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From author and druid John Michael Greer's essay, "The Next Ten Billion Years"[1],

"One hundred million years from now:

The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.

A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon."

1. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...

Funny, as I was reading the original article, I was thinking that anything left on the moon would survive being recycled by plate tectonics.

It seems like reaching the moon isn't such a stretch for any technological civilization, so the lack of preexisting artifacts counts as pretty definitive for me.

What an amazing read! (and only slightly depressing)

Though I'm kind of disappointed the last section did not end with fusion power, stellar migration and artificial intelligence...

>The oldest place on the earth’s surface—a stretch of Israel’s Negev Desert

I do not understand this statement, I thought an area in Quebec was around 3 - 4 billion years old. I looked, seems Australia may have the oldest area:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220126-is-the-pilbara-t...

But I say the article could be true, but the only issue I have is the large dinos. I would think they could be an impediment to any organized settlements.

One other thing, didn't most of our fossil fuels come from the Carboniferous era ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

The claim isn't about the age of rock, but that the surface has churned almost everywhere. Israel does contain the oldest measured continuous surface at about 1.8M yo, but nobody claims to have looked everywhere.
I can't speak to dinosaur people, but the population genetics of our own DNA reveals that there were never many humans on the planet till recently, so that rules out any very large human civilization. (Unless they genetically altered themselves to hide the evidence! Ahaaa...)
If whole populations were wiped out and the world was repopulated by a small remnant would that not account for it? Or if an extinct human species had an advanced civilisation?
I know, let’s modify our DNA so if we’re wiped out nobody will ever know we existed!
they could be distinctly different dna, wiped out and evolved again from scratch.
> I can't speak to dinosaur people

Dash out of context

However, since we do have plenty of fossils from Silurian, it is hard to believe that none of the advanced technologies never left any hint. Any idea?
Yes. We'd find mines, where the richest veins were mined out and what's left is spread in a pattern that clearly appears to be "a rich deposit but with the best stuff taken already". The mine itself would have long collapsed but would also leave interesting evidence, a pattern of mismatched geological layers that rather than looking like an earthquake or a tectonic upheaval would be something that is relatively clearly shaft-shaped and if followed into the mountain would open out into a pattern that indicates intelligent mining activity as the anomaly is further charted.

Places where there is suddenly a vast collection of foreign rocks from the other side of the world that can't be explained by glaciers.

Radioactivity from nuclear tests that can't be explained by stellar phenomena and leave a layer of weird isotopes and isotope ratios all around the world, as we already have done.

And while we aren't to the point we'd have found this quite yet necessarily, evidence on the Moon where unlike Earth evidence probably would in fact persist for millions of years, especially if it ever attained any scale, e.g., "a large complex of cities" might still leave a visible mark on the surface easily visible to modern satellites and clearly with no other explanation available as to what caused it.

People get stuck on the idea that the only way to determine there was intelligent life earlier is to find a super complicated artifact which obviously can't survive, but there are footprints we've left in the world that are way, way larger than a cell phone or even a major city.

I don't find it hard to believe we've lost entire human civilizations. In fact I'd call it the smart bet. Maybe those civilizations were even a bit more sophisticated than we'd have thought, with maybe an earlier and entirely unknown Iron Age popping up somewhere for some period of time or something. But this is the first major technological civilization this planet has ever seen, even across geological time scales. And those lost human civilizations never reached to the level where they took all the easy resources like we have, because if they had, we wouldn't be able to get them. Some resources we call "non-renewable" do replenish on a few million year time scale, but we also pull lots of resources out of billion-year-old rocks, such as copper mines in northern Michigan which are pulling resources out of pre-Cambrian rocks. Clearly nobody else has been there, at scale.

> Any idea?

Not really, because none of this passes the smell test if you know even a tiny bit about geology and paleontology. The most solid arguments are religious texts, there is not really any substance other than that.

I don't think we have to go that far back. Plate tectonics, submersion and weathering does a good enough job of wiping the slate clean off the surface of the Earth, that any evidence of earlier hominids developing pre-industrial, coastal civilizations say, a million years ago, would be now under the crust. What we consider civilization is about 5000 years old, so it's not inconceivable that the cycle might have occurred multiple times during geologic time spans. Perhaps this is the first time civilization was not interrupted and made its way through to a technological civilization.
Huh?

We have plenty of fossil evidence from, from your example, a million year old hominids. Far more than we would need to expect to see evidence of civilization.

Subduction makes up for a tiny tiny proportion of where coastal land "goes" in any age.

You'd need an enormous set of coincidences for a past civilization of hominids to go unnoticed.

>coastal civilizations say, a million years ago, would be now under the crust.

Nah, you way off on that, coastlines have remained relatively same last million years, def not subducted into an ocean trench

I mean sure, if they somehow didn't have any trade goods that went in land, didn't work with metals enough to do any appreciable mining, and didn't breed any plants or animals enough to change their genetics. Any hypothetical hidden past civilization would have to have been weird in a number of ways to not leave any evidence.
Are you sure? what about fossils and other remains? So far there is zero evidence that there was an advanced or non advanced civilization. Unfortunately this nonsense is the bread and butter ot pseudo archeologists.
The fact there is still coal(and oil) in the ground pretty much rules out any "advanced" industrialized civilization that came before us.

