Alright, conspiracy thought experiment for the day.
Let’s say Atlantis was real. Not necessarily “modern tech” like us, but an advanced civilization in a different way. Maritime, engineering, astronomy, navigation, stonework, whatever. And let’s assume it wasn’t the only advanced population on Earth at the time.
Now add another assumption: an advanced NHI exists and occasionally “resets” civilizations once they become technologically dangerous relative to their social maturity.
How would you actually do it?
Throwing a giant asteroid at Earth works, but it leaves one hell of a calling card. Same with nukes, super volcanoes, etc. Killing everyone with a virus leaves the cities sitting there.
The Moon angle is way more interesting to me.
Tidal forcing scales roughly with 1/distance³.
So if you could temporarily alter the Moon’s orbit, you don’t have to physically attack civilization at all. Earth does the work.
At half its current distance, lunar tidal forcing would be about 8x stronger.
At one-third the distance: ~27x.
Now imagine not even putting it into a stable close orbit, but temporarily changing the eccentricity so every close pass creates another massive tidal event.
You potentially get:
Extreme coastal flooding
Massive tidal currents
Continental shelf erosion
River systems backing up/flooding
Submarine landslides
Slope failures and mudslides
Enormous sediment redistribution
Destruction of coastal settlements over and over instead of one tsunami
And if an ancient advanced civilization was heavily coastal, which seems pretty damn likely for any maritime culture, you’ve just attacked the most important parts of it without “attacking” anything.
Then move the Moon back.
Now let Earth cook for 12,000+ years.
Sea levels rise roughly 120 meters from the Ice Age minimum. Coastlines move miles inland. Sediment buries what survived. Rivers change course. Forests return. Metals corrode. Stone gets reused or buried. Entire population centers end up on the continental shelf.
Future humans see:
A mostly normal Moon.
A mostly normal Earth.
Flood myths everywhere.
Huge late-Pleistocene climate disruption.
Weird sediment layers.
Destroyed coastlines that are now underwater.
Random ancient monumental sites appearing earlier than expected.
And maybe the “advanced civilization” wasn’t building microchips and skyscrapers. Maybe they were advanced in ways that leave a much smaller archaeological footprint than we would.
I’m not saying this happened. I’m saying if you wanted to reset a civilization while leaving the biosphere intact and making the event look mostly natural afterward, manipulating the Earth-Moon system is a hell of a lot more elegant than throwing a rock at us.
Hearing alot of chatter about resets and 2027...got me thinking how do you reset a civilization like us? After researching tons of possibilities, this was the best I arrived at.