Article What if we weren’t the first advanced civilization on Earth?

[C C]

https://www.zmescience.com/science/a-pro...-on-earth/

EXCERPTS: A long-lived, solar-powered civilization might leave hardly a trace. By contrast, a short-lived one — fueled by fossil carbon — would leave a distinctive isotopic spike, just as humans are doing now.

As they scoured Earth’s geological past, Schmidt and Frank identified events that eerily resemble today’s Anthropocene. Chief among them: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a rapid global warming event 56 million years ago, triggered by a mysterious pulse of carbon...

[...] The Silurian Hypothesis is not about proving an ancient lost civilization existed. As we’ve seen, it would be almost impossible to tell from very subtle geological traces. Rather, it’s more about asking what signs civilizations leave behind — and what that tells us about our own.

“While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own,” the authors conclude, “asking the question in a formal way… raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies.” (MORE - missing details)

[Zinjanthropos]

Maybe they arrived here in colossal spaceships and stayed for a period of time. Didn’t need to set up shop, did everything needed to survive while in orbit. Meanwhile they just monkeyed around here on Earth. Eventually buggering off but you would think they would have deliberately left something behind just in case an intelligence evolved that needed some wisdom. They needed to be smart about it and place this information where it could be safe for a long interval until found. Why not the moon in several places? Be a great story to find evidence of such on or within the lunar body. Wheres a good hiding spot on Earth? Silly me, there’s probably YouTube videos of such.

[Magical Realist]

They needed to be smart about it and place this information where it could be safe for a long interval until found.

Paul Davies suggests that a past alien species could have inserted a message into our own DNA:

"Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record.

Which leads to an even more radical proposal. Life on Earth stores genetic information in DNA. A lot of DNA seems to be junk, however. If aliens, or their robotic surrogates, long ago wanted to leave us a message, they need not have used radio waves. They could have uploaded the data into the junk DNA of terrestrial organisms. It would be the modern equivalent of a message in a bottle, with the message being encoded digitally in nucleic acid and the bottle being a living, replicating cell. (It is possible—scientists today have successfully implanted messages of as many as 100 words into the genome of bacteria.) A systematic search for gerrymandered genomes would be relatively cheap and simple. Incredibly, a handful of (unsuccessful) computer searches have already been made for the tell-tale signs of an alien greeting."

My only question is: what would this vital message be? The formula for endless free energy? The secret to consciousness? The cheat code for our cosmic simulation? Or maybe the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body..lol