It’s all a choice, and the goal is living out every possible life, making every possible decision, in the pursuit of having someone “else” to interact with. 
Well, I mean, those ruins are still there, in spite of thousands of years of massive earthquakes in the region. 
My head is spinning lately. Between our inexplicable refusal to treat Covid patients or even allow it to be discussed and UAP, it’s driving me crazy. I don’t like mysteries, especially ones that impact my survival.
No not earthquakes, being detected by seismograph if they are down there, unless they are so advanced they are down there on servers and only print a body when they need it. Entirely possible another hominid came before us, advanced enough to leave, either by ship, dimensional or temporal or virtual. Plenty of time for it to have happened and all trace to be gone.
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If you don’t like mysteries, it may be the reason you’re not pleased with this world. The brain can only recall things it has experienced, but your body is not the limit of your true experience. “We” were all born with amnesia, on purpose.
I don’t think any sane human likes a mystery that impacts their chance of survival. That’s what drives us to explore for answers. Oh and I am fairly pleased with my life currently, the first thirty or so years, not so much.
No such thing as a sane human, and none of us have any chance of survival. We’re all going to die physically, and then the time will come when the last person has their last thought about us. It will be as if we never existed in the first place.
Even Einstein will be completely forgotten.
Not sure that is necessarily so. Quite possible we hit the singularity before I die. In which case, immortality. If the AI’s don’t kill us. Or we don’t wipe ourselves out along the way. There is no reason our bodies couldn’t be engineered to be immortal barring accidental death and have a back up just in case.
Functional immortality is nothing more than an increased, mortal lifespan. Even that singularity will evaporate, as will every proton. You’re already immortal. Always have been.
We are liable to undergo a hundred or a thousand years of technical progress as we know it to date over the next ten years because of the exponential progress of information technology. It is going to be a very unstable and dangerous time for humanity.
It may be theoretically possible to survive the end of this universe. Black holes may lead to other universes and information can survive the trip.
There were batteries in Iraq and Iran 1,500+ years ago.
Rome had a steam engine. Hell, they had mechanical clocks.
12,000 years ago, people were carving and stacking 20 ton stones when they were supposed to be stupid cavemen.
Technology is always advancing, right up until the moment humans get set back.
They as far as we know did not reach the information age and weren’t operating at logarithmic scale progress. We have and are. It took many thousand of years to get from farming to the steam engine, but less than a hundred to get from steam to self landing rockets and trillions of operation a second computers. Not particularly up for large scale disruption, chaos and existential humanity ending sort of events, just want to enjoy retirement, travel and hang out at the pool.
As far as we know, we don’t know much or anything about them. There is, however, physical evidence that people around the world had a shared knowledge/communication/technology/etc…
Let’s not forget that the steam engine was invented, forgotten, and reinvented. Same with batteries. Same with granite stone cutting. It happened at least once, and if some can happen, it likely happens often.
I was reading they used a plant based form of sulphuric acid to cut and join those stones. If they were advanced it was more likely in the areas of chemistry and biological. We would see traces of any large scale industry no matter how far back it was. If we go extinct and something intelligent arises a million years later, they will be able to deduce there is a shortage of easily accessible metals on the planet.
They found traces of the acid on ancient worksites in pots.
I mean think about ayahuasca. Hard to imagine that process being discovered by mere chance.
It’s not the methods themselves that are telling (we still don’t know what those are), it’s the global architecture. The spread of the same type of work, in all time zones.
All the ancient religions have tales of a golden age when people could fly in their chariots, speak to people in far off lands, use cut stones instead of fired bricks, etc…
It wasn’t. The knowledge of its origins are merely forgotten, like the vast majority of history.
Would have to be fairly small numbers or we wouldn’t have had the easy access metals we did, No way it was a seven billion person advanced society. I could see a few million advanced size society leaving no geological trace to speak of but not one of billions.
