The Silurian Hypothesis: What Traces Of Humanity Will Be Left 50 Million Years From Now? 

As it happens, Lovecraft's version of Earth's deep history IS the deep backstory of Conan's Hyborian Age. It doesn't come up all that often, but Lovecraft and Howard knew each other (by correspondence, neither ever left their home area of the US and both died young at about the same time) and officially considered themselves to be writing in the same world, and Conan did reach a few eldritch abominations.

The Silurians greatest technological acheivements were in advanced biodegradability. They got so good at it that they had to move their entire civilization someplace lifeless just to get their paperclips to last through the week.

Australia is the most geologically stable (inactive) landmass on Earth, as it is the flattest continent with many of the oldest rocks and fossils.......I propose building monuments for future beings to find in the middle of the outback. Make it so.

I loved how Arthur C Clarke tackled this issue by having the aliens bury an artefact on the moon. It would survive for millions of years and by design couldn’t be found until we were at a certain stage in our evolution. The man was a genius.

I see cyborg dinosaurs: I get exited. I'm a simple man.

The knock against any past techno civilization is that it was easy for us to find natural metals and fuels in the ground. Any previous civilization would already have taken the easy to get to materials.

To keep historical time just a bit in perspective, it is useful to remember that the Egyptian Pyramids were older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us!

The concept is much older than the 2018 paper. Back in the 1990's some archeologists studied the remains of US camps from world war 2 and found that even after 50 years they were largely overtaken and difficult to find, even when we knew exactly where they were.

One interesting theory for an ultra-ancient civilisation on Earth - and why we haven't seen evidence of it - is that it was based primarily around coastal areas, in deep time. If you think of Pangea, for example, the coastal areas of the super land-mass look like they would have been the most habitable, but also that they would have been subject to erosion and/or subduction - hence, no evidence survives (either eroded utterly away, or buried under 50 kilometres of rock).

This topic fascinated me. I know how unlikely it is but given that it took less than 10 million years to go from weak but clever animals to computers and space flight I can’t help wondering.

The documentary movie Life After People asks the question: "If humans were to suddenly disappear, how long would evidence of human society last?" The movie concludes that everything would be buried within a few thousand years, with the possible exception of the faces carved in granite on Mount Rushmore. They might last a few million years since granite takes a long time to erode.

Keep in mind that people die in accidents and prehistoric people died in accidents A LOT. If someone falls in a cave and drowns in anoxic water, there likely isn't a rescue mission and fossilization becomes incredibly likely.

Back in the 90's I played SimEarth. I was an undergraduate biology student and for me it was a wonder. My personal challenge was to raise an intelligent race, "win" the game by having them fly their cities into space, then developing another intelligent race to do the same. It was hard because I have used up almost all oil reserves for the first race. Maybe energy production and dissipation is where we have to look out. I mean, if their tech path included fire and metallurgy, not much of easy coal, oil and gas would be available, we would have to dig deep to find them.

We have a habit of hammering massive steel pipes tens of meters in to the ground in any village, town or city that has even a medium sizes building, as Isaac points out such things don't simply disappear from the geological record and would look exceedingly out of place even if all the iron rusts.

Great topic! Key & Peele (paraphrase) “I became a vampire to see future cars”. I love to live +500y (healthy) to see Type 1 Civ

Pertwee's silurian episodes were some of the best stories. They were villains, but you actually felt bad for them after a while for the sheer loss they suffered from a simple mistake of not realizing the Earth may not warm back up enough to wake them.

