Have you ever wondered if another species may grow to human-level intelligence long after humans have left this planet? We don’t know about you, but we always see raccoons in that job.
Perhaps in 70 million years, a family of masked fuzzballs will gather in front of Mt. Rushmore, starting a fire with their opposable thumbs and wondering what creatures sculpted this mountain. But, hold on a second, would Mt. Rushmore last that long? And what if we end up being the raccoons?
To put it another way, if a technologically advanced species dominated the globe around the time of the dinosaurs, would we even know about it? And how can we know it didn’t happen if it didn’t?
The land prior to time.
It’s called the Silurian Hypothesis (and, lest you think scientists aren’t nerds, it’s named after a bunch of Doctor Who monsters). It simply says that humans are not the first sentient living forms to have evolved on our planet, and that if there were ancestors 100 million years ago, almost all trace of them would have been gone by now.
To clarify, physicist and co-author Adam Frank noted in an Atlantic article, “It’s not often that you publish a paper giving a notion that you don’t support.” In other words, they do not believe in the reality of a Time Lord and Lizard People civilisation. Instead, they want to figure out how to find evidence of ancient civilizations on faraway planets.
It may appear natural that we would see evidence of such a civilisation – after all, dinosaurs existed 100 million years ago, as evidenced by the discovery of their fossils. Despite this, they have been around for more than 150 million years.
This is essential since it isn’t only about how old or large the ruins of this fictitious civilization would be. It’s also about how long it’s been around. Humanity has spread over the globe in an astoundingly short span of time – approximately 100,000 years.
If another species did the same thing, we’d have a lot better chance of discovering it in the geological record. Frank and his climatologist co-author Gavin Schmidt’s research aims to pinpoint methods for discovering deep-time civilizations.
It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.
We probably don’t have to tell you that humans have already had a long-term impact on the ecosystem. As it dissolves, plastic will breakdown into microparticles that will be absorbed into the sediment for millennia.
Even if they linger for a long time, finding that small stratum of plastic particles may be challenging. Looking for periods of increasing carbon in the atmosphere, on the other hand, could be more fruitful.
The Earth is currently in the Anthropocene epoch, which is characterized by human rule. It is also notable for an unprecedented rise in airborne carbons.
That is not to say that there is more carbon in the atmosphere than ever before. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of exceptionally high global temperatures, happened 56 million years ago.
The temperature at the poles hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius). Simultaneously, there is evidence of increased amounts of fossil carbons in the atmosphere, the exact cause of which is unknown. This carbon accumulation occurred over hundreds of thousands of years. Is this the evidence of an advanced civilization from prehistoric times? Is it possible that the Earth witnessed anything beyond our wildest dreams?
The intriguing study’s message is that there is, in fact, a method for searching for ancient civilizations. It’s as simple as combing through ice cores for brief, fast bursts of carbon dioxide — but the “needle” they’d be looking for in this haystack would be easy to miss if the researchers didn’t know what they were looking for.