Are Humans the First Civilization? The Silurian Hypothesis

there are over 7 billion people livingon the earth right now tens of millionsare born and die each year every singleone of us leaves signs of our existencein the air water soil even space butthese signs won't last forever ourbuildings will be gone in a few hundredyears our stone monuments plasticstyrofoam twinkies even evidence of ourinevitable nuclear destruction willeventually be gone so how can we be surethat we were the first advancedcivilization on earth well according tothe silurian hypothesiswe can't let's find out why[Music]let's talk about the silurian hypothesiswhat the hell is a solution well theywere intelligent humanoid reptilians whoin an episode of doctor who wereawakened by nuclear testing after 400million years of hibernation blizzardpeople yep we're finally doing a lizardpeople episode we arewell kinda humans are selfish it's hardfor us to imagine that in a very shorttime we as individuals won't be here andit's even harder to imagine a time whereour civilization won't exist at all butif we learned anything from archaeologyit's that every civilization has itstime think about ancient egypt theylived 30 dynasties that spanned over 3000 years and if you were an egyptianliving during this timegenerations of your family going back asfar as anyone can remember walked in theshadow of the pyramids they fished thenile they sailed the mediterraneanmingled with other cultures as far asyou or anyone knew your civilization hadbeen there and would last foreverthen it was gone the mesopotamiansbefore them the indus after them greeksnubians the persians romans incas aztecsthese were empires of millions of peopleall lasting a thousand years or more butvery little evidence of them remains nowall of these civilizations including ourown modern one have only been here for ashort time complex life has existed forhundreds of millions of years modernhumans have only been here for about 100000 years our entire history has takenplace in the past0.002 percent of life on earth sothere's a whole lot of past in the pastand that's plenty of time for otherintelligent species to evolve thrive andgo extinct over and over again withdifferent speciesand if that happened would we reallyknow they were here when adam frank andgavin schmidt wrote the silurianhypothesis they addressed a lot ofmisconceptions about how we study thepast we're used to the idea that welearn of ancient societies by examiningartifacts and excavated ruinsbut this really only works if you'regoing back a few thousand years but whenyou want to go back millions of yearsit's more complicated for example theearth is about 4.5 billion years old andcomplex life appeared about 600 millionyears ago fine but the oldest surfaceland ever discovered is the negev desertin israel it's about 1.8 million yearsold that's itevery other piece of exposed land we'veever found is newer than that sowhere'd all the land go[Music]if ancient civilizations existed beforehumans they could be very hard to detectbecause of the earth's plate tectonicstoday's mountains are yesterday's oceanfloor new land is formed every day asold lands are eroded into dust that'swhy discovering fossils is a lot moredifficult than people think veryspecific conditions need to be presentfor fossilization the organism needshard body parts like bones teeth andshells the remains need to be quicklycovered and protected from scavengingand erosion you need high pressure formineralization and low oxygen to preventdecomposition this almost never happensdinosaurs roam the earth for about 180million yearstrillions of individual animals livedand died yet we only have a few thousandnear complete fossils it's estimatedthat over two and a half billiontyrannosaurus rex's lived and died onthe earth but fewer than 100 fossilshave ever been found and only one ofthem is complete that means we've onlydiscovered 0.0000zerozero four percent of the speciesnow schmidt and frank said that aspecies as short-lived as homo sapiensmight not be represented in the existingfossil record at all now the currentarea of urbanization is less than onepercent of the earth's surface so humanartifacts like road cities machines evenmega structures would last only a fewthousand years and are unlikely to everbe foundthey conclude that direct evidence likethis can only go back about 4 millionyears even if the entire human race wereeliminated by a nuclear war theradioactive evidence would disappeareventually so are there other methodsfor detecting the existence of advancedintelligent life in the distant pastturns out there are[Music]civilization at least as defined by theauthors of the silurian hypothesis iswhere industrialization occurs on aglobal scale as ours does now as wespeak industrialization is leaving cluesof our existence that will be detectableby scientists a hundred million years inthe future now eventually our time onearth will be crushed down to nothingmore than a thin layer of rock sedimentyeah that's uplifting now in asedimentary core a layer of a fewcentimeters is deposited every thousandyears and in those centimeters futurepaleontologists will find evidence ofour geologic era called the anthropocenenow for example we grow so much food nowthat our use of fertilizer is actuallyredirecting the planet's nitrogen supplyand this nitrogen cycling is alsochanging its isotopic signature and thisisotope will be detectable in thesediment agriculture and deforestationincrease soil erosion and that erosionwashes