Hello... I’m back... I’ve been gone for a while now... It’s because I’ve been sick 🤢. I’m still sick right now. And here’s a new post.
Do we really know we were the first technological species on Earth? We’ve had an industrial society for only about 300 years, but there’s been complex life on land for nearly 400 million years.
If humans went extinct today, any future civilization that might arise on Earth millions of years hence might find it hard to recognize traces of human civilization. By the same token, if some earlier civilization existed on Earth millions of years ago, we might have trouble finding evidence of it.
IN SEARCH OF LIZARD PEOPLE
The discovery of physical artifacts would certainly be the most dramatic evidence of a Silurian-style civilization on Earth, but Scientists doubts we’ll ever find anything of the sort.
Our cities cover less than one percent of the surface, Any comparable cities from an earlier civilization would be easy for modern-day paleontologists to miss. And no one should count on finding a Jurassic iPhone; it wouldn’t last millions of years, Gorilla Glass or no.
Finding fossilized bones is a slightly better bet, but if another advanced species walked the Earth millions of years ago — if they walked — it would be easy to overlook their fossilized skeletons — if they had skeletons. Modern humans have been around for just 100,000 years, a thin sliver of time within the vast and spotty fossil record.
Scientists suggest zeroing in on plastics and other long-lived synthetic molecules as well as radioactive fallout (in case factions of ancient lizard people waged atomic warfare). In our case, technological development has been accompanied by widespread extinctions and rapid environmental changes, so those are red flags as well.
After reviewing several suspiciously abrupt geologic events of the past 380 million years, the researchers conclude that none of them clearly fit a technological profile. Some researchers calls for more research, such as studying how modern industrial chemicals persist in ocean sediments and then seeing if we can find traces of similar chemicals in the geologic record.
LUNAR ARCHAEOLOGY
A lot of scientists are now applying serious scientific thinking to the possibility of pre-human technological civilizations.
Habitable planets like Earth are pretty good at destroying unmaintained things on their surfaces, So they’ve been looking at the exotic possibility that such a civilization might have been a spacefaring one. If so, artifacts of their technology, or technosignatures, might be found elsewhere in the solar system.
Some researchers suggests looking for such artifacts not just on the lunar surface, but also on asteroids or buried on Mars — places where such objects could theoretically survive for hundreds of millions or even billions of years.
SpaceX’s recent launch of a Tesla Roadster into space offers an insight into how such a search might go. Several astronomers pointed their telescopes at the car and showed that, even if you had no idea what you were looking at, you’d still quickly pick it out as one weird-looking asteroid.
Finding technosignatures in space is an extreme long shot, but some argues that the effort is worthwhile. There are lots of other reasons to find peculiar structures on Mars and the moon, and to look for weird asteroids, Such studies might reveal new details about the history and evolution of the solar system, for instance, or about resources that might be useful to future spacefarers.
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