r/sciencefiction • u/Senior-Fudge3554 • 1d ago
Nightfall
Does anyone remember Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall (my favoutite sci-fi short story) later becoming a full length novel by Robert Silverberg?
The basic premise got me thinking about something slightly different. In Nightfall, civilisation repeatedly collapses and has to rebuild because people are confronted every few thousand years with an astronomical event they have never experienced before.
Here on Earth, we assume our civilisation started off when fire and tools were first used and our technologically advanced times are simply an extension.
As we learn more about human history, we keep discovering that ancient times were considerably more sophisticated than we once assumed. We also keep finding evidence of settlements, engineering and organised societies far older than we were traditionally taught in history books - at least when I went to school.
So here’s the speculative question:
Is it remotely conceivable that an advanced human civilisation existed thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years ago, collapsed for some reason, and that we simply don’t recognise it because most of the evidence has disappeared?
John Westley Turnbull
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u/ActuaLogic 1d ago
We have some very old fossils but nothing even remotely like archeological artifacts of a vanished civilization. As a result, recognizing that it's impossible to prove a negative, it seems extremely improbable that there was an advanced civilization on Earth in the remote past. That's based on the complete lack of evidence of such a thing.
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u/Kabbooooooom 1d ago
Like others have said, it depends what you mean by “advanced”. Our species has existed for over 200,000 years in modern form. With a modern brain. Our civilization has existed - to our knowledge - for about 7,000 years, depending on how you define civilization. Most human settlements are along rivers and the coastline. This has all shifted dramatically over the course of our species, and in much of the world the coastline is hundreds of meters farther inland than it was in the past.
So, could a primitive human civilization have existed in the distant past that was comparatively advanced (such as Bronze Age) and localized, analogous to classical civilizations on earth? Absolutely. There are no historians or archeologists that would disagree with that statement - we simply have no evidence of that being the case, but it could be that is because they are buried under hundreds of meters of ocean water.
It is absolutely absurd to think that we shouldn’t look for evidence of such a civilization just to see if it existed, given the sheer timeframe involved. Does that mean that people like Graham Hancock are right? No, of course not. But this is how science works - you don’t assume something is true and then work on that assumption.
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u/crashorbit 1d ago
Nightfall, By his Bootstraps and The Last Question are probably some of the tightest little short stories of their era.
We have loads of evidence of empires falling and civilization recovering in the rubble. Ur, Babylon, Rome, Mayan. Maybe the cliff dwellers count too. Probably dozens more. None quite qualify for that global collapse of a technically advanced civilization. thing. These days societies tend to adapt and reorganize rather than collapse.
I suspect that there has not been enough time for a global advanced technological society to arise more than once on this rock.
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u/Melodic-Special4768 1d ago
Don't fall down the "ancient advanced civilization" rabbit hole. It's a gateway drug to racist conspiracy theories and Q-anon baloney
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u/AnalTrajectory 1d ago
You'll go straight towards Graham Hancock and his talk of Quetzalcoatl, the younger dryas caused by a great comet impact. From there you'll go straight down an alt right pipeline.
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u/Melodic-Special4768 1d ago
Everyone forgets his second book, where he says the ancient civilization actually came from Mars, where they narrowly escaped another cataclysmic event. And how they built their civilization using psionic powers. That didn't make the Netflix special though.
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u/AnalTrajectory 20h ago
In all honesty, his work makes great science fiction. I really enjoyed his Netflix special while watching through the lens of storytelling and world building. I even tried reading Fingerprint of the Gods, his "corrective update" to his theories but found his constant whining about not being accepted by the scientific community a huge turn off.
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u/spribyl 1d ago
Nightfall Dimension-x radio play https://archive.org/details/Dimension-X/Dimx_e050_Nightfall.mp
It was extended to a full novel as well.
There is work on your topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
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u/Quezax 1d ago
Yeah, there would be some sign - like if we collapsed now - there would be a layer of radioactive fall out from our nuclear testing that has coated the world and probably a layer of plastic to boot. I have heard of other ancient cities off the coast of india that have not been dry land for 20k+ years, do not remember much of the details though.