I think one of the simplest ways to debunk this is coal seams. Large coal seams really only come from the Carboniferous period, as there was a relatively short time between when trees evolved and when organisms evolved to break down the lignin in them. So plant matter would just pile up in massive layers in the swamps of the time, which eventually became coal. Any civilization would be in massive need of energy, and coal is an intuitive, easily accessible start for that. With humanity's current coal consumption, we would only have a few hundred years of supply. So any civilization on earth millions of years ago would likely have depleted these coal seams, which would not be replenished to such a scale. Thus we would have a pretty obvious and worldwide lack of coal where there really should be some. It would be pretty ridiculous to assume an advanced species could arise before the Carboniferous as well, considering how simple most animal life was then (I mean tetrapods only came up to the land in the Devonian and were still relatively simple). And I highly doubt that any civilization would just ignore coal, after all fire is a very intuitive and important technology which helped launch humanity into civilization over thousands of years. Perhaps a civilization could have simply never made it to an industrial era but that kinda kills the point of this anyways.

I read a book to my nephew when he was little that was a fairly good story about a group of teenagers who go back in time 65 million years. They discover two alien races living on Earth. One colony is conducting research on the flora and fauna of Earth and are interested in preserving it. The other colony is interested only in exploiting the natural resources of Earth, including the flora and fauna. There is also a spectacular comet visible which considering what the kids know of Earth history is concerning. But the science team aliens assure the kids the comet will make a close approach to Earth in about a week, but there is a 100% chance it will miss. There is a conflict between the two groups which the exploit aliens lose and they are forced to leave the Earth. However, on the way out the change the orbit of the comet so now, in less than a week the comet will strike the Earth on the north coast of what will one day be the Yucatan Peninsula. This location is possible the worst place on the planet such an impact could be. The biosphere will be badly damaged if not totally destroyed. The kids assure the aliens that the biosphere will recover but everyone has to leave because the scientist aliens can't do anything to prevent the impact. The scientist aliens take off and the kids return to their own time and everyone except the dinosaurs live happily ever after. It was one of a series of books about a group of kids with the ability to turn into animals at will. It was a pretty fun series but I can't remember what it was called.

There could still be evidence of old space farers in the asteroid belt, where old mining equipment is still there, covered with layers of dust, long powered down and inert, and orbiting with the rest of the rocks looking almost like them. Only being identified when they impact other rocks, with the metal, being composed of mined material, looking like just long buried rock to spectral survey, unless you look and see there are sealed spaces, and not natural concentrations of metals, there in places. Then looking to find the remains of long dormant machinery, and long dead reactors that are only slightly above background levels deep inside the composite rock layers.

I like to think that even if everything we're made disappeared, we'd still leave our mark in plants and animals suddenly scattered across continents with no obvious way for them to have travelled that far.

Stephen Baxter, in his book Evolution, has a chapter that dispenses with the "advanced" part of the Silurian hypothesis of past civilizations. The characters are primitive by our standards, but simply more advanced than their contemporaries. Baxter's paradigm is far more plausible and intriguing. Truly unfindable. One of my favourite "what if" scenarios in fiction.

Does anyone remember a novel called "The Toolmaker Koan"? It's a bit dated now I'd imagine, but it's about an Alien AI that unwittingly causes the end of a dinosaur civilisation and then waits in the outer solar system (pretending to be Pluto if I remember correctly) for a new tech using species to evolve.

I'm working on the marine works of a nuclear power station. We just finished the third of three tunnels, 2 of which will bring water in to the plant and one to let it out. 2 run about 3 miles out below the sea and one goes 1.5 miles. The TBM's (tunnel boring machines) are not retrievable from a one ended tunnel and so they have been encased in concrete and left under the sea bed. I think these have a good chance of being around for geological time.

One can imaging the sorts of heated and imaginative debates between future post-human scholars (and even the Sci-Fi community) reconstructing our civilization from very meager remains!

Cool topic! The Giants Causeway _is_ natural according to Roger of "Mudfossil University", he asserts that the reason the stones are hexagonal is because they're scales. Giant scales on a massive fossilized beast. Check out his channel if you're into pareidolia because that is literally all it is. Rust on a stone because of the iron content? Nah! It's dried blood from ancient creatures! It's hours of facepalming fun!

Yay! I love getting notifications for Isaac! What a great topic.

