Jul 11, 2023 06:27 PM
https://nautil.us/could-an-industrial-ci...9030654636
EXCERPTS: Homo sapiens, the futurists tell us, may one day be succeeded by another intelligent species. But how do we know another intelligent species didn’t come before us? After all, if civilization had also arisen from an earlier, now-extinct animal species, where are the ruins of its cities? If we found fossils of dinosaurs that lived tens of millions of years ago, we should also have found relics of tombs and temples built in the deep past.
In 2018, climatologist Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank published an intriguing paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology called, “The Silurian hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?”
[...] The purpose of the Silurian hypothesis isn’t to assert that another civilization came before us. Rather, it’s a thought experiment to get us thinking about how we would know if a pre-human civilization once existed, a point that might be too subtle for some netizens in our age of Ancient Aliens memes.
Schmidt and Frank acknowledge that paleontologists haven’t uncovered fossilized evidence of pre-human civilizations—but that’s the point. If a civilization thrived millions of years prior to us, its artifacts could have been destroyed. Geological processes such as tectonic plate subduction and glaciation could easily erase evidence of ancient urbanization.
[...] Schmidt admits that his and Frank’s thought experiment has been met with a few good counter arguments. “The best one is probably the issue of deep mining,” Schmidt said. “We are mining very old deposits for metals and ore, and if these had been depleted by a prior civilization, it might have been noticed. These place limits on the scope of a prior civilization, but don’t eliminate the possibility.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Homo sapiens, the futurists tell us, may one day be succeeded by another intelligent species. But how do we know another intelligent species didn’t come before us? After all, if civilization had also arisen from an earlier, now-extinct animal species, where are the ruins of its cities? If we found fossils of dinosaurs that lived tens of millions of years ago, we should also have found relics of tombs and temples built in the deep past.
In 2018, climatologist Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank published an intriguing paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology called, “The Silurian hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?”
[...] The purpose of the Silurian hypothesis isn’t to assert that another civilization came before us. Rather, it’s a thought experiment to get us thinking about how we would know if a pre-human civilization once existed, a point that might be too subtle for some netizens in our age of Ancient Aliens memes.
Schmidt and Frank acknowledge that paleontologists haven’t uncovered fossilized evidence of pre-human civilizations—but that’s the point. If a civilization thrived millions of years prior to us, its artifacts could have been destroyed. Geological processes such as tectonic plate subduction and glaciation could easily erase evidence of ancient urbanization.
[...] Schmidt admits that his and Frank’s thought experiment has been met with a few good counter arguments. “The best one is probably the issue of deep mining,” Schmidt said. “We are mining very old deposits for metals and ore, and if these had been depleted by a prior civilization, it might have been noticed. These place limits on the scope of a prior civilization, but don’t eliminate the possibility.” (MORE - missing details)