The Silurian Hypothesis

What's a Silurian, and what did they hypothesize?

I have a confession. As an aspiring young semi-nerd I never watched Dr. Who. It was the perfect time for me to do so; it was the early 70’s, I was in college, classes left enough free time to break me into the work, play, relax cycle gently and not all at once, but television, with the lone exceptions of Green Acres reruns and Dialing for Dollars held little attraction for me. Hanging around with musicians, I was not unaware of science fiction/fantasy nerds, but chose to express my nascent nerdom in the reading of Tolkien’s hobbits rather than watch the adventures of Dr. Who and the Time Lords as they traveled in their time machine (neatly disguised as a British phone booth) saving countless civilizations - especially ours - from unspeakable evils.

Dr. Who began in 1963 on BBC, ran continuously until 1989 and started up again in 2005, and introduced many strange, if imaginary, cultures and worlds and beings, but the only one that really caught my attention was the episode about the Silurians. Supposedly the Silurians were an ancient earthly race of highly intelligent reptiles that had been in hibernation or suspended animation or advanced brumation or something of the sort for several millennia because they had ignored climate change. When accidentally awakened by loud human noises, they used their advanced scientific knowledge of relativistic time travel to warn humans about the dangers of too much chlorophyll in the atmosphere and nuclear testing. It wasn’t the creatures themselves that caused several current scientists with the requisite nerdish background to become curious about their existence, but the possibility of a connection between a 56 million year old segment of time known as the Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal Maximum (aka PETM) where, for no reason anyone could discern temperatures went up, carbon levels spiked and a variety of ecosystems disappeared. So what, exactly, does the PETM of 56 million years ago have to do with the Silurians? I’m glad you asked.

First, though, I have to mention Enrico Fermi. Enrico was an Italian physicist and a naturalized American citizen that, as a specialist in both theoretical physics and experimental physics, worked with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb at the end of WWII. Enrico won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938 and was also known for his contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, nuclear physics and particle physics. In his free time, he wondered why in the unimaginably vast universe we had not yet discovered hints of other intelligent life. This question became known as the Fermi Paradox, and, scientists being scientists, several solutions have been suggested: first is that civilizations do not, as compared to the vastness of time itself, last a long time and one civilization’s brief shining moment of 400 or so years probably won’t coincide with many (or any) others; second is that space is so ginormous that humans, way out here in the boonies of Orion, have not as yet overlapped with other civilizations, and; third is that other civilizations may have mastered the art of sustainability and their technical signatures are far less conspicuous than we are able to discover. I would think that any civilization that reached the point of space travel over immense distances would increase its own chances of longevity well past the 400 years or so average that we have seen on earth. I would also suggest there is also a strong possibility that other civilizations might have watched some of our TV and movies from a distance and want nothing to do with humans and have made our solar system a no-fly zone. There’s another one Enrico forgot to consider - what if that advanced civilization had occurred here on earth, and they had either wiped themselves out or moved on to a better planet in a nicer neighborhood of the universe where the grass was greener and there were no red bugs or ants or HOA’s or car warranties?

Earth’s place in our solar system falls neatly into what is known as the “Goldilocks Zone.” That particular zone is the region around a star where temperature conditions allow for the existence of liquid water on the surface of a planet. Liquid water is one of the necessary ingredients for the development of life as we know it. Any planet in that exclusive zone, like earth, is not so close to the system’s central star that everything is burned to a crisp and not so far away that everything is frozen solid. The key here is the phrase “life as we know it,” and that limits a lot of our thinking about which planets are habitable or not habitable. Our knowledge of the universe suggests that its physical laws and constants can only allow life that follows those physical laws to exist, and that any intelligent life we discover will have similarities to our own existence. One of those life keys is liquid water that, for us anyway, is essential for chemical reactions and processes that sustain living organisms in our world. This is known as the Anthropic Principle. As a result, we only look for life in the Goldilocks Zones of other stars and dismiss the possibilities that other life unlike ours (beings that breathe methane or live in extreme hot or cold conditions, for example) is not what we might find. I’m not so sure dismissing the possibilities of other forms of life, considering all we’ve learned from Star Trek episodes, is a good idea, but it’s what we have for now, until we can go a little further than any man as yet has gone before.

Scientists tell us that the earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Considering the whole of our planet’s existence as one 24-hour day and complex life emerged only 3 hours ago, the industrial revolution lasted less than .0003 seconds and the vast majority of our “great” civilizations lasted less than a few moments each. If there had been a highly developed civilization here on earth before man, what evidence might possibly be left to give us any clues as to its existence? It seems, judging from what scientists have learned over the years, that eventually all things on earth become a thin layer of rock covered quickly - as time goes by - by other layers. Our particular layer will contain our “techno signature,” a rather unique blend of nitrogen, rare earth elements from electronics and other substances like plastics, chlorofluorocarbons and manufactured steroids. There would also be the byproducts of combustion - the primary source of our energy - and carbon isotopes and other fossil fuel residues, synthetic chemical compounds and even transuranic isotopes from nuclear fission.