I actually had this argument with someone on Reddit a few weeks ago. My position was "no way humanity's traces will last THAT long". You've just proven me wrong. Thank you, Isaac! Always good to challenge our own perspectives.

Isaac: It feels like a stretch that we wouldn't have at least one fossil that stuck out like a sore thumb. Hallucigenia: You rang?

Arthur, I love your self-deprecating sense of humor in regards to your speech. It makes me glad you're able to take life and it's relative misfortunes and joke about it. It's definitely how I try to approach things, given that we are just stardust taking itself really, really seriously. Haha! Keep up the good work, my friend.

I used to think I was weird for loving concepts like this, but after I discovered your channel, I was so happy.

Honestly I love this content and will always be immersed by the idea of the "What if"s and the marvelous optimism that Isaac has, but you actually sold me on Audible and I haven't watched any of these videos in a few months. I've been immersed in Orson Scott Card's works, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven King. I'm thinking of becoming a long haul trucker just to listen to more audio books while I work. So thank you Issac, for actually supporting a good sponsor that supports you.

Aw man, your pronunciation is spot on and your gentle voice is one of the main reasons I keep coming back here. The material can get really dense sometimes and I def couldn't keep up with a either a more manic or dull voice. You prolly speak clearer than most other people BECAUSE of your impediment, because people like you and me (who also had an impediment) had to learn how to properly enunciate as well as we could (kinda like a language's SOL learners vs. native speakers). Please don't think your impediment is anything bad. You're voice is warm and inviting, and you kick so much ass. Thanks for the channel!

Thank you for the always amazing content! My fav channel on RU-vid!

A few thing to consider; 1 - While we have a rough idea of what any state size area of land could’ve been ten million + years ago (desert, sea bed, grass lands) we have less of an idea of where the good building sites for townships or cities would’ve been the further you go back in time. We ourselves with exceptions, have chosen to build near fresh water sources and coastal lands until the more modern era. 2 - There’s nothing saying that these hypothetical archaic-human or pre-human civilizations had to have reached anywhere near the size or complexity as our’s has been over these last two millennia or so. We would be more likely to find the equivalent of smaller classical or pre-classical townships buried in strata half a kilometer dead out in the middle of the desert or farmlands or a forrest, than we are to find their street signs, cars, cell phones and roads sticking out of the ground in a field near Philadelphia or sticking of a cliff face in the Grand Canyon. --- And no, nobody is going to be able to tune-in to watch the original airings of I Love Lucy 70 or so light years from here. At least not without a massive antenna aimed at and listening to where our system was 70 years ago at the time when the signal passes and with pre-digital TV and radio/tv station equipment and expect to translate it into signal strong and clear enough to be intelligible. The universe is too noisy for that. However there have been a few efforts to send a strong and simple enough signal out, aimed at specific points in the sky that should be able to reach that far and beyond.

Really enjoy these episodes. Appreciate the upload and hard work.

This is a concept that really interests me, since I’m using it as a premise for my own novels. There are a lot of intact and functional Precursor remnants lying around in my setting, but all of them are things that were meant to survive - monuments, grave markers, and sealed facilities - and the Precursors left drone systems that have been meticulously maintaining these sites (sometimes scarring the landscape as they relocated remnants in danger of being swallowed by the ocean or erased by a volcano.

I read a hypothesis that if we meet our demise and intelligent life evolves again on Earth in a few million years, they could never have an industrial revolution because the easy to access hydrocarbons have been used up already, by us. Truly aincent intelligent life that occurred BEFORE easy to access hydrocarbons had formed is an interesting hypothesis as well. They could have been every bit as clever as us, yet been limited to a hunting and gathering lifestyle by plant availability and/or limited to basic agriculture based on lack of available energy to industrialize.

