CIVILIZATION BEFORE HUMANS

ARE HUMANS THE FIRST CIVILIZATION:

SILURAIN

They were intelligent humaniod reptilians who were awakened by nuclear testing after 400 million years of

hibernation. Humans are selfish it's hard for us to imagine in a very short time we as individuals won't be here and

it's even harder to imagine a time where civilization won't exist at all but if we learned anything from archaeology

it's that every civilization has its time.

Think about ancient Egypt they lived 30 dynasties that spanned over 3000 years and if you were an Egyptian living

during this time generation of your family going back as far as anyone can remember walked in the shadow of the

pyramids they fished the Nile they sailed the Mediterranean mingled with other cultures as far as you or anyone knew

your civilization had been there and would last forever then it was gone the Mesopotamians before them the Indus

after them Greeks, Nubians, the persain, romans, Incas aztecs these were empires of million of people all lasting a

thousand years or more but very little evidence of them remains now all these civilizationsincluding our own modern

one have only been here for a short time complex life has existed for hundreds of millions of years.

Modern humans have only been here for about 100000 years our entire history has taken place in the past 0.002%

of life on Earth so there is a whole lot of past in the past and that's plenty of time for other intelligent species to

evolve thrive and go extinct over and over again with different species and if that happened would be really know

they were here.

When Adam Frank & Gavin schmidt wrote the silurian hypothesis they adressed a lot of misconceptions about how

we study the past we're used the idea that we that we learn of ancient societies by examining artifacts and excavated

ruins but this really only work if you're going back a few thousand years but when you want to go back millions of

years it's more complicated for example the Earth is about 4.5 billions old and complex life appeared about 600

million years ago fine but the oldest surface land ever discovered is the Negev Desert in Israel its about 1.8 million

years old that's it. Every other peice we've exer found is newer than that so where'd all the land go?

IF ANICIENT CIVILIZATION EXISTED BEFORE HUMANS??

They could be very hard to dedect because of the earth plate tectonics today's mountains are yesterday's ocean floor

new land is formed everyday as old lands are eroded into dust that's why discovering fossils is alot more difficult than

people think very specific conditions need to be present for fossilization the organisms needs hard body parts like

bones, teeth, shells the remains need to be quickly covered and proceted from scavenging and erosion you need

high pressure for mineralization and low oxygen to prevent decomposition this almost never happens dinosaur roam

the Earth about 180 million years.

Trillion of individual animals lived and died yet we only have a few thousand near complete fossils it's estimated that

over two and a half billion trynnosaurus rex's lived and died on the Earth but fewer than 100 fossils have ever been

found and only one of them is complete that means we've only discovered 0.0000004% of the species.

Now Schmidt and Frank said that a species as short-lived as Homo sapiens might not be represented in the existance

fossilrecord at all. Now the current area of ​​urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth's surface so human artifacts like

road cities machines even mega structures would last few thousand years and are unlikely to ever be found they

conclude that direct evidence like this can only about 4 million years even if the entire human race were eliminated by

nuclear war the radioactive evidence would disappear eventually so are the other methods for detecting the presence

of advanced intelligent life in the distant past turns out there are.

CIVILIZATION DEFINE BY THE AUTHORS OF SILURIAN HYPOTHESIS:

Where indrustrialization occurs on a global scalr as ours does now as we speak indrustrialization is leaving clue

existence that will be detectable by scientists a 100 million years in the future now eventually our time on earth will

be crushed down to nothing more than a thin layer of rock sediment. Now in a sedimentary core a layer of a few

centimeters is deposited every thousand years and in those centimeters future paleontologists will be find evidence

of our geologic era called the Anthropocence now for example we grow so much food now that our use of fertilizers is

actually redirecting the planet's nitrogen supply and this nitrogen cycling is also changing its isotopic signature and

this isotopic will be detectable in the sediment agriculture and deforestation increase soil erosion and that erosion

washes into the sea and part becomes of sediment a human mining activities have increased the amounts of gold,

lead, chromium, platinum and other metals and these also be visible in the sediment at greater rates thanbefore but

the element that will really tell the story of civilization is Carbon.

Humans conquered the planet by harnessing combustion and it seems reasonable that intelligent life forms

everywhere would do the same thing when we burn the tissue of long dead plants fossils fuel we change the ratio of

isotopes in the atmosphere and this is called Seuss Effect carbon comes in 15 flavors but the most common isotopes

are carbon 12, carbon 13 and carbon 14.

Carbon 12 is light carbon this is the isotope preffered by plants and used during photosynthesis and animals that eat

plants consume the plants carbon-12 and the animal that eat animals that eat plants consume their carbon-12 and

So on.

now volcanic emissions are carbon-13 carbon-14 are radioactive and decays predictably overtime fossil fuel have no

carbon-14 at all and as we burn more fossil fuels the levels of carbon 13 and 14 go down while the level of enriched

carbon-12 goes up all this carbon in the atmosphere also causes the earth to warm slightly.

When looking through the sedimentary layers from millions of years ago this is what we need to se to determine there

was an advanced civilization present we need to see a large but temporary spike in carbon and oxygen a large but

temporary spike in metals and a large but temporary spike in global temperature. We find thatWe are on to

something have we found and it happened 56 million years ago.

SUDDEN CHANGE OF CARBON AND OXYGEN:

isotopes levels happened 56 million years ago in what's known as the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum or petm

and the petm only lasted about two hundred thousand years now that's nothing in geologic time but remember

that's as long as we've been here and during this time the petm the Earth temperature rose about six degree

celsius now that was warm I mean we're talking t-shirt weather at the north pole warm I mean the ice caps were

completely gone.

So is the petm evidence of an ancient civilization?? probably not, it took 5000 years to reach the level of carbon in

the atmosphere that we've only done in only 300 years the best guess is the petm is caused by massive volcanic

eruption but nobody knows for sure what's wierd though is there is evidence of a lot of fossil carbon in the

atmosphere and a dew millions of years later these conditions happened again and this event is called "The Eocene

layers" of mysterious orgins and they were other massive events in the cretaceous period that depleted the Earth's

oceans of oxygen for thousands of years now to be honest most scientists believe that we are the first civilization

but they do admit that if advanced species only existed for as long as we have they would be really hard to

detect even the authors of silurain hypothesis admit if you are not specifically looking at the right time in history and

for the right details you'll probaly miss it but the silurain hypothesis does give us an interesting set of tools, tools that

might not help us find ancient civilization on our planet but could help us find them on other planets.