I also use the Carboniferous Period as a metric as to why "Advanced alien life" isn't more abundant (and I believe it should be factored into the Fermi equation)...

All those trees growing, soaking up sun, dying and just laying there to be compressed and buried without anything to decompose them, and then humans using them like solar batteries to power civilization (i.e. burning the coal), is one of those million-to-one things that enabled the human race to develop beyond basic society.

We needed all that coal and oil (and gas) based power to get to the point - industrially and technologically - where we could even build solar panels or nuclear to replace them, so its not like you could start from first principals and jump straight to modern power generation either.

The odds that the same sequence of events - fungus and bacteria not having the tools to decompose lignin (or whatever the alien equivalent is) - to happen on an extra-solar planet is ... pardon my pun ... astronomical :D

(yes, I used a dash to separate ideas in a sentence, deal with it...)

one thing I enjoyed about The Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky: the spiders learned to build "computers" out of ant colonies by hijacking the ants ability to generate and respond to chemical stimuli.

not that it makes me believe in the silurian hypothesis, but i'm always reminded of that whenever i start to think "well it couldn't possibly be done any other way".

This article is a weird mash-up of an actually very interesting paper [0] with random personal slop like i've asked my rabbi, consulted my kabbalah-initiated friends and for the fun mixed it up with some fashionable ancient text (Mahabharatha)

So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?

> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. 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. Thus, 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.

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

So we have microbial fossils from 3.5 billion years ago, fossilised 300 million year old skin, bones from almost 200 my ago, even actually soft tissue inside a fossilised bone from 70 my ago. Ah, footprints too, the most unsubstantial matter of all: pure shape. That's in addition to all the million other fossils that are so common we hardly care: shells, small bones, etc.

And someone is saying there could have been an entire advanced civilization 400 million years ago, large and powerful enough to cause climate change, and that no traces of it would possibly be left? Like, billions of individuals, cities, factories, metals, concrete, mines, wells, roads and bridges and tunnels, stone sculptures!, plastic, waste dumps, farms, agricultural land, billions and billions of artifacts of all materials, most of them entirely artificial. All gone because "nothing resists 400 my" and, "oh btw, check this dinosaur footprint and this fossilised piece of skin, how cool"?

The counter argument: dinosaurs were around for a staggering amount of time, no pun intended. 165 million years is reasonably long enough to ensure they left behind some nests, bones, and a feather or two. Modern humans have been around for more like 0.02 million years.

The counter-counter argument is that while we’ve been here for a comparative blink of an eye, we’ve left behind 4 orders of magnitude more stuff than just nests, bones, and a feather or two.

Actually correct. We have very very few fossils compared to the millions of species that have evolved and gone extinct over 4 billion years.

The fossils we do have are of highly successful species in that geography. It’s a matter of chance, leaving behind a fossil, after all.

And unlike biological matter that can fossilize, industrial structures etc do not. All our manufactured stuff has very short life once it reaches the crust and starts getting compacted.

The more time you add, the better the odds we’d find this evidence lost.

And if this wasn’t a global, but more localized pre-human civilization, the evidence would be thinner still.

Which is why this isn’t a scientific hypothesis really. It’s more showing you the limits of scientific inquiry into the deep history of Earth.

> And someone is saying there could have been an entire advanced civilization 400 million years ago, large and powerful enough to cause climate change, and that no traces of it would possibly be left?

If humanity vanished today, in 1 million years almost all of our artifacts would be gone or burned under miles of subduction.

In 10 million years there would literally be nothing left.

Isaac Asimov's Nightfall [0], but on a longer cycle?

Jokes aside, what is the evidence, beyond "Ancient mystical texts"?

[0] http://www.myths.com/pub/fiction/science-fiction/Asimov/Nigh...

I think there is no evidence for it, but I think the point of the Silurain hypothesis (which the article does not convey well) is that if there were such civilisations we would not know as its unlikely we would find any evidence.
Reminds me of this comic: https://badspacecomics.com/scour-copy-copy
> or it could’ve been the eruption of a monster volcano, the sort that presently smolders beneath the Atlantic.

I know about Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, etc, but I haven't heard about a supervolcano below the Atlantic. What's that referring to?

There's a seam of volcanic mountains that runs down the center of the Atlantic, but nothing that resembles a supervolcano. The supervolcano complex under the Pacific is one of the largest known in the solar system, however.
Technical ceramics would have survived.
To recognize the possibility, one has to grapple with incredible scale and deep time: In roughly 300 million years (1/10th of the time life has been around), the Appalachians split off from the Atlas; the Atlantic Ocean first started splitting open; uplifts underneath North America pushing the West up from the seabed and caused the rivers to carve millions of acres of sandstone landscape down, leaving towering plateaus, cliffs, and eventually river chasms. Over the 3 billion years before that, what was carried away like so much sediment? What was subsumed by subduction boundaries?