If you want to know how fast roads deteriorate, you should have been in Saskatchewan about 20 years ago, when the province decided it didn't need to maintain secondary roads. You might still find pictures of naked people paddling canoes in the potholes (it was a protest.) How would the archaeologists of some future species (say, rats) be able to distinguish human cemeteries from dinosaur mass gravesites? Both would seem like natural, long-term deposits, I'm sure. Or maybe hadrosaurs were sapient. Also, Technology IS "natural". It is the nature of H. sapiens to use technology, because that's the survival path the species specializes in. It's just a life strategy, open to any species predisposed to it, and forced to use it because of incompetence in every other possible life strategy. A city is exactly as natural as a beaver lodge and pond complex, or a termite mound.

It's been a joy...keep them coming brotha. Josh

I love your pronunciation, it’s idiosyncratic, nothing wrong with that. I like listening to your voice and when I want to relax your channel is one of my go to channels (along with closer to truth, of course). Thanks for your hard work, I hope you get want your want from it. It’s top class.

I’m really intrigued by this idea. If the civilization died out in hunter/gatherer we would probably not be able to detect them

Thanks for the Sunday-Surprise, Isaac!

Fantastic episode, Isaac, thank you! 😄🙏🏽

Finally you have touched on this fascinating idea. Love it

Watched/listened to this last night on Nebula while prepping food that would be cooked later today. Even with the rather silly title in my opinion you created yet another informative and interesting video explaining the concept. Learned a lot of things I would not have considered otherwise. Great video as always Isaac.

Read a short story (decades ago) based on the Silurian Hypothesis. An engineer was discussing the concept with a paleontologist. The engineer asked if they found a dinosaur fossil that had steel tool(s) with it, would they notice? The paleontologist had to admit that after 65 million years they probably would not. The tool(s) would have long age been reduced to rust stain. Nobody was looking for such a thing.

SO nice to hear your voice again in this video.

Cool, I had just learned of this hypothesis a couple days ago. Made a note to look into it, and here we are w a fresh video.

Egyptian and Mayan pyramids are most probably analogous to convergent evolution: people with roughly similar capabilities finding similar solutions to similar problems (the pyramids in Nubia are a different story altogether).

I have a love/hate relationship with Dr. Arthur's channel. I love the information and the learning process and he is incredible at teaching. I hate the fact that every time I listen to him I realize that even though I THINK I am intelligent I am actually at the shallow end of the gene pool... And there's too much chlorine.

