Inspired by a Doctor Who episode, the Silurian hypothesis asks if there are traces of an industrial civilization before humans on Earth.
, awakened by nuclear testing after 400 million years of hibernation. In homage to those fictional forebears, the scientists dubbed their thought experiment the “Silurian hypothesis.”
Our seemingly indelible mark on this planet will someday be reduced to a thin layer of rock, composed of the eclectic materials with which we’ve constructed the human world. Collectively they will make up our “,” the unique imprint that accompanies every technological species. For example, the sediment from our current geological epoch, the Anthropocene, will likely contain abnormal amounts of nitrogen from fertilizer, and rare-earth elements from electronics.
We humans conquered our planet with the help of combustion, and it seems reasonable to bet that ascendant life forms everywhere do the same. It’s just intuitive, Frank says: “There's always biomass, and you can always set biomass on fire.” For a long time we’ve founded our industry on fossil fuels, and, climatic consequences aside, that will leave a geological footprint. Carbon occurs in three types, called isotopes.
? That’s what puzzled the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. One solution is that plenty of civilizations have arisen, but they fizzle out so quickly that few exist at any given moment. Time, like space, is enormous, and humans may not overlap with many other extraterrestrial world-builders, reducing our chance of discovering any.
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