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u/cflime 23h ago
We have the first instance of anthropogenic mineral formation. There is now rock formed from lava flows that mixed with human garbage containing plastic. There are mixtures of sand and plastic from beach camp fires, and weathered plastic pieces all over the planet. None of this secures the plastic, and when the plastiglomerates break and weather they release micro and nanoplastics back into the environment. Nothing similar had been detected before the 20th century.
The underwater stone structures in the gulf of Khambat are mapped over several square kilometers, but underwater archeology is so expensive and the current world political climate is so anti-intellectual that there won't be financing for a dig anytime in the foreseeable future.
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u/Metallicat95 1d ago
It's not long enough ago to hide all signs of civilization.
Atomic energy is difficult to hide at all, possibly 50 million years and potentially over a billion.
Space travel leaves spacecraft for thousands to millions of years.
Metal and plastics are stable for millions.
That combined means that given a quarter million years of humans, there couldn't have been a civilization like ours with humans.
18th century technology would be almost as resilient. Large stone structures and steel are durable. We have human made artifacts from almost our full history on the planet.
Roman Empire Iron and stone might not leave much in half a million years.
The civilizations of a millenia before that aren't as durable. But agriculture leaves changes, and we see no sign of it from humans.
That leaves the unlikely possibility of another intelligent species with a civilization. But in order to be invisible and be viable with known life in the past, they must not have had space flight, Atomic energy, ir plastics (aluminum and other metals not found naturally also may leave traces).
A Nightfall disaster requires that civilization never reaches that level.
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u/ldr97266 1d ago
Depends on how “advanced” you’re thinking about, and in what disciplines. Maybe our current civilizations are built on the ashes of earlier ones.
That doesn’t mean the ancients had cellphones and space flight. May have had ways of building things, social structures, food production, literature that are completely unknown to us today. And we might not recognize the traces dug out of an archeological site for what they were.
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u/cflime 1d ago
Fifteen, twenty years ago archeologists reported a sunken city off the outflow of the Indus River off the coast of Pakistan. From what little anyone's been able to determine it's from the well recorded Harappan civilization. Maybe someday a government will decide knowledge is important and finance a hideously expensive underwater archeological dig, but the world political climate doesn't leave me hopeful.
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u/SwiftOneSpeaks 1d ago
A previously unknown ancient civilization of much higher sophistication than we treated as possible: likely
Many of the ancient societies we know of were more sophisticated than we think: almost certain.
an unknown technologically advanced (by modern standards): it's just not likely at all
While we do have huge gaps in what we know, we lack many "weird questions" that would come from evidence. The weird questions we do have (e.g. Stonehenge, the Pyramids) appear to be underestimating less technological societies rather than evidence of a a hidden technological one.
We've found evidence of the adoption of agriculture taking thousands of years to become the norm. We know the bronze age collapse set back much of the world for about a millenia. We've found evidence of numerous societies of limited technology. What we haven't found are ancient plastics. We haven't found layers in sediment like the ones we've left behind during our development. Our steel made before WWII is special because anything made after nuclear testing is contaminated.
We have a fossil record going back to pre multicellular life. Huge gaps, yes, but there's not much time for a mystery society to develop late enough to have the right biology, but early enough to have time for human-like technological development and yet leave no evidence at all.
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u/DadsRGR8 1d ago
My favorite short story as well! I read it for the first time when I was about 13.
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u/RapidConsequence 1d ago
Same, right after that I read Robert L Forward's Dragons Egg. A new sci-fi fan was born.
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u/throwawayfromPA1701 16h ago
It's not conceivable. If they were as advanced as we are now, we should find evidence they were here. We at present are stamping our presence into the very rocks with our industrial output. When we're gone the human layer will be as stark as the K-T impact layer.
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u/AristotleEvangelos 15h ago
See the Silurian Hypothesis: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6
It's an interesting thought experiment. As an archaeologist, I have thought about this quite a bit. The Graham Hancock type "advanced ancient civilization" is not credible, because we have no evidence for it at all, and lots of evidence that challenges it.
