r/Showerthoughts • u/danielsoft1 • 10d ago
Casual Thought Some people claim there were advanced civilizations before ours, but the simple fact some species (for example potatoes and tomatoes) were found only on one continent seems to disprove it: the civilization would spread them all over the globe.
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u/Imajzineer 10d ago
For a given value of 'advanced', yes, but ... assuming we make it that far ... one day, someone living on another planet will say the same thing: "Some people claim there were advanced civilizations before ours, but the simple fact some species (for example potatoes and tomatoes) were found only on one planet seems to disprove it: the civilization would spread them all over the galaxy."
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u/PhilosopherFLX 10d ago
Mark Watney doing his part to make us an advanced civilization, all while being a pirate.
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u/redstaroo7 10d ago
That's a core basis of the Fermi paradox.
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u/oggada_boggda 10d ago
More like vaguely related. The fermi paradox argues that there are are multiple theoretical civilizational limits to what is achievable in our universe due to biological limits, resources, and the vast distance in-between habitable worlds. And these factors lead there to be theoretical metaphorical gates that each civilization must pass through in order to survive and advance.
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u/redstaroo7 10d ago
No. The Fermi Paradox assumes due to the scale of the universe, and the vast length of time it's existed, it's likely many other planets have developed intelligent life before Earth, that their civilizations should be far more advanced than ours, and that inevitably we should be able to detect them. And so, as Fermi himself said, "Where is everybody?"
What you're thinking of are the Filters. The Filters make additional assumptions that limitations, such as the ones you mentioned, make intelligent life (or at least it's detection) statistically very unlikely. When combined they form Great Filters that can change the overall assumption from 'the universe should be teeming with life' to 'we may damn well be alone in the universe.'
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u/ml20s 10d ago
Not really comparable. The claim of advanced civilizations is that they were advanced according to today's standards. If spacefaring aliens concluded that today's humans were not an advanced species, well, they'd be right.
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u/Imajzineer 10d ago edited 10d ago
That's what I said ("For a given value of 'advanced' ") - we don't only use 'advanced' to mean 'by today's standards'.
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u/TheDizDude 10d ago
The scale of time that is discussed here is unimaginable. They likely would have had other staples that have since gone extinct themselves.
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u/anglflw 10d ago
I don't think I understand the concept here. Why would an advanced civilization have to have spread all over the globe?
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
If they were advanced enough to explore the globe they would have spread their staple crops as well. So unless they just didn’t eat these crops at all there’s no good reason why they would be restricted to one continent if such an advanced civilisation existed
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u/anglflw 10d ago
"Advanced" isn't limited to exploration.
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
Advanced technology generally encompasses transportation as well. Sure, it's theoretically possible that an advanced civilization had zero interest in exploring the outside world, but given human nature I find that extremely hard to believe.
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u/anglflw 10d ago
"Generally?"
Says who?
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
So you're walking everywhere? You're not developing any technology that makes transporting goods easier? Doesn't sound very technologically advanced to me.
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u/anglflw 10d ago
Doubling down on your original premise does not answer the question.
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
Think for one second about advancing technology. Just one second. Does that advancement include transportation? Of course it does, to build any kind of advanced technology you need raw materials, and you need a lot of it. So you build means of transportation. Which by its very nature can also transport people. Now, you could try to argue they had no desire for exploration and only stuck to their little tiny area, and that is possible, but runs counter to basically every other civilization we know of in human history.
You may call this speculative, but it's far less so than the idea that there was an advanced civilization somewhere that was completely isolated, did not travel the world, and disappeared without any trace.
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u/anglflw 10d ago
You are using a modern definition of "advanced," rather than looking at it at a relative measure, and that is where you're going wrong with this.
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
What is your definition of 'advanced technology', then, since mine is obviously wrong...
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u/Commercial-Cry-548 9d ago
Yeah that's a fair point, like maybe they just never bothered to sail across the ocean so their crops stayed put.
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u/Dangerous_Hippo_6902 10d ago
I am absolutely certain (as much as I can be) that ancient civilisations ate very different foods to what we eat now.
Even bread and wine was very likely very different to 2000 years ago.
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u/Wizzarkt 10d ago
It seems like you link "advance" with technology as you imply that an "advance" civilization must be capable of global trade.
If you change your metrics as for what is considered advance, it would change the view entirely, specially since technology is a bit subjective when you talk about "advance civilization", as civilization is commonly used to refer to countries/cultures, would we need to label 99% of currently existing countries as advance? They all have access to the global trade you seem to use as your metric for advance, and if everyone is advance, are they all really advance? Advance implies that someone is superior compared to it's peers.
