> So, in their original paper, Schmidt & Frank didn’t actually voice belief in an ancient civilization, but pondered the question if and how it would be detectable. They conclude that no ruins of ancient football stadiums, highways or housing projects would survive geological time.
That's absurd. If modern housing can't survive geological time, then dinosaur fossils also can't survive it. But fossils can actually survive geological time. So housing can as well. So an ancient civilization would be visible in the geological record.
A lot of houses use hard stone in various places, sometimes even granite, which is a lot more durable than any fossilized skeleton. So the assumption definitely holds.
And those stones will survive, but the structure they are a part of will not. When you pull a stone out of a structure, it becomes just a stone. Structures become unrecognizable in a relatively short time span.
Fossils are as durable as stone (indeed they are stone) but their structure is preserved in such a way that they remain distinctly identifiable for millions of years.
I doubt nature produces square granite, and certainly not hexagonal granite or even more complex shapes. Erosion affects fossilized skeletons more than granite, because granite is harder.
That piece of granite that a human cut square is not going to still be square in 1 million years, nonetheless 100 million.
Both fossils and granite erode. But an eroded fossil is still identifiable as a fossil. Stick it under a microscope and you'll see the microstructure produced by living cells, even if macroscopically it just looks like a hunk of rock. An eroded piece of granite is just another piece of granite.
Maybe under the right conditions an eroded piece of granite that started off square will still look kinda squarish, but no sane person finding a kinda squarish piece of granite is going to conclude it must have been a building block of an ancient civilization of hyperintelligent squids.
That's absurd. If modern housing can't survive geological time, then dinosaur fossils also can't survive it. But fossils can actually survive geological time. So housing can as well. So an ancient civilization would be visible in the geological record.