Was there an Advanced Civilization Before Humans? The Silurian Hypothesis (Part 1 & 2)

Episode 1

We are always there talking about extra worlds, aliens, and how civilizations might be sitting safely on extrasolar planets, protected by the enormous distances involved.

And it is as if we take it for granted that nearly five billion years of geological and biological evolution of the Earth could have resulted in only one dominant form of intelligence: that of our species.

We, Homo sapiens, as the apex of evolution, the final, unique, and unrepeatable product of a time course all aimed at bringing us to the dominance of this planet…

But… what if this is not really the case? What if before us … long before … there was a way and time for evolutionary roulette to have birthed another terrestrial civilization?

Would it really be far-fetched to think so?

After all, complex life has existed for more than 500 million years. How sure are we that humans are the first intelligent species to have evolved on this planet?

Might there not have been – I don’t know – a Cambrian civilization of intelligent trilobites, building underwater cities powered by hydrothermal vents? Or big-brained Cretaceous theropods capable of using tools and language?

This is not as absurd as it sounds. On the geological time scale, we inhabited this planet for only an instant, and industrial civilization existed for only a fraction of that instant.

And if humans became extinct tomorrow, the relics of our society would not last long.

But why these questions? And who are the Silurians?

Episode 2

Earth is the only planet where we know for sure that life exists. And it is also the only planet in the solar system to have given rise to a technological civilization.

Whether other civilizations then exist beyond the solar system, we can only guess, but our ignorance on the matter is total.

Of course, we know that there are countless planets: in nearly three decades thousands have been discovered, and starting from the ratio of the number of extrasolar planets discovered so far to the total number of stars observed, we can deduce by statistical methods that the potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way alone are probably more than 10 billion: too many even to count.

But there is one big problem: they are all beyond our reach, and by a lot.

Exploring the depths of space in search of another evolved civilization is therefore an undertaking currently beyond our capabilities.

But what if instead of searching in space, we search in time?

When we search for alien life we tend to look into the three dimensions of space, looking for planetary environments similar to our own. But there is perhaps another dimension to look into when searching for aliens, namely, that of TIME…

Insane Curiosity
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