• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Silurian Hypothesis Suggests An Advanced Civilization Lived On Earth Before Humans

January 16, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

In Doctor Who, an alien species called the Silurians exists – technologically-advanced humanoid reptiles who lived long before humans, going into hiding and being basically undiscovered again until everyone’s favorite time-traveling alien came along in his phone box. So far, so not science. However, in 2018 two University of Cambridge scientists named their paper The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?, after the fictional species.

Advertisement

Published in the Journal of Astrobiology, the paper does not argue that there was a technologically advanced species long before humanity, but proposes the interesting hypothetical question of whether it would be possible to find “geological fingerprints” of a bygone civilization that expired millions of years ago.

Advertisement

“One of the key questions in assessing the likelihood of finding such a civilization is an understanding of how often, given that life has arisen and that some species are intelligent, does an industrial civilization develop?” they write in the paper. 

“Humans are the only example we know of, and our industrial civilization has lasted (so far) roughly 300 years (since, for example, the beginning of mass production methods). This is a small fraction of the time we have existed as a species, and a tiny fraction of the time that complex life has existed on the Earth’s land surface.”

“This short time period raises the obvious question as to whether this could have happened before.”



Advertisement

As well as being an interesting hypothesis to ponder, seeking to answer the question could also help us search for signs of advanced civilizations on exoplanets. As the paper points out, humans have left notable marks on the planet that will certainly last for many years in our (relatively short) time altering the planet’s climate and ecosystems. However, that doesn’t mean that these changes will be detectable millions of years from now. In fact, the record we leave – for instance, in the sediment – may only be a few centimeters thick. This may be true even if we survive for much longer than our current age.

“The longer human civilization lasts, the larger the signal one would expect in the record,” the team write. “However, the longer a civilization lasts, the more sustainable its practices would need to have become in order to survive. The more sustainable a society (e.g. in energy generation, manufacturing or agriculture) the smaller the footprint on the rest of the planet. But the smaller the footprint, the less of a signal will be embedded in the geological record.”

The team discuss other markers we could leave for a species millions of years from now (or that may have been left for us). Particularly, they mention signs of large-scale energy harvesting, which would leave marks in the geological record. These would be smaller if the hypothetical civilization adopted solar or hydro power, or geothermal energy. Some will be indistinguishable from naturally occurring phenomena such as the Cretaceous and Jurassic ocean anoxic events – but others would be clear signs that we were here, and we absolutely trashed the place. 

Advertisement

“We speculate that some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe,” the team write. 

“Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause.”

The team does not give a definitive answer in the paper, but suggest that if there were other ancient advanced species to be found, they would be discovered through exploration of elemental and compositional anomalies in the sediment record.

“While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies,” they conclude. 

Advertisement

“We hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Lacking Company, A Dolphin In The Baltic Is Talking To Himself

Source Link: The Silurian Hypothesis Suggests An Advanced Civilization Lived On Earth Before Humans

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Why Do Many Large Language Models Give The Same Answer To This “Random” Number Query?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version