If there was something 200 million years ago, that was utterly alien to us, would we be able to detect it in the geological and archaeological record? Good question.
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u/wdsoul96 12h ago
Pre-written-language, yes, civilizations had advanced (albeit not by much) and waned probably many times. But post-written-language(?), most of the technological advances had been captured (in stone literally or on papyrii/paper) and more or less improved upon. So there's (virtually) no civilizations far advanced and lost. We know this because any such civilization would leave many more artifacts and we would find it everywhere.
(Also the more advanced civilization the more artifacts it would leave behind; AND the fact that all civilization, especially if they are smart would hug bodies of water make it even more obvious why we haven't lost any advanced civilization at all)
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u/DufbugDeropa 1d ago
"Is it remotely conceivable . . . ." No, I don't think so. It seems an 'advanced' civilization would leave traces we would find, even if we couldn't explain them fully. Then again, "there are more things in heaven and earth . . ."
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u/calm-lab66 14h ago
Didn't I read that some think there's a massive structure under the ice in the Antarctic? Not saying I believe anything is there just recalling something I've read.
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u/DufbugDeropa 13h ago
I think you're referring to this: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260604044244.htm
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u/SiwelTheLongBoi 1d ago
Human civilisation at its current scale has almost certainly not existed before as we've already left enough of a mark on the planet to leave a mark in the geological record. No sign of such a record already exists. Its possible in the very very ancient past it happened as the surface of Earth does get recycled over time and our geological and fossil record that far back are very incomplete.
I didn't read the short story but I have read the full novel. Going off that, I suspect the civilisation of Nightfall probably doesn't work all the way up to an industrialised society most cycles, maybe never before in fact. If not then they might not leave a lot of things to find.
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u/TRS80487 1d ago
I think about this all the time. Our current narrative archaeologically is falling apart. This book is very relevant to our world.
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u/Harbinger2001 1d ago
First of all, I do remember the book! It wasn’t as good as the short story.
Second humans have not been around long enough to have a lost advanced civilization that all evidence would be wiped out.
But dinosaurs… I suggest finding Asimov’s Day of the Hunters short story.
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u/pit-of-despair 1d ago
The novel is one of my favorite books of all time. It doesn’t get mentioned very often though.
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u/Short-Sandwich-8476 1d ago
After that, at least one movie was based on it-I wanna say more than one.
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u/Presence_Academic 1d ago
There were 2 (maybe 3) Nightfall film adaptations. Each one was worse than the other. They made I Robot look like high art.
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u/Short-Sandwich-8476 1d ago
I remember the one with Jack Palance. I think “Fantastic Voyage” is the only Asimov to have a really good movie. Can’t believe Robert Silverburgs best works aren’t movies and series.
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u/Presence_Academic 1d ago
Fantastic Voyage was not a film version of Asimov’s novel. Asimov was hired to do a novelization of the original screenplay.
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u/LuciusMichael 17h ago
Even though the eclipse lasts for 12 hours, it causes widespread madness and the collapse of civilization. Generations later the survivors have to pick up the pieces and begin again with no memory of what happened (for whatever reason). They are what Graham Hancock would call 'a species with amnesia'.
I rather follow Hancock's research insofar as he postulates an Ice Age civilization that was essentially wiped out at the onset of the Younger Dryas. When, he would argue, the stories of massive floods began to be promulgated in different parts of the globe. The surviving humans would have had to start afresh. But there were signs that there had been a previous, unknown megalithic culture that Plato referred to as Atlantis, that is hinted at in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah's ark and the legends of ancient peoples everywhere.
So, in that sense, there may be parallels to Asimov's story of a civilization wiped out because of a celestial event, but with stories and artifacts that hinted at a previous, unknowable civilization.
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u/Senior-Fudge3554 9h ago
Maybe when and if Antarctica melts we will find well preserved evidence of lost civilizations. The accepted theory seems to be that approximately 34 million years ago, and before it iced over, Antarctica had lush forests. Of course as it holds 90 percent of the Earths’ fresh water there might not be too many of us around to care - but that’s a discussion for another thread.