into the sea and becomes part ofthe sediment a human mining activitieshave increased the amounts of gold leadchromium platinum and other metals andthese also will be visible in thesediment at greater rates than beforebut the element that will really tellthe story of civilization is carbonhumans conquered the planet byharnessing combustion and it seemsreasonable that intelligent life formseverywhere would do the same thing whenwe burn the tissue of long dead plantsfossil fuels we change the ratio ofisotopes in the atmosphere and this iscalled the seuss effect the green omeletguy differences yeah carbon comes in 15flavors but the most common isotopes arecarbon 12 carbon 13 and carbon 14.carbon 12 is light carbon this is theisotope preferred by plants and usedduring photosynthesis and animals thateat plants consume the plants carbon-12and animals that eat animals that eatplants consume their carbon-12 and so onnow volcanic emissions are carbon-13carbon-14 is radioactive and decayspredictably over time fossil fuels haveno carbon-14 at all and as we burn morefossil fuels the levels of carbon 13 and14 go down while the level of enrichedcarbon 12 goes up all this carbon in theatmosphere also causes the earth to warmslightlywhat global warming is a myth it's notsheeplook you can argue that the warming isman-made or that it's not but either waywe're up about a degreeanyway when looking through sedimentarylayers from millions of years ago thisis what we need to see to determine ifthere was an advanced civilizationpresent we need to see a large buttemporary spike in carbon and oxygena large but temporary spike in metalsand a large but temporary spike inglobal temperaturewe find thatwe're on to something have we found thathave wewe have and it happened 56 million yearsago the age of the lizard people[Music]a sudden global change of carbon andoxygen isotope levels happened 56million years ago in what's known as thepaleocene-eocene thermal maximum orp-e-t-m and the p-e-t-m only lastedabout two hundred thousand years nowthat's nothing in geologic time butremember that's as long as we've beenhere and during this time the petm theearth's temperature rose about sixdegrees celsius now that was warm i meanwe're talking t-shirt weather at thenorth pole warm i mean the ice caps werecompletely gone lizard people do likewarm weatherwhat lizard people are cold-bloodedhello read a science book there therewere no lizard peopleso is the p-e-t-m evidence of an ancientcivilization yepprobably not it took 5 000 years toreach the level of carbon in theatmosphere that we've done in only 300years so what caused it nobody knowsthe best guess is the petm was caused bya massive volcanic eruption but nobodyknows for surewhat's weird though is there is evidenceof a lot of fossil carbon in theatmosphere lazy people gas stations anda few million years later theseconditions happened again and this eventis called the eocene layers ofmysterious origins sounds like the nameof a harry potter book it does and therewere other massive events in thecretaceous period that depleted theearth's oceans of oxygen for thousandsof years now to be honest mostscientists believe that we are the firstcivilization but they do admit that ifan advanced species only existed for aslong as we have they would be reallyhard to detect even the authors of thesilurian hypothesis admit if you're notspecifically looking at the right timein history and for the right detailsyou'll probably miss it but the silurianhypothesis does give us an interestingset of tools tools that might not helpus find ancient civilizations on ourplanet but could help us find them onother planetsthe drake equation is a well-knownformula for estimating the number ofextraterrestrial civilizations in ourgalaxy it boils down to the number ofstars that have planets the number ofplanets that can support life thefraction of those planets that developlife and the fraction of those that candevelop intelligent life now this numberfluctuates as new discoveries are madebut still the number of civilizationsout there could be anywhere from 150 000to 1.5 billion even if it's just morethan one it would be so cool so coolwhat's interesting is now that we hadthe silurian hypothesis any planet thatcan develop intelligent life can maybedevelop it again and again over millionsor billions of years and that was theoriginal premise of frank and schmidt'spaper they wondered not only about lifeon other planets in the galaxy but aboutcivilizations that may have existedright here in our solar system at onetime mars was much wetter and muchwarmer so was venus one of jupiter'smoons europa is covered by a saltwaterocean when we finally get core samplesfrom these planets we may realize thatthose civilizations don't exist thereright now the distant past could tell avery different story now the authors ofthe silurian hypothesis don't believethere are ancient civilizations on earthfor humans and our civilization may beunique in the universe but they do layout an exciting possibility that therecould be millions of civilizations outthere and now we have the tools to findthem[Music]thank you so much for hanging out withus today my name is aj that's hecklefishthis has been the y-files if you had funor learned anything do me a favor andlike subscribe comment and share tryingto solve the youtube algorithm is liketrying to discover ancient civilizationslazy peoplebut with your helpwe can do it until next time be safe bekind and know that you are appreciated[Music][Music]you