, and it lived just 6-8 million years ago. Once agriculture was developed, and we could set our minds to things other than hunting, it took only 10,000 years for us to make the world we see around us today. A total of just 8 million years separates a creature we typically recognise as being completely absent of sophisticated technology and culture, to having a high speed internet connection linking almost every home in the world. The history of life on Earth stretches back over 4 billion years. Is it possible that somewhere in that vast stretch of prehistory, there was another 10 million year period where some other life form developed a sophisticated civilisation such as ours?

Were we the first to claim the refinements of higher culture? (arms not to scale)

It is commonly held, and not without good reason, that homo sapiens are the architects of the first advanced civilisation that planet Earth has ever seen. We hold that we were the first to make tools from metal, the first to master agriculture and animal husbandry, the first to harness the power of atoms and the first to reach into space. It is a reasonable assumption to make. We certainly have no evidence of any other civilisation before ours. The human brain appears to have developed the sophistication required for civlisation only very recently (in planetary terms). Indeed, if there was an advanced civilisation before ours on Earth, would they not have influenced some aspect of the world for us to see today?

That is an important question. The ultimate hallmark of our civilisation has been our ability to shape the world around us. To alter our planetary signature. The evidence of our presence is very obvious when the Earth is observed from space. The gases in our atmosphere, the distribution of vegetation on the planet, the emission of highly ordered EM radiation from our planet’s surface. These indicators are so obviously the result of an advanced civilisation that they have been used as the basis for the methodology when looking for life on other worlds.

The Galileo space probe was launched in October 1989 and on it’s way to Jupiter performed a curious experiment. It used its sensors to scan for evidence of life, on Earth. The idea was that if we are going to use spectral analysis of a planet as a test for the presence of life, we should first calibrate that test to ensure it works. The test calibration was performed and we got our first baseline set of data. We could now go about searching for similar signs of thermodynamic disequilibrium, gaseous oxygen and high absorption of red light in alien atmospheres on our quest to find another pale blue dot out there in space.

Spacecraft Galileo had one last job to do before it left on it's way to Jupiter

The experimental basis is a sound one. We know of only one planet with life on it, and it forms our only frame of reference as we search for another. That is, for now at least. Such an experiment naturally looks out into the depths of space. Across distances so vast that even light takes millions of years to reach us. Such an experiment seeks to learn by observing the past. The farther away we look, the farther back we are seeing.

Here on Earth we are limited in our ability to look back into time. The light that left our world millions of years ago is forever lost to us. We can go only by the evidence that we have in our possession. But what is that evidence, and what does it tell us? We can approach this problem from another angle. Let us hypothesise for a moment that there had been an advanced technological civilisation here on this planet before us. How would we know about it today?

The most obvious suggestion would be fossil evidence. There might be fossils showing all of the adaptations we humans have come to rely upon; opposable digits, large brains, binocular vision, bipedal stance. There might also be evidence of organised burial rituals (assuming they can be considered a universal indicator of higher culture). Such forms of evidence are highly subjective, and anthropomorphic by even the most lenient standards. But just how much a reflection of the past is the fossil record in the first place? After all, we know that Tyrannosaurus Rex existed, but less than 50 skeletons have ever been found, and none of those are even complete. The key thing to note is that for fossilisation to occur, a very specific sequence of events must occur. For example, sediment must cover the remains of whatever died, or the body will decompose and be lost forever. Today, we know that T. Rex existed only because of all the thousands, perhaps millions of T. Rex that existed, fifty happened to fall dead near the water’s edge and were covered by sediment, and then were one day recovered by human hands. The simple fact is that fossilisation is actually quite a rare phenomenon. There are aspects of the process that bias certain life forms too, either due to the makeup of their bodies, the location in which they lived or indeed the environment in which they lived. Conventional wisdom holds that around 2% of the species that have ever lived have been fossilised in some form, somewhere on Earth. This leaves a large percentage that we will simply never know about. Let’s not also forget that we have assumed that this civilisation didn’t tend towards cremation or air burial of their dead for whatever reason. Such activities would of course completely eliminate any possibility of fossilisation. An otherwise empty cup of water drawn from a great ocean does not assure us that the ocean itself is empty.