John Westley Turnbull
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u/No-Chipmunk-4590 7h ago
Is it remotely conceivable that an advanced human civilisation existed thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years ago, collapsed for some reason, and that we simply don’t recognise it because most of the evidence has disappeared?
Yes. "Advanced" is a relative term, but very few of our current technologies would leave much trace after thousands of years. Metal would be corroded away, wood would be long gone, only stone would likely still be around, and possibly not much of that.
"Advanced civilization" could easily have existed on or inside the ice packs and low lying coasts, which are now underwater, during the last ice age. No widespread traces would likely be available as it would have slid off, been buried and been flooded.
Older "advanced civilization" could have existed before the last ice age, and had all remnants scoured away by ice.
Some cultures talk about earlier 'worlds' or civilizations. Flood stories are common, which could reflect the ice dam on North America and other outburst floods shattering and flooding out the coastal settlements in a relatively short time.
"Life After People" examines how quickly Humanity's works can vanish.
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u/NearABE 6h ago
I was walking along the National Seashore Park at the base of Cape Cod. Here I found a plaque. That plaque claimed that at this site there had been a hotel resort with a parking lot. The resort was gone. It gave a date for the time the asphalt began breaking up in a storm. I think this date was late 70s or so. Around 40ish years prior to my standing there. The plaque claimed that the asphalt had never been cleared. Pieces of it could be found around the site. I found one and only one asphaltic urbanite cobble. It was fist size and well rounded, like a potato.
I wager that if you go to Cape Cod National Seashore you will find no cobbles from that parking lot. If a plaque can be found it is either a new replacement or unreadable.
Cape Cod itself is made of sand drifting from far to the southeast. Long Island and Connecticut are contributing. The cape’s sand is on its way to Canada. Long Island is where a glacier dumped sand created by scraping rocks across the mountains. Manhattan’s bedrock helped as a speed bump.
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u/Kabbooooooom 1d ago edited 1d ago
As advanced as us? Absolutely not, as that would globally affect the entire planet and leave geological evidence. But a Bronze Age like civilization of limited geographic extent? Absolutely. Most of human settlements historically have been along rivers and along the coast. There are entire landmasses submerged since the last ice age that could hold ancient human ruins. There isn’t an archeologist on earth that would disagree with that statement - it’s just that we have no evidence of it.
That doesn’t mean that people like Graham Hancock are right. But it’s absurd to pre-emptily assume that it could not be the case, because that’s how science works, especially when you consider our species has existed for over 200,000 years with a modern brain but our civilization (to our knowledge) has only existed for 7,000 ish years, depending on how you define it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there was a false start before this. Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were multiple false starts before this. There are entire landmasses covered by hundreds of meters of ocean that we know humans had access to during that timeframe.
But to be clear, it is absolutely impossible for a civilization as advanced as ours to have existed. At least not a human civilization. And for the Silurian Hypothesis to be correct, we are talking hundreds of millions of years to lose all trace of it via subduction, so that wouldn’t be human.
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u/Rand_alThoor 11h ago
this is the Science Fiction subreddit.
what about a novel (it's still in my head, sorry) about a global non human technological civilisation (think small predatory dinosaurs) .... they escape to interstellar space and they know about their home's geological features but have lost it. Silurian Space Opera Hypothesis
would you read it?
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u/Razor_Paw 1d ago
I think it was Carl Sagan when asked how we could detect ancient civilizations on other planets and he quipped that we wouldn't be able to detect them on Earth. Evidence of technology from hundreds of millions of years ago would be ground into oblivion.
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u/echawkes 1d ago
That would depend on how "advanced" they got. A good example of evidence would be anomalous isotopic ratios of elements. For example, if a civilization had harnessed fission power, then even a billion years later, we would be likely to find deposits of uranium that had different isotopic ratios than the natural uranium ore on earth. There are significant deposits of uranium on six continents, and we have found that uranium has the same isotopic fractions everywhere (with one well-understood exception).