An Antique Planet

Antique Planet

« In the very beginning everything was resting in perpetual darkness; night oppressed everything like an impenetrable thicket” (The Great Father myth of the Aranda people of Central Australia).

“All was in suspense, all calm, all in silence; all montionless and still; and the expanse of the sky was empty”. (The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya).

The erosion of landforms, the dendritic patterns and oxbows of rivers, the presence of lakes and battered volcanic plugs all spoke of an ancient battle between landforming and erosional processes. Really for an intelligence smarter than an average, this was an antique planet with a brand new civilization.

Most of the planets in the Galaxy would be venerable and pretechnical, maybe even lifeless. A few world harbour civilizations much older than ours. Worlds with technical civilizations just beginning to emerge must be spectacularly rare. It was perhaps the only quality fundamentally unique about the Earth.

An Antique Planet. How ignorant we are of our own past. Papyruses, inscriptions, books time-bind the human species and permit us to hear those few voices and faint cries of our brothers and sisters, our ancestors. And what a joy of recognition when we realize how like us they were. (Megan Jorgensen). Photo by Elena

Are the worlds of more advanced civilizations totally geometrized, entirely rebuilt by their inhabitants? Or would the signature of a really advanced civilization be that they left no signal at all? Would they be able to tell in one swift glance precisely which stage we were in some great cosmic evolutionary sequence in the development of intelligent beings?

In the lifetime of the universe there has apparently not been enough time for an initial gravitational nonuniformity to collect the amount of mass that seems to reside in the Virgo supercluster, for example.

Our achievements rest on the accomplishments of 40,000 generations or our human predecessor, all but a tiny fraction of whom are nameless and forgotten. Every now and then we stumble on a major civilization, such as the ancient culture of Ebla, which flourished only a few millennia ago and about which we knew nothing.

Planets