Awesome channel with awesome content and great quality as always say 🌍💯

This is interesting; for quite some time I've considered/contemplated how to create *passive* markers/beacons that are 'functional' (in a *passive* fashion) for at least dozens of eons, preferably multiple (as in, dozens or scores of) mega-years. There seem to be two primary constraints/considerations involved: if on a planetary surface, something that is 'too big' may be problematical. My first thought has usually been to create a geometric shape made up entirely of equilateral triangles (60 or 80 sided, or whatever), and then make each such triangular face an internal reflection-corner. Such a concept can be also used in space, where attempting to maximize effectiveness will tend to lead to either _very_ *large* objects, or to a *great* _many_ objects. For space-based objects, the larger it/they are, the more the longer wavelengths can be taken into consideration as part of the 'visibility strategy'! On a planetary surface, this 'go large!' strategy carries less force/impact. On the surface, environmental/climactic consideration need to be carefully taken into account. A 60 or 80 sided object that can be exposed to a variety of surface conditions (& which will quite possibly have those conditions changing significantly over the course of multiple eons, and which are virtually *certain* to change - possibly drastically - over the course of 10s of mega-years) will certainly need to be as close to indestructible as possible - at least, to _any foreseeable_ circumstances/conditions. An alloy that has approximately equal amounts of tungsten and osmium and iridium meets that requirement. It will be *very* tough and resistant to fracturing, and with an extremely high melting point it could literally be engulfed by lava and remain un-harmed. It's naturally high surface hardness could be augmented/enhanced with titanium nitride &/or tungsten carbide &/or amorphous diamond coating(s). The problem is that this alloy has a density of around 20g./cm.³ ... this is multiple-times the density of almost any 'normal' rock! (As an example, a cube of 'WOsIr-alloy' that was about 20 in. [~50¾cm.] on a side would weigh about 3 tons!) If left sitting on any kind of soil/sand (or soil-&-sand combination), it would literally sink completely out of sight to whatever depth it took to 'settle' onto a solid layer of rock! And this would happen more quickly, the larger the object was. Also, if it was displaced downhill, it would, eventually, settle on a creek/river-bed. *Eventually* it would settle on the bottom of a pond or lake, where the process of sedimentary deposit would commence, eventually resulting in it being covered/buried/encased by sedimentary rock! So if at all possible the material should be (on a planetary surface) as low-density as possible, while still remaining as nearly indestructible as feasible. An alloy that was approximately ½ aluminum, ⅓ titanium, ⅐ beryllium, and the remainder being scandium, should - generally - meet those requirements. It would be fairly light-weight, have good strength/toughness, and surface-hardness would be enhanced by the mentioned coatings of titanium nitride, tungsten carbide and amorphous diamond. Other possible materials would be what are called 'high-entropy alloys' ... one such would be one composed of equal amounts of lithium, beryllium, magnesium, aluminum and titanium. This material has *very* high strength & toughness and a fairly high melting point. Plus, it's density is only about 2¼g./cm.³ - lower than almost any natural soils! An object made of this material will be unlikely to be buried, under any kind of 'normal' circumstances. In fact, constructing it so that it is hollow, and ⅔ of it's interior is hollow and filled with helium, brings it's over-all density down to less than that of water, so it would float! A fascinating topic for consideration!

How timely. I was just thinking about this today.

Don't forget, all gold and silver coins, bullion bars, and jewelry, especially cut gemstones like diamonds would basically last forever unless subducted back into earth's mantle

"To be fair." I genuinely love how subtle you can be at times.

Really great video!! Glad I came across it

Never underestimate nature's ability to reclaim just about any space on Earth over long enough timescales. That 6 lane highway Arthur was talking about would be 100% completely gone and undiscoverable in time frames of millions of years. The concrete cracking, the upthrusting of vegetation and the sinking and infilling of all paved surfaces would take less time than that I would imagine.

An upper bound for the strength of convergent evolution between aliens and Earth life is to look at two similar niches on Earth and see how different the organisms are. So, nonhuman apex predator of Africa nowadays is the African Lion. Apex predator of Africa during the cretacious if Carcharodontasaurus. They are both well-suited to their environmental niche. But it's hard to imagine anyone would confuse one for the other, and likewise, nothing mistakeable for a lion existted then and nothing mistakeable for a Carcharodontasaurus is alive today. Even some tiny fragment of vertabral bone would be enough to discriminate a lion from a large therapod dinosaur.

You should definitely come up to anywhere in Canada and see how quickly roads degrade with a lack of proper maintenance.

Pyramids were so widespread in ancient civilizations for the simple reason that they tend to be very stable and durable structures.

This channel and The Why Files are so underrated. Great work fam 🍻

Srsly tho, the inevitable Raccoon vs Sea Lion battle for this planet millions of years from now will be fire.

Excellent, new IA episode. You just made my sunday

I don't think it's entirely implausible to consider a civilization may have reached the heights of ancient Greek technology far earlier than history suggests. If that civilization built a majority of it's culture on coastlines, all evidence would be unobtainable today.

I absolutely love this concept

If an ancient civilization moved off earth into colonies, say before the last planetary extinction event, and perhaps with knowledge of it, wouldn't we find them among Earth's Trojan satellites, or at Earth's other Lagrange points? I kinda wish you had talked about floods and partial or full ice ages and how they might affect remnants of a civilization. Perhaps another aspect would be language that still survives as a remnant of a prior civilization, as in the spoken language of a different animal than man.