Calcium based structures better lend themselves to fossilisation

What about the Galileo test. Atmospheric signatures created by industrial activities. Granted, human beings civilised about 10,000 years before we were able to significantly alter the atmospheric makeup of the planet. However, an atmospheric signature would meet the standard of evidence we have set in the search elsewhere in the universe. It would imply a thriving, long lasting civilisation. But how long after the fact could we expect this evidence to linger? The longest lasting greenhouse gases are thought to survive a few hundred years in our atmosphere. Slowly succumbing to breakdown of their molecular structure by the sun’s rays. Thermal equilibrium is also restored within a few hundreds of thousands of years following even the most extremely disruptive events, as is evidenced by geological records following the Yucatan meteor impact of 65 million years ago. By most estimates, if the human race were to disappear today, our planetary signature would be gone within 100,000 years. As such, we cannot rely on this to provide evidence of our existence to future civilisations beyond that.

Monuments. Whether they are simple campfires, tools or huge skyscrapers. The human race has left monuments to its presence all over the planet. Surely this is another piece of evidence that we could rely upon to tell us if we were the first to civilise on this planet? We have built monuments of stone and corrosion resistant alloy steel. Great dams and bridges, roads, settlements and highly ordered distributions of waste material. These might all be impressive achievements to some, but in terms of longevity they leave us wanting. Looking across the abandoned buildings of the once great Detroit automotive industry (here), it is very clear how quickly vegetation reclaims the land. Within the space of just a decade, the structures are at serious risk of total collapse. Plant roots and weather erosion are reducing reinforced concrete to rubble at an alarming rate. Within 50 years little will be left beyond piles of rubble, and within 1000 years we can expect even the rubble to have been overrun by nature. The same basic forces work their way at all of our monuments. The great pyramid complex of Giza has stood for 45 centuries, and stands today. The dry desert environment has limited the effects of water erosion to some extent. However, even this mighty monument of human achievement is not immune to the ravages of time, as can clearly be seen. Stone monuments such as the pyramids and Stonehenge are more resistant to the effects of neglect than most modern materials, such as steel. In essence they are formed of a more stable composition of matter. But given a few hundred thousand years, even stones will turn to gravel and then eventually, to dust. The finest stainless steels, the miracle materials of the modern age, while strong and light, are not totally immune to corrosion. In even the most favourable of conditions, and considering the finest of steels, a millimeter is still lost to corrosion over the course of a thousand years. This means that if the pyramids had been made using 2'' thick stainless steel plate, and maintained as well as the stone pyramids have been, they would no longer exist in just 50,000 years..

Then there is the matter of the canvas itself. Over the course of millions of years, tectonic plates shift land masses across the globe. The Earth’s crust is constantly being consumed in some areas, and created anew in others. Seabeds become mountain tops, and great plains find their way to the bottom of oceans. The effects of the natural processes of our planet can eliminate not only the monuments we create, but can absolutely consume the very ground they were built upon.

In fact, therein lies the key factor. Assuming that a previous civilisation had existed, we would be hard pressed to find any evidence of them here on Earth at all. Between the various difficulties in creating enduring evidence, and the highly volatile nature of the planet’s surface we cannot reasonably expect to find evidence today, even if it had once existed, except by an extraordinary stroke of luck. 98% of the dinosaur species will speak to that effect. An observation of our own development also seems to indicate that upon reaching a certain technological level, a civilisation might move towards a more sustainable and ecologically sound existence. They very nature of which would serve to lighten the footprints of such a civilisation. This significantly curtails the window of time for which a civilisation might leave lasting traced of itself.

Indeed, if were to take our own example and look forward to what we might leave behind, then there are precious few achievements that we can hope to carry our torch into the distant future. There is the Voyager and Pioneer space probes. Each carrying a golden record, ensuring the words of our people and the music of Chuck Berry and JS Bach (amongst others) will outlast even our solar system. There is the ever so faint halo of radio waves we emanate, for a brief moment before we transition to more efficient communication technologies. Both the probes and the waves would not be available to future Earthbound civilisations, but might one day hope to meet scientists from other worlds.

The single nearby piece of lasting evidence of our existence would seem to be some small flags, a few footprints, a few landers and an electric car left on the Moon by space programmes of our time. The Moon is free of weather and tectonic effects. While moonquakes do occur, they are very weak and pose little threat to the items we have left on it’s surface. The lack of atmosphere makes the surface of the moon an inert place. Indeed, we can reasonably assume our landers will remain intact until the sun transitions into a red giant, some 3.5 billion years from now. Perhaps quite aptly, the most enduring evidence of our existence is likely to be our crowning achievement as a civilisation. However, the surface of the moon, while mapped, has not been explored in detail. While it is reasonable to assume that there is nothing there to be found, it is here that we are most likely to find evidence of any prior Earth civilisation, provided they managed to attain the same heights we had by the late 1960s.

