We’ve always assumed we were the first advanced civilisation on Earth.
But proving that is harder than you might think.
In 2018, two scientists, Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, published a paper called “The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?”
They were exploring how we might find intelligent life on other worlds.
But that raised a disturbing question about our own.
If an industrial civilisation existed here millions of years before us… would we even know?
Their answer? We’d be very unlikely to find anything.
Cities. Machines. The remains of their world.
Over millions of years, erosion, burial and the recycling of Earth’s crust could erase those recognisable signs.
What might survive is something much harder to interpret: Unusual chemicals in the rocks. A sudden shift in carbon. Traces of a planet being transformed.
But natural catastrophes can leave similar fingerprints.
Now they weren’t saying an earlier civilisation existed.
They were asking whether we could recognise one if it had.
Because before we search other planets for vanished civilisations…
How certain are we that we’d spot one on our own?
Credit : Meachal Button on X
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But proving that is harder than you might think.
In 2018, two scientists, Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, published a paper called “The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?”
They were exploring how we might find intelligent life on other worlds.
But that raised a disturbing question about our own.
If an industrial civilisation existed here millions of years before us… would we even know?
Their answer? We’d be very unlikely to find anything.
Cities. Machines. The remains of their world.
Over millions of years, erosion, burial and the recycling of Earth’s crust could erase those recognisable signs.
What might survive is something much harder to interpret: Unusual chemicals in the rocks. A sudden shift in carbon. Traces of a planet being transformed.
But natural catastrophes can leave similar fingerprints.
Now they weren’t saying an earlier civilisation existed.
They were asking whether we could recognise one if it had.
Because before we search other planets for vanished civilisations…
How certain are we that we’d spot one on our own?
Credit : Meachal Button on X
$SPX
$SPK
$SPELL