A BIZARRE academic study has left readers wondering if another society could have called Earth home before humans occupied the planet.
The research taps into the innate human desire to know if we are the universe’s first and only developed society.
1
The researchers explored whether a developed society could have inhabited Earth over 2.5million years ago.
“Our industrial civilization has lasted (so far) roughly 300 years (since, for example, the beginning of mass production methods),” the study writes.
In that time, we’ve left a mark on Earth but it would be only minutely detectable in millions of years if society ended tomorrow.
The study effectively asks, if there were an advanced society on Earth before us, how would we know it?
The structures and bodies of an ancient developed society would have an extremely low chance of being found.
“The fraction of life that gets fossilized is always extremely small and varies widely as a function of time, habitat and degree of soft tissue versus hard shells or bones,” the study writes.
An ancient developed society would be also difficult to find because of the chaos and destruction needed to exterminate a civilization – the signs of life could be lost to time.
“After a few million years, any physical reminder of your civilization may be gone, so you have to look for sedimentary anomalies, things like different chemical balances that just look wacky,” study author Adam Frank told the Washington Post.
Most read in Tech
IFLScience reporter James Felton wrote that our impact on the geological record may be just a few centimeters thick in millions of years.
Reason says that the longer a society lasts, the larger its footprint on its planet will be – but the study notes that a longer-running society would have more streamlined methods for sustainability.
A complex society that cleans up after itself would be difficult to find without looking closely.
Modern humans are faced with the challenge of disposing of some of our most permanent impressions on Earth.
“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 study writes of how humans’ signature on Earth would be found.
Humans have also put a couple of metric tons of lasting signs of our existence into space.
The study was named the Silurian hypothesis in a nod to an ancient advanced civilization in the Dr Who series.
The research sits at an interesting cross-section of anthropology, philosophy, and biology.