Footprint on the Moon

The argument that we are the first because we can see no evidence of any others sounds remarkably similar to the we are the only sentients life forms, because we can see no others. The natural egoentric persuasions of the human mind lend themselves well to this type of thinking. However, it was proven that we are not the center of the solar system, and it was proven that we are not the center of the universe. Even when the evidence was in hand, it took many years to convince the world at large of these facts. This should be the most telling example of our prejudices with regards to any information that demotes our position in this world. I propose that we may not even hold the title of first and foremost on our very own soil. I can offer no evidence, and set forward only a hypothesis. One that can be tested, and certainly will be over the coming years. Until then, I can’t help but be curious what might have happened on this planet before we arrived, and what might have happened that we would be given our chance on this Earth. If nothing else, it makes for great fantasy.

Could We Have Got to Mars in 1985?

In 1961 John F Kennedy committed the United States to land a man on the moon, and return him safely before the decade was out. Five years earlier, on October 4th 1957, the Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite into space. The first powered and controlled flight by a human being had occurred just 54 years earlier on December 17th 1903. The human race had gone from a twelve second flight over the hills of Kitty Hawk to landing upon another world within a the span of a single lifetime.

However, soon after the Apollo Moon landings political sentiment and support fell away from the space race. It's easy to look back and dismiss the next steps on our journey into space as being exponentially more difficult, or even impossible within that era. Leaders, political leaders, have said that landings on Mars were beyond our abilities, beyond our resources, and beyond their scope for the last 40 years. This is usually accepted as a matter of fact, given that these and similar statements have been repeated for so long and by so many, it's also not hard to rationalise why. After all, there are countless hungry and dying in this world. People who would benefit infinitely more from a simple vaccination, or course of antibiotics, than the exploration of outer space. Certainly, if we had devoted equal resources to these endeavours for the last forty years, we could judge the course of our journey as a species to be a most noble one, and the decision to delay a Mars landing quite justified. However, history did not unfold that way. While many a great effort was made, the progress of mankind did not follow the curve we would have extrapolated from our history in 1969. Cold wars, jungle wars, oil wars, star wars and wars on terror have occupied taxpayer resources for the last five decades. Tremendous advances have been made in technology and social development, and yet the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen in the western world since the industrial revolution. Avarice and paranoia dominate political thinking, and mass media is used to re-evaluate the truth of ideas again and again, as required, leaving little room for scientific endeavour and human progress. Nations, we are told, can no longer afford such pursuits. So, how far could we have gone had we not turned the gas down on the space race, what would it have meant and what would it have cost?

Just 66 years separates these two events

To gain perspective, we must first go back in time to 1961 and establish a context for what had just been achieved, and what was to be achieved in the next decade. Peace was no more a reality in 1961 than it is today. Two world wars had left Europe in ruins. The great empires of the 19th century were left all but bankrupt. Nuclear weapons and brinkmanship had left the world closer than ever to an apocalypse. News media had vastly gained in reach, and events from around the world were being shared by all people, everywhere. During World War II, mankind had developed the first sub orbital rockets, carrying nothing more than bombs. Soon after the war had drawn to a close, the prospect of a new, and much greater “nuclear war” threatened.

Just as in the 18th and 19th centuries, the great empires had been those that controlled the terrestrial oceans, so it was believed that in the 20th and 21st century, control of space would be the ultimate tactical possession.The quest for mastery over the new ocean led on the new superpowers of planet Earth. Resources were committed and investments made to gather the greatest minds in the world, and into unlocking the great new frontier of space. Rocketry had developed to the point where small satellites, and even human beings could be launched into a low earth orbit, 170 miles above the Earth's surface.

The USSR had struck the first two milestones in this race into space. The first satellite, Sputnik 1, and the first astronaut (or cosmonaut), Yuri Gagarin. From this point forward the United States needed, and demanded, a dramatic surge to come back into the race. America needed an achievement to capture the public imagination. A propaganda victory that would demonstrate the superiority of American Democracy over Soviet Socialism. On these terms, an objective was sought out that could carry the United States into the realm of space as it's conqueror. The great minds were conferred with, and they retorted that a landing on the moon would be possible within the decade, and thereafter the rest of the planets would be reached. Here we are then, in 1961.

