Strange science 😦

[Paleophyte]

This bold theory says we're not Earth's first advanced civilisation

This rubbish clickbait has a dishonest title. The authors of the paper never suggested that their thought experiment should be taken to have any real-world implications. This isn't particularly strange science, it's simply badly misrepresented to the public in order to get higher advertizing revenue. This sort of promotion of scientific illiteracy should be punishable by having the perpetrator's teeth dragged across concrete.

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.

It's startlingly easy. You probably won't find much in the way of large structures, though where you do those will be a giveaway. Look instead to any depositional environment. Any river delta or oceanic floor will record a layer of burried micoplastics and fucked up isotopic signatures. Any landfills not erased by erosion will preserve an impressive record of our civilization, as will the shattered foundations of our cities. Even the ones that erode will leave an unmistakable mess downstream.