Nice use of giants causeway in the giant highway part

Isaac, I appreciate your insight and your perspective. Makes a person think..🤔

The Part about not being able to kill ourselves was surprising. Didn't they build Cobalt bombs which would lead to massive amounts of long lasting radiation killing most live on the Planet for centuries?

Good subject. I think about this a lot. How long does it take a civilization to completely disappear? 1000 years? Obviously not. 10,000 years? Maybe... 100,000 years It depends. 1,000,000 probably.. Even plastic breaks down in 1,000,000 years. If I was an archeologist looking for evidence of a previous technologically advanced civilizations, I would look for something like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, or Chernobyl. Nuclear waste leaves a hell of a scar. You find isotopes in strata where it shouldn't be and bingo. Now if the Cold War ever went hot It would be detectable as an entire world wide layer of radioactive carbon. Hell, just the atomic tests of the last century have rendered future carbon dating problematic. That's a good place to start. Look for noise in the carbon. We also rely on corn which is a C-4 carbon fixer. Most plants are C-3 carbon fixers, but corn is a C-4. C-3 and C-4 cause a difference in isotopes of carbon. It's significant enough that you can take a blood sample from someone and see how much corn they eat. Our modern world relies heavily on corn as a staple crop, so that's going to be a marker a well. Again look for noise in the carbon data. 1,000,000 from now, all that's left of us will be a layer of radio isotopes.

Great vid! These concepts, however incomprehensible they may seem to current minds, will continue to spark my curiosity to no end. I do wonder at times what the next evolutionary predecessor to us will be, as well.

You have a very smooth vocal pattern. I enjoy your narration alot my guy.

Been waiting for a video about the possibility of Earth being inhabited by intelligent life in the past for a minute. Thanks Isaac!

It's hard to grasp how deep time really is. I mean, the t-rex lived closer to humans than it did to the stegosaurus by at least 10 million years. Could it be normal that intelligence waits so many ages to arise? No way to tell 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Awesome job, loved this video‼️💯

I really like how you really reiterate how little we actually know. Too often modern media likes to overemphasize how much we as a species know paleontologically, anthropologically and scientifically in general. I commented on a PBS Eons video on evolutionary biology of certain plant species a while back that it was all fascinating but remember to maintain the perspective that this is all just an educated guess. Fascinatingly a few hours later someone replied “no it really isn’t”. It amazes me, honestly. I know science and religion have always had a paradoxical, abusive, codependent relationship but it feels as though it has accelerated massively in recent decades.

Thinking about the conclusions we come to about ancient human civilizations that weren't even that long ago like Rome or Egypt or the sumerians it'd be really interesting to see what future aliens who discover us after we wipe ourselves out think based on the little bits of our various cultures that are left. Like imagine they find a lone reddit or 4chan server and have to piece us together based on that and a few structures scattered all over the world.

The strata of the Anthropocene will be distinct, and most curious. Question is, will intelligent life ever claw its way from the mire again to be in a position to appreciate the phenomena?

I love this!! So much story potential!!

Never seen this channel before. It’s super cool!

There's a Star Trek Voyager episode where they come across intelligent space faring dinosaurs originally from Earth!

Wouldn't glaciers basically raze everything on the land into the ocean over the course of 50m years?

I've been waiting for this one

Older than dirt, could be literal on the timelines your channel can handle :D

I'd encourage people to look into the Younger Dryas theory to get an idea as to why we can never truly disprove this sort of thing. It even comes complete with actual real conspiracies of entrenched academia working overtime to block any actual study into it (mostly because a cartel of tenured archaeologists don't want their work being questioned at all)

In Three Body Problem, human civilization tries to think of ways to preserve information for millions of years, and the best way they come up with is large characters carved deeply into stone. Everything else will disappear with time, even the rock will. Eventually, they develop the ability to make pocket universes outside of time, but that causes new problems.

Life After People did a fantastic series on this.

