"One hundred million years from now:

The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.

A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon."

1. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...

So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?

> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies. Thus, we hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

Jokes aside, what is the evidence, beyond "Ancient mystical texts"?

[0] http://www.myths.com/pub/fiction/science-fiction/Asimov/Nigh...

I know about Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, etc, but I haven't heard about a supervolcano below the Atlantic. What's that referring to?

Edit: Did a Linux find, and...it did find the story. Unfortunately, it didn't find me a place to publish it.

So there could have been this hypothetical civilization 55 million years ago already. And they've only just disappeared (if they did) 10'000 or so years ago? Without a trace?

Also, no, a conspiracy cannot be the answer to a question we've not yet asked. The word has a clear meaning, it requires people to conspire to hide something from you.

Our knowledge is becoming holographic such that to prevent the reemergence of civilization one would have to wipe out all of us at once.

I do not understand this statement, I thought an area in Quebec was around 3 - 4 billion years old. I looked, seems Australia may have the oldest area:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220126-is-the-pilbara-t...

But I say the article could be true, but the only issue I have is the large dinos. I would think they could be an impediment to any organized settlements.

One other thing, didn't most of our fossil fuels come from the Carboniferous era ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

Eg that the entire surface of the earth gets replaced in a million years by tectonics.

Many of the large plates are more than 1000km across, they’d need to be moving meters per year for that to happen. In reality it’s cm per year. Also typically it’s oceanic plates that get subducted and take material under the crust, not continental plates. If it were true, then how do we see dinosaur fossils, and creatures even older than that; how do we find rocks that are over a billion years old.

This doesnt reject the possibility that there was a civilization tens of millions of years ago, but it makes the article hard to take seriously. If you’re gonna spend time writing an article on this you might as well try to research it a bit more. Someone is gonna read this and repeat this nonsense like it’s some fun trivia.

400 million years ago is as distant as the stars. The Earth was a different planet then, in a sense.

It’s also yet another Fermi paradox answer. Even if our civilization lasts for millions of years, that’s a blip. We are searching both space and time and both are incomprehensibly vast.

And someone is saying there could have been an entire advanced civilization 400 million years ago, large and powerful enough to cause climate change, and that no traces of it would possibly be left? Like, billions of individuals, cities, factories, metals, concrete, mines, wells, roads and bridges and tunnels, stone sculptures!, plastic, waste dumps, farms, agricultural land, billions and billions of artifacts of all materials, most of them entirely artificial. All gone because "nothing resists 400 my" and, "oh btw, check this dinosaur footprint and this fossilised piece of skin, how cool"?

dude wind hundreds of thousands of years into future, sands of time, etc. modulo two warring biological descendants of humans not full diff species tho

On a much more recent timescale, one of the dominant theories of the emergence of civilization places the ancestors of the Sumerians in a stupendously fertile valley at the bottom of what is now the Persian Gulf, eventually flooded during the retreat of the glacial maximum and covered in Tigris & Euphrates sediment. It could be the very origin of regional flood and primordial garden myths. But it's all buried.

I also use the Carboniferous Period as a metric as to why "Advanced alien life" isn't more abundant (and I believe it should be factored into the Fermi equation)...

All those trees growing, soaking up sun, dying and just laying there to be compressed and buried without anything to decompose them, and then humans using them like solar batteries to power civilization (i.e. burning the coal), is one of those million-to-one things that enabled the human race to develop beyond basic society.

We needed all that coal and oil (and gas) based power to get to the point - industrially and technologically - where we could even build solar panels or nuclear to replace them, so its not like you could start from first principals and jump straight to modern power generation either.

The odds that the same sequence of events - fungus and bacteria not having the tools to decompose lignin (or whatever the alien equivalent is) - to happen on an extra-solar planet is ... pardon my pun ... astronomical :D

(yes, I used a dash to separate ideas in a sentence, deal with it...)

Also, just as we "engineered" animals and plants through selective breeding, previous animals/plants could have been the results of selective breeding by a previous civilization: There'd be no way to tell just as there'd be no way to tell our "tampering" a few million years in the future.