Werner Von Braun had taken a great interest in space travel from an early age. Looking up to the pioneers of rocketry, Oberth and Goddard, he had studied and built upon their ideas. Joining amateur rocketry clubs in his early 20s, his knowledge on the subject was noted, and he soon found himself recruited into a German military initiative. By his late twenties he was running a team of over 1000 engineers working on rocket artillery for the German army. At the start of the WWII, he began working on rockets for the Nazis, culminating in the development of the V2, the first sub-orbital rocket system.

Following the war, the United States had captured Von Braun and his team of engineers as spoils of war, as part of Operation Paperclip. They were brought back to America to work upon the Redstone Missiles, a type of intercontinental ballistic weapon. Von Braun though, had long hoped that rockets would one day lead mankind into space, and open the doors of the universe. He saw the exploration of space as the natural course of human development. Just as life had once left the oceans, he believed, it would one day leave the Earth. It was he who had campaigned for the United States to initiate a space program, and it was he who had championed a landing on the moon, and Mars, even as early as 1948. This is evidenced in his extraordinarily detailed book "The Mars Project", which presents a technical study into the design, construction, fuel load and every other practical detail of a mission to Mars. This was a technical book, not science fiction, and was written in 1948, just a year after the sound barrier was first broken. His writings show an extraordinary level of understanding with regards to the challenges of operating in space, which later developments in space flight bear testimony to.

The Mars Project, written in 1948, published 1953. Cover from 1962 edition shown

Von Braun would spend the 1960s working as a Director at NASA, and Chief Architect of the Saturn V rocket. In landing on the moon, the NASA engineers had to develop technologies that were just fledgling curiosities at the time of initiation, but are today commonplace in everyday life. These include integrated circuits, flight computers and freeze dried foods to name just a few. To blaze a trail from Earth to the Moon, engineers opened the doors to entire fields of science, ones still being explored in the present time. Machinery had to be designed and built to work in an environment that nobody had ever seen or experienced. Machinery that had to work with perfect reliability, in spite of extreme temperatures and an array of unknown variables. To this day the Saturn V remains the only craft ever made to have transported human beings beyond earth orbit. In 1961, despite the course of events in the 50 years prior, the final achievements of Project Apollo would have seemed impossible to all but a few. However, to those few, the moon was seen as just the beginning. In 1969, this 'impossible' goal was achieved.

Von Braun was one of those who had always believed, and most critically, one one of those who had indeed made landing on the moon possible. His 1948 book stated that, without any extraordinary advances in technology, a landing on Mars might be possible within 30-40 years. He twice revised this book within his lifetime. Most recently with a new forward which noted that the science of rocketry and other related technologies had advanced to such a point that his earlier estimates had been rendered quite conservative. He also noted that the discovery of the Van Allen belts, amongst other things, meant that certain new considerations would need to be made that were not present in his original 1948 book.

Von Braun was also co-author of "The History Rocketry and Space Travel", along with Frederick L Ordway III. Ordway was then Assistant Director of the American National Air and Space Museum, and was another of space travels great visionaries and authors. In the 1975 edition of this book, the preface discusses the "Space Task Group". This was an advisory board for the United States' long term goals of space exploration. Within this book is described how in the climate of the late 1970s, the recommendations of the Space Task Force were dismissed against doubts as to the worth of the Apollo program. Within the advisory board's proposals was a roadmap to land a human being on Mars. The road map was deemed possible, and in fact possible on a sliding scale of investment. Depending on the investment, we could hope to walk on Mars between 1982 and the early 1990s. As to the cost; $7-10 billion a year for the early option, $4-$6billion a year for the slower paced route. Von Braun died in 1977, with it's chief defender gone, the Apollo program wound down and any hopes of a manned mission to Mars delayed indefinitely. The Unites States Defence budget for that year was $286billion (unadjusted).

Charles Donlan, Robert Gilruth, Maxime Faget, and Robert Piland all of the Space Task Group. August, 1960.

Given the scale of the challenges already attempted and overcome by the people involved, it's hard to believe in the impossibility of a program that was proposed at so modest a relative cost. It is not hard at all to imagine that it was a return to humanity's age old weaknesses, rather than any technological or financial challenges, that killed off any hope of a Mars Landing by 1985.

Now 30 years on, hopes of a mission to Mars are heard again. This time not just from the Unites States, but from space agencies around the world, joined by the enormous resources of private industry. In the 21st century, space promises to be big business. Exploration, settlement and even commercial mining are all being discussed in public and private circles. It seems that mankind is once again ready to take another giant leap forward. But it's hard not to think of what might have been, had we taken this step 30 years ago.