On a much more recent timescale, one of the dominant theories of the emergence of civilization places the ancestors of the Sumerians in a stupendously fertile valley at the bottom of what is now the Persian Gulf, eventually flooded during the retreat of the glacial maximum and covered in Tigris & Euphrates sediment. It could be the very origin of regional flood and primordial garden myths. But it's all buried.

This is a good thought experiment to show how time is as vast as space.

400 million years ago is as distant as the stars. The Earth was a different planet then, in a sense.

It’s also yet another Fermi paradox answer. Even if our civilization lasts for millions of years, that’s a blip. We are searching both space and time and both are incomprehensibly vast.

How can a galaxy spanning civilisation fail. If life can spread to other worlds, unless you get FTL, how could you end all life in a galaxy

As such it seems impossible for life to have reached interstellar travel anywhere in the Milky Way before at most a few million years ago, otherwise we would see it.

Which is weird because life surely can’t be that rare in the entirety of space time.

Of course the galaxy could be teaming with non interstellar life, but once you reach mankind’s level of sentience and technology it dormant seem a massive jump to interstellar, and once that happens there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

> time is as vast as space.

This is what I always say to "Why haven't we found any aliens yet??"

Hell, we wouldn't even have known about the existence dinosaurs, lifeforms on THIS VERY PLANET, if we hadn't chanced upon their remains.

I really enjoyed this article. It was a very pleasant read. The author should write a book and or movie script. The original Doctor Who Silurian episodes were fun to watch. Makes sense to connect dinosaurs or the remnants of Silurian civilization to dragons and deities. Star Trek Strange New Worlds S04E01 deals with the dinosaurs and Mars @ 65 million years ago. The story is rather intriguing and fun to watch as well. Invincible S04E04 deals with the various ages that planet Earth has gone through and has a different take on the meaning of Hell and Satan and why they exist. Last episode of the Season 4 is rather interesting, as well as it relates to the possible next phase or not, of human evolution.
I think the article greatly underestimates our archaeological capabilities. We can identify five mass extinctions in the last 500 million years, so why should such a civilization simply be overlooked? Of course, we wouldn't find abandoned ruins, but the idea that an industrial civilization wouldn't leave behind any detectable artifacts is practically impossible. Perhaps there were a few primate species before that could make fire and hunt with bows and arrows, but certainly nothing industrial and hardly any extensive agricultural culture.
The timelines don't really add up for me.

So there could have been this hypothetical civilization 55 million years ago already. And they've only just disappeared (if they did) 10'000 or so years ago? Without a trace?

Also, no, a conspiracy cannot be the answer to a question we've not yet asked. The word has a clear meaning, it requires people to conspire to hide something from you.

I wrote a sci-fi short story on this idea once. It took place in the present, and left the truth of the hypothesis open. Submitted it to Analog, but it was rejected. I suppose there are now places one can self-publish sci-fi stuff, but I'm not sure I can even find my original.

Edit: Did a Linux find, and...it did find the story. Unfortunately, it didn't find me a place to publish it.

Petroleum could be the byproduct of a previous civilization.

Also, just as we "engineered" animals and plants through selective breeding, previous animals/plants could have been the results of selective breeding by a previous civilization: There'd be no way to tell just as there'd be no way to tell our "tampering" a few million years in the future.

I have a toy hypothesis that once civilization level intelligent life emerges it never disappears barring the planet it inhabits being vaporized by some unfortunately directed GRB or some similar catastrophe.

Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.

if all dolphins were wiped out could we know that they were ever here from physical evidence?
Dr Who and the Silurians had this covered: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Silurian
Surprised so few are pushing back against some of the claims in this article.

Eg that the entire surface of the earth gets replaced in a million years by tectonics.

Many of the large plates are more than 1000km across, they’d need to be moving meters per year for that to happen. In reality it’s cm per year. Also typically it’s oceanic plates that get subducted and take material under the crust, not continental plates. If it were true, then how do we see dinosaur fossils, and creatures even older than that; how do we find rocks that are over a billion years old.

This doesnt reject the possibility that there was a civilization tens of millions of years ago, but it makes the article hard to take seriously. If you’re gonna spend time writing an article on this you might as well try to research it a bit more. Someone is gonna read this and repeat this nonsense like it’s some fun trivia.

Time Machine movie reboot did this in opposite direction into future decently well

dude wind hundreds of thousands of years into future, sands of time, etc. modulo two warring biological descendants of humans not full diff species tho

Interesting topic, but (to immediately veer off of it) I really wish he would find another word and stop misusing "conspiracy." The word has already been through hell.
I'm butt hurt that I'm five paragraphs in and still have no idea what the hypothesis is.
Joe Rogan tier pseudoscience.
Silurian Hypothesis, SETI, a widely help motivation for space exploration, much of sci-fi: all posit a high-ish rate of life (or intelligent life) invention, because the alternative is terrifying. I/we need/enjoy this, but it's fiction. When humans reason about the rate, they're extremely biased by what they want to be true.