This bold theory says we're not Earth's first advanced civilisation
In 2018, physicist Prof Adam Frank and Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller, published a paper exploring whether modern scientists would be able to detect evidence of an advanced industrial civilisation that ended millions of years ago.
They named this possibility the ‘Silurian hypothesis’, after an advanced reptilian race from the BBC’s long-running sci-fi show Doctor Who. They concluded that while it's extremely unlikely, evidence for such a civilisation might be hard to find.
Focusing on a period between 400 million and 4 million years ago, the researchers pondered what evidence might be left behind by this hypothetical society.
In just a few hundred years, our industries have made a huge impact on the world’s climate and ecosystems. But if the human race vanished, within a few hundred million years, any direct evidence of our society – or a previous one like it – would almost certainly be gone.
Our biggest cities would disappear in a geological blink of an eye, due to erosion and tectonic movements.
Instead, scientists searching for a long-lost civilisation would need to look for the geological fingerprints of their activities.
We might expect them to leave markers in Earth’s rocks and sediments such as evidence of massive carbon emissions, global climatic changes and sea-level rise.
The problem is that in the geological record, climate change caused by a fossil-fuel burning civilisation is hard to distinguish from climate change caused by natural forces.
In fact, there's an eerie similarity between modern climate change and events in Earth's history known as 'hyperthermals'. One such even occurred around 55 million years ago, when global temperatures rose by up to 8°C (14.4°F), but hyperthermals tend to coincide with intense tectonic activity.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-eart...vilisation
In 2018, physicist Prof Adam Frank and Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller, published a paper exploring whether modern scientists would be able to detect evidence of an advanced industrial civilisation that ended millions of years ago.
They named this possibility the ‘Silurian hypothesis’, after an advanced reptilian race from the BBC’s long-running sci-fi show Doctor Who. They concluded that while it's extremely unlikely, evidence for such a civilisation might be hard to find.
Focusing on a period between 400 million and 4 million years ago, the researchers pondered what evidence might be left behind by this hypothetical society.
In just a few hundred years, our industries have made a huge impact on the world’s climate and ecosystems. But if the human race vanished, within a few hundred million years, any direct evidence of our society – or a previous one like it – would almost certainly be gone.
Our biggest cities would disappear in a geological blink of an eye, due to erosion and tectonic movements.
Instead, scientists searching for a long-lost civilisation would need to look for the geological fingerprints of their activities.
We might expect them to leave markers in Earth’s rocks and sediments such as evidence of massive carbon emissions, global climatic changes and sea-level rise.
The problem is that in the geological record, climate change caused by a fossil-fuel burning civilisation is hard to distinguish from climate change caused by natural forces.
In fact, there's an eerie similarity between modern climate change and events in Earth's history known as 'hyperthermals'. One such even occurred around 55 million years ago, when global temperatures rose by up to 8°C (14.4°F), but hyperthermals tend to coincide with intense tectonic activity.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-eart...vilisation
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
