Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

137 pointsposted 6 days ago
by yk
(travelandtannins.com)

70 Comments

broken-kebab

2 days ago

Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.

RamblingCTO

2 days ago

I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.

raptor111

2 days ago

the "why it matters" subtitle near the end seems very much like claude to me

eth0up

2 days ago

That falls into the general category of 'authority groping' (yes, I coin my own terms) where a prediction engine without real reasoning, must apply numerous tricks to convey confidence, authority and substance where there may be less or none. Similar to the constant negative-propositions or "not" statement, where usually one to three things that do not apply are articulated, which has the result of credibility accumulation, I suppose, by showing "hey, I am right about not just one thing, but four!" hence the saturated styles we tend to see.

_kulang

2 days ago

I saw a great video on YouTube by languagejones, and he asks: do we have to tell the difference between an LLM and an idiot?

The writing is just bad. I think this is clear to everyone, so I guess we could stop at that

springtimesun

2 days ago

Stake the claim then. I’ve also read a fair bit of LLM text and this didn’t trip anything for me.

Edit: after reading the author bio and the other articles, I agree with this assessment. Though I will admit, this particular article didn’t jump out as AI to me.

homeonthemtn

2 days ago

It's Claude. I picked up on it too (I am also a heavy Claude user)

The title alone gives it away. Sentences like this also trigger my daily annoyance:

"Researchers found an elegant way to test it, and the timing was almost too convenient."

Me: "Almost too convenient is expressing an opinion. Rewrite this to be straight forward, succinct information"

Claude: "You're right, and I was wrong. That's the second time you've had to correct me this session. Let me update my memory to adjust for this"

Eye twitch

everybodyknows

2 days ago

And the nonsensical, chatty slang

> Let me ...

As if Claude actually needed the human user's permission or cooperation to do so.

yaemiko

2 days ago

"summary, a, b, c, why it matters" + fillers

like the summarization tools based on those models except it's the opposite, it was fluffed up into a long article

wpollock

3 days ago

Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it never had connections to the outside, just because it doesn't have connections now.

defrost

2 days ago

Geology is most probably largely how the sealed claim has been made .. it was open to the world when the limestone was forming, formed (Speleogenesis) by sky water (rain) permeating down and eating out a limestone void, and "sealed" by thick and impermeable layers of clays and loess (windborne sediment) some 2.5 million years ago during the Quaternary.

There are also genetic drift estimates, which put the "last" outside species to enter at about that time (

  One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave )

lostlogin

2 days ago

Mentioning the recent Chernobyl accident is weird too. Surely an accident from long ago that is expected to be detectable is far more helpful.

All they proved is that nothing had entered since the Chernobyl accident.

defrost

2 days ago

It's an AI article.

Looking for Chernobyl signature in cave during the late 1980s / early 1990s does seem daft - far more likely for them to be looking for residual "trace" from the atmospheric tests that doused the planet in "unnatural" residuals and odd isotopes.

fragmede

2 days ago

Have there been many nuclear reactor meltdowns prior to Chernobyl?

defrost

2 days ago

Before 1986 there have been twelve "public" core meltdowns, and at least six, likely more, incidents not public on nuclear subs, etc.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.

More significantly, there's been a lot of above ground and atmospheric tests that have draped residuals across the planet, and a bunch of dirty Russian / former USSR sites that drift trace across Europe.

inigyou

2 days ago

Isn't there a nuclear bomb sitting somewhere in a swamp in the USA that everybody lost?

defrost

2 days ago

"Yes"

- TBH I'd be surprised if it's still "lost" - not further reported on because [ XXXredactedXXX ] is more likely.

rbanffy

2 days ago

Also, if the finding is never recorded, it can be used to frame just about anyone who can be accused of finding it and smuggling it out of the US.

fragmede

a day ago

> Before 1986 there have been twelve "public" core meltdowns

Significantly before in relation to the 5.5 M year claim?

> You should look up how many live armed nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped on mainland US soil.

Did they explode in a way that would lead to workers in Romania being able to detect their radioactivity in their cave?

hvb2

2 days ago

You could just look for isotopes from the atmospheric nuclear tests that were conducted? Doesn't need to be a reactor I would assume?

nbernard

2 days ago

Indeed. That's one of the reasons why the "Before Present" time scale (that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch) is sometimes called "Before Physics" (another one being that 1950 is less and less "present", of course)!

rbanffy

2 days ago

> that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch

I guess we can say this is when humankind reached adulthood, became able to drink and got a driver’s license. And a gun.

lostlogin

2 days ago

Yes.

But also, finding something from within the last hundred years doesn’t say an awful lot about something claimed to have been a closed system for millions of years.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

bcraven

3 days ago

"Combined with the geology and the peculiar chemistry of the cave’s water and air, the evidence pointed to a system that had been closed off since roughly five and a half million years ago."

defrost

2 days ago

That quote, from the AI generated article, simply asserts the cave was sealed, it doesn't explain how the cave came to be sealed, nor how it is that modern humans infer the cave has been sealed and for how long.