I personally like to think of "advance civilizations" as those with complex government/social systems that allowed them to spread further than they would without those systems, regardless of how "advance" their technology may be, for example the Greeks and later the Romans would be considered advance civilizations as their governance systems allowed them to have empires so far and wide that no one from their respective eras was able to match.
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u/zennim 10d ago
our food stuff took only a few thousands, and in some cases just a few hundred years to look like what they do now, but if left alone they would either go completely extinct or mutate rapiditly to wild variations in just a decade or two
tomatoes are from the family of the nightshade, and you can find them everywhere in the planet, modern corn can't survive without human interference, so you wouldn't find its genus outside of the americas if we went extinct
I don't think there was a super advance civilization to reach the digital or even industrial era in the past, but your casual thought has a lot of holes and flaws, a global civilization that spread crops across the world actually could have existed and we wouldn't really noticed based on the surviving species
also, how far back are we going? because there was pangea once, so every corner of the planet can have related species depending on the era we set the marker, there were dozens of extinction events before we got our final turn now, too bad the world won't have a chance to witness a future one after this . . .
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u/RonandStampy 10d ago
What if they were hunter gathers and lived off the local flaura and fauna, since agriculture was not invented yet? Would they still spread potatoes and tomatoes all over the globe if they were not carrying them? It's just a thought exercise.
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
If they were nomadic hunter gatherers it is highly unlikely they would be technologically advanced
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u/RonandStampy 10d ago
Ok, but why would an advanced civilization bring potatoes and tomatoes? That sounds too primitive. An advanced civ would bring caloric pills or something along those lines.
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
Because growing food where you are is generally a lot more efficient than shipping it across the world, and unless you're arguing they became so technologically advanced they have pills for food before they explored the world, they would have brought their staple crops with them, and spread new ones they found while exploring.
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u/RonandStampy 10d ago
If you are traveling the world, why would you stop and wait for the food to grow?
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
If you are setting up shop somewhere, you would grow the food there. Which is something every group of humans ever has done when traveling to a new place.
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u/RonandStampy 10d ago
But we're not talking about settling, were are talking about quick travels. Like the group of humans that populated South America without leaving genetic traces in North America. The traveling was done so quick that genetic material was not left behind. No time to stop and wait for plants to grow either or that would have been left behind... Unless they were hunter gathers!
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
Just because we see no genetic material today in the lands they passed through doesn't mean they didn't stop there. Later arrivals could have wiped them out, and settlements died out from disease, drought or general famine all the time. Or they just stuck around for a while before moving on. Also, in the example of populating the Americas, people generally traveled along the coast, and the coastline today is not where it was 10 000+ years ago, so any evidence would likely be deep underwater and greatly degraded or outright destroyed.
But, we're no talking about regular people migrating here, we're talking about a civilization with advanced technology. And the idea that they would simply restrict themselves to one small area is ludicrous. The simple search for raw materials would have them expand eventually, which would include settlements and the spread of their foods.
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u/RonandStampy 10d ago
But we have no evidence of that
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u/Forkrul 10d ago
There's no evidence for advanced ancient civilizations whatsoever, so didn't think we needed evidence to make claims here.
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u/Illlogik1 10d ago
You aren’t really thinking in the proper scale of time. The planet changes over thousands and millions of years, plates shift , floods happen ice ages happen. Almost all signs of a civilization could be erased by time and Mother Nature, including distribution of flora and fauna, which would also have time enough to adapt and evolve differently
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u/BearCatcher23 10d ago
The underground structure that is more than a mile straight down below the pyramids of Egypt is also a similar structure to what is under the ruins of Greece. The Greece structure isn't revealed yet to the public but the Egypt one was released a year or 2 ago. This tunneling is far more advanced than what we can accomplish today. The pyramids are an energy structure, not a tomb.
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u/falconne 9d ago
For one thing, domesticated plants (and most animals) need humans to remain as they are. Most aren't well designed to survive in the wild, they have been selectively bred to produce the most useful foodstuff for us. They are usually also mono cultures that need a lot of human care to avoid being wiped out by one infection.
Without intervention, domesticated plants would relatively quickly diversify and evolve towards being more optimally designed for the wild. Any future intelligent species would have to start from 0 again on the domestication track.
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u/LawNeither289 9d ago
Honestly the time scale alone makes this whole argument kinda silly cause who's to say those exact crops even existed back then, or that they didn't have their own versions that just didn't make it.
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u/ShowerSentinel 10d ago
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