We like to think that we are an exception : An intelligent life that has develop a vastly complex industrialized refinement unlike anything get wind before . But would we actually know if millions of age ago some other life forms had create Brobdingnagian cities , altered the landscape , and mould their own civilization ? What would be left of their exploit for us to find ?
This is the thought experimentation that the director of NASA ’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies , Gavin Schmidt , and professor of physic and uranology at the University of Rochester , Adam Frank , have been exploring . They want to translate if any grounds of a tremendously advanced civilization could persist tens of millions of year into the future and , if so , what form it might take . Their results are published in theInternational Journal of Astrobiology .
“ Gavin and I have not seen any evidence of another industrial civilization , ” Franklays out from the onrush . Since they have not found any pre - human civilization , they have been looking at what impact we as a coinage are having on the satellite , and how long those impacts are likely to be detectable into the futurity . “ These interrogative sentence make us think about the future and the past in a much different way , include how any erratic - scale of measurement civilization might rise and lessen . ”
While we have plenty of grounds of retiring civilizations in the form of statutes and foundations that see back maybe a few thousand age at most , things get far more opaque when the clock is rolled back by a few million or 100 of 1000000 of days .
cry this the “ Silurian possibility ” – after the technologically advanced reptiles fromDr . Who – they speculate what would be left if a civilization lasted for 100,000 years or so around 60 million long time ago . That may sound like a longsighted sentence , but in the story of the Earth , it is but a blip . However , the chance of dodo would be rare , so what else could we look for ?
As a specie , we are currently pose down all sorting of traces that will be detectable in a 100 million age ’ time . In feeding 7 billion people , we ’ve completely altered the nitrogen wheel , with much of it now finding its way into sediment at the bottom of the ocean and the teetotum of mess . On the flip side , rarified land constituent that were once inter rich are now float free at the airfoil as we develop ever more complex technology .
That ’s not to mention the changes in the carbon paper cycle from burn so much fossil fuel or the gazillion of tonnes of plastic being lay down . Some have even suggested that all the credit card we ’re producing isforming a raw kind of rock , and all these change will still bedetectable far into the futurity .
All this is obviously hypothetical at the second , but it has an important item . These are the sort of clue we could practice to look for previously advanced civilizations on other planets .
“ We know former Mars and , perhaps , former Venus were more habitable than they are now , and conceivably we will one day drill through the geologic sediment there , too,”saysGavin Schmidt . “ This helps us think about what we should be looking for . ”