Rebelgecko

2 days ago

On the flip side, the wiki article for the cave mentions that new species arrived as recently as 2 million years ago...

gregoriol

2 days ago

The wikipedia article says "While animals have lived in the cave for 5.5 million years, not all of them arrived simultaneously. One of the most recent animals recorded is the cave's only species of snail, Heleobia dobrogica, which has inhabited the cave for slightly more than 2 million years."

pokpokpok

3 days ago

Does anyone have the original source of this information? This article seems to be AI generated: https://www.pangram.com/history/fdf6dfd6-1a9c-4267-a90c-a3cf...

phyzome

2 days ago

Pangram isn't useful for single documents. Too many false positives. It only gives something approaching actionable results if you use it on an entire corpus.

vixen99

2 days ago

An updated Turing Test is overdue or has someone suggested one?

croes

2 days ago

Pangram isn’t a reliable detector

BlackRabbit1

2 days ago

Still the linked article reads like slop

croes

2 days ago

Doesn’t mean it is.

I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.

lelanthran

2 days ago

I keep requesting this here, but so far I haven't been given any links.

There's probably a good reason for that.

franze

2 days ago

> this was not an ordinary cave. It was something far rarer

so probably a cheap openai model

sntran

2 days ago

For some reason, I feel sad. I was always fascinated when finding an article about newly found discoveries on Earth, and the comments from Hacker News were usually helpful and adding more to the stories.

Now, we talk about whether such discovery was written by LLM.

Does it really matter?

cyberax

3 days ago

> Oxygen levels run at roughly half of what our lungs expect. Carbon dioxide is present at concentrations enormously higher than in the outside atmosphere. The air is laced with hydrogen sulfide, the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs, and with methane and ammonia.

So it was not truly sealed. A truly sealed cave would have had no oxygen, it would have all been consumed in reactions with methane.

dyauspitr

3 days ago

Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s). Nothing about this is sealed.

john_strinlai

3 days ago

>Yeah it has significant groundwater inflow (like 5L/s).

where did it say this? i did a double-take because the article says the opposite, and i checked the wikipedia and didnt see it there either. is there another source of info? or am i being blind?

dyauspitr

2 days ago

> Mesothermal, sulfidic groundwater (up to 1 mM in H2S) originating from an artesian sulfidic aquifer underlying the region enters at the bottom of the cave’s lower passages. This results in a constant flow occurring tens of centimeters to 1 m below the water surface at flow rates of about 5 L/s

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10672346/

0-_-0

2 days ago

Right, so it was sealed only in the biological sense, which makes sense since there needs to be an inflow of energy

statictype

3 days ago

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects.

Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

quuxplusone

2 days ago

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

usrusr

2 days ago

Add to this that life in darkness sustained by microbes consuming a rock surface will be rather slow. Because any fast processes would just flash out after a boom/bust cycle or two. And presumably not just slow in terms of no cheetah vs antelope racing, but also much slower than out in the sun in generational turnover.

I wonder how big that cave system is, as in number of barley connected caverns. There might have been quite a few cycles one cavern flashing out and then slowly getting repopulated from the neighboring cavern(s). The "magical" balance we admire in nature isn't a miracle, it's the result of endless series of failure.

somenameforme

2 days ago

We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!

sidewndr46

2 days ago

Isn't it more accurate to say we went from wolves to dogs? Dogs are not a group of species. The domesticated dog is a species.

Also canines seem to hybridize well, suggesting they aren't truly differentiated anyways.

somenameforme

2 days ago

Biology is quite arbitrary. For instance the dingo is basically just a wild dog, looks like a dog, can breed and create fertile offspring with dogs, yet is considered its own species.

So I prefer things that are more visceral in nature. There are lots of dogs that look a lot like wolves, but going from a wolf to a chihuahua is just kind of mind boggling in terms of the degree of change over such a small window of time. There's one extremely disappointed great great great ... grandfather wolf somewhere. 'Kids these days.'

sidewndr46

2 days ago

Same thing happens with plants on a similar timescale right? Cultivars look nothing like their wild relatives at this point.

j13n

2 days ago

Humans didn’t evolve from chimps.

0-_-0

2 days ago

No but they could over 5 million years

sockaddr

2 days ago

Yes, but an alternative would be that if an organism is perfectly fit for its static environment (that hasn't changed in 5 million years) then there is no benefit to evolving novel features.

More likely a dynamic environment is most important for intelligence.

weaksauce

3 days ago

the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.

rbanffy

2 days ago

There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).

DannyBee

2 days ago

Isn't this the opening to a few of those "virus destroys humanity" movies?

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

andrewstuart

3 days ago

Great first line for a story.

visarga

2 days ago

It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.

rbanffy

2 days ago

Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.

lelanthran

2 days ago

You think machines are a race? Where did you go to school?

layer8

2 days ago

Even space is a race.

charlie0

2 days ago

It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....

rbanffy

2 days ago

Or the Reptilians. Or nazis from the centre of the Earth.

hulitu

2 days ago

> Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave

Oh, so that's why my neighbour, Vasile, drills day and night. He hopes to discover a new life form. /s

TacticalCoder

2 days ago

This already happened in the past: they found a cave totally sealed since so long that spiders still had eyes, but non-functioning ones (for they were totally in the dark for generations and generations, eyes didn't make sense anymore).

Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.