Just want to say I am a SLP and have been listening to you for years. Your r’s and L’s are definitely above 85% accuracy in these videos and from what I’ve seen on the live streams. It’s really only the /or/ and /rl/ in the medial and final position that give any distortion. You’re speech is otherwise great and the continued success of the channel proves it. Thanks Isaac!

This is going to help me with my kind of meta fanfiction of Stargate SG1 where the Ancients and ascended beings are real in the real world. My story's main core is that a small rouge group of Ascended beings planted the idea of the Ancients and their history into the head of the writers of Stargate TV series without the writers knowing about it.

Something we don't see covered is the consideration that non-high-tech pre-human civilisations arose on the planet. ie non-human civilizations in the equivalent to the classic/medieval era. This is something I consider quite likely, and itself is important to the fermi paradox. The civilisations could have risen to the equivalent of the classical or medieval level millions of years ago, then become extinct and left precious little evidence. They would likely have needed to be close to water, so sea level changes and river flow could have long washed away much of the evidence...or left their ruins in locations far beyond where we would think to look. Unlike humans these species may not have been global, which would futher reduce the chances of finding them as their remains would be far more localised and make them far more suseptible to regional disasters such as volcanic eruptions and climate change. I don't think the current lack of evidence is evidence against this being true either. We locate new sites from our own recent past all the time, including uncovering entire lost civilisations...in locations that have been near continually inhabited from pre-history to the present day...so if such a civilisation existed in remote locations ten million years ago then it could easily be overlooked. Add to this a bias of looking for artifacts that are within the recent past, in locations we inhabit, and that fall within human timespan and evidence could easily be overlooked...which is an important consideration when it is likely to be vary old and vary scarce to begin with. I cite other species as examples of why I think this to be likely; - There are multiple species currently in their 'stone age' - Ants developed complex societies and agriculture millions of years ago - There are multiple species that are very intelligent now, but are trapped by biology, ie whales, dolphins, etc - Humans did not kick off the era that modern humans live in...pre-humans did...it is also entirely possible that some of our innovations come from extinct branches of homo that are unrelated to ourselves. That modern humans are the only species to advance to the level of 'civilisation' I think is rather unlikely, that view privilidges humans as unique when that isn't the practice of evolution, especially over geological time.

new bonus episode, I'm so happy 😊

A new Isaac episode, I am so happy.

This hypothesis is a little too fanciful for me to buy into. It's basically the plot for H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountain's of Madness. That was published in 1936, so the idea is an old one. It's fun to think about. Needs more Shoggoths, though.

If such a civilization has ever existed they could possibly leave one kind of trace. Let's say that they like us manipulated the genes of animals and plants to serve their society. Whether it's the direct manipulation of the genes using techniques like crisper (or more advanced versions of it) or selective breeding. We could look at the genomes of plants and animals to see if we see strange patterns of genes that don't help you survive but would help a civilization in some way. If such civilization has existed and has changed the genome of animals or plants and those organisms have survived, it might be possible to find evidence for them.

love the ideas discussed here; my uncle was a watcher of the doctor who shows--sometimes i liken my cat Oliver to the doctor as a joke, because my roommate and i found it cute to call him Dr. Mistur Oliver 'Ollie' D Cad

Thanks SFIA :)

Thanks for covering this. It is a subject I think about often. I do wonder if the nanobots or even robots responsible for wiping everything out might have taken a very long time to do it and then each one is designed to self-extinguish if nothing else can be found around it. Plausible, but not sure how believable.

I thought about this a lot as a kid, I never really took it seriously then either, even then I was sure there would be SOMETHING to prove dinosaurs built skyscrapers and also worked 9 to 5s, though who knows, maybe they spoke dutch?

4 minutes in, you gained a subswiber. Still guessing your herritage, as a Dutchy, I would have to guess central Alaskan or north Texan. Please tell me how far I'm off!? Your info is priceless history, your "speach impediment" gives it all the charm it needs!!!

Great video!