Nevertheless, their work raises some intriguing questions and points to the value of further research on how long synthetic compounds will survive in the environment. It explores an unusual idea that has the potential to change the way we think about humanity and places our impact in a broader perspective. It also provides a background for astrobiologists studying other planets. Mars was once much wetter and warmer. If it ever hosted an industrial society, this paper maps out some of the signatures that might show up in the geological record there.
Venus, too, was once more hospitable. Then there are the oceans of Europa and, ultimately, planets around other stars. Nevertheless, our industrial civilization may be unique in the universe. But much more exciting is the possibility that it is just one of many, perhaps millions of others. Schmidt and Frank have set out some of the groundwork for finding them. Ref: arxiv. Heat-sensing cameras and face recognition systems may help fight covid—but they also make us complicit in the high-tech oppression of Uyghurs.
Partnerships with law enforcement give smart cameras to the survivors of domestic violence. But who does it really help? The very first drone attack missed its target, and two decades on civilians are still being killed. Why can't we accept that the technology doesn't work?
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more. Thank you for submitting your email! It looks like something went wrong. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service technologyreview. Skip to Content. But there is another type of evidence: our civilization also leaves a chemical footprint.
Deep Dive. Tech policy. Modern humans have been around for just , years, a thin sliver of time within the vast and spotty fossil record. For these reasons, Frank and Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Goddard and the paper's co-author, focus on the possibility of finding chemical relics of an ancient terrestrial civilization.
Using human technology as their guide, Schmidt and Frank suggest zeroing in on plastics and other long-lived synthetic molecules as well as radioactive fallout in case factions of ancient lizard people waged atomic warfare.
In our case, technological development has been accompanied by widespread extinctions and rapid environmental changes, so those are red flags as well. After reviewing several suspiciously abrupt geologic events of the past million years, the researchers conclude that none of them clearly fit a technological profile.
Frank calls for more research, such as studying how modern industrial chemicals persist in ocean sediments and then seeing if we can find traces of similar chemicals in the geologic record. He argues that a deeper understanding of the human environmental footprint will also have practical consequences, helping us recognize better ways to achieve a long-term balance with the planet so we don't end up as tomorrow's forgotten species.
It took me a few seconds to pick up my jaw off the floor. We never got back to aliens. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. Go back much further than the Quaternary, and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Doctor Who episode with intelligent reptiles. So could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own?
Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch, about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that lasted only , years—which would be times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far. Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist?
Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos.
They might also show up in future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 10 million years from now. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artifacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.
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