Evidence we probably would not find are buildings, structures or artifacts that withstood millions of years of weather, cataclysm, erosion, gravity, water and deposition. Add all of that to the slow but constant grinding movement of tectonic plates and geothermal activity, and not much of anything any civilization builds stands much of a chance of, you know, standing. Look at man’s own history for verification of this; it’s pretty rare for us to discover structures or buildings or artifacts from more than 10,000 years ago, much less from several million. Today, for example, less than 3% of the earth’s surface is urbanized, and the chance that anything at all from any current city would remain over millions of years is astonishingly low. To estimate the possibility of finding artifacts from millions of years ago, look at it this way; the number of dinosaur artifacts (bones, fossils, footprints, whatever) is one fossil for every 10,000 years or so that have passed since then. Not really great odds, are they?

There may be, however, some things we might discover. Scientists can look for distinctive patterns of sediment deposition at the mouths of rivers. As with our current civilization, there would probably be traces of molecules that did not occur naturally, including steroids, plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls (toxic chemicals from electrical devices), and chlorofluorocarbons from refrigerators and aerosols. There might also be traces of fossil fuel combustion residues and other various forms of an altered carbon cycle from industrial productions.

Hyper thermals, like those scientists have discovered in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55.5 million years ago, where global temperatures rose by 9-14 degrees F, are exactly the type of events might discover on other planets as evidence of past civilizations, so why not look at that period on Earth as a possible candidate for the same thing? After all, if we are creating a climate change disaster today wouldn’t it be possible that an ancient civilization did the same thing?

“Now hold on just a minute, pardner” you might exclaim. “Just how does anybody - scientists or otherwise, know what the temperature was here on earth a hundred or a thousand or a million years ago? Isn’t that sort of stretching the believability of tarot cards or Ouija boards?” You would be correct in that assumption and let me assure you that there are many scientists today that spend a significant portion of their careers looking for, collecting and carefully studying hundreds of thousands of examples of what are known as “climate proxies.” These are things like rocks, ice cores, glacial movements, tree rings (even petrified trees have petrified tree rings), fossils, lake and sea sediments, mountain strata and other things that contain a variety of imprints of ambient temperature conditions in and on them. Ice cores are particularly useful in measuring atmospheric gases from the past. As snow falls, small bubbles of gases from the atmosphere get trapped within. These bubbles become trapped in ice sheets and glaciers, some many miles deep. Scientists can measure the temperature from the isotopic composition of the water molecules released by the melting ice cores. As the ice forms from the buildup of annual layers of snow, the lowest layers are much older than the upper ones. The deepest cores have come from over two miles down and contain ice and atmosphere from as long ago as 2.7 million years. That’s some old snow.

Now don’t misunderstand - all the measurements and all the climate proxies we can discover only give us a series of educated guesses about climate and temperature, and the only results we can achieve are guesses. They are educated guesses to be sure, and probably about as good as we can get from millions of years away. The guesses as to the temperature also extend to its causes. Climate change, after all, has been happening since the beginning of the earth; the only difference in the current climate and all the others is that some politicians have convinced many gullible people that spending more of your money - with their direction of course - will help them lower the earth’s temperature and eliminate climate change. Just imagine - the very people that can’t figure out how to solve homelessness or define what a woman is are the ones that are trying to convince you that if they spend enough of your money they can buy a new climate.

The long-term aspect of climate change is only predictable to the extent that scientists looking at past climates and their causes may use them to predict future climate change patterns. That’s a pretty iffy game of “what if” on the supposition that climate change in the future will follow any of the patterns of the past. Milankovitch Cycles (developed by Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch, hypothesize that the long-term collective effect of changes in the Earth’s position relative to the Sun are a driver of climate cycles responsible for triggering the beginning and end of glaciation periods (aka Ice Ages). It’s a complicated theory that involves changes in the shape of the earth’s orbit, angle of axis tilt and direction of the axis of rotations (eccentricity, obliquity and precession, respectively). Remember, however, that the universe is nothing if unpredictable, but Milankovitch’s theories suggest that using climate change as an indicator of past civilizations might be a journey down the wrong rabbit hole. Our climate history has been estimated and ordered as closely as possible with the dilation and distortion of time, and almost all of those climate changes have occurred, with the exception of the current change, without man. This too shall pass. Were I a scientist looking for evidence of prehistoric civilizations my personal bets would be on geologic clues rather than climate.

But wait a minute you might exclaim, “What about Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle and ‘Oumuamua and UFO’s on camera and alien abduction stories and The Pyramids and Nazca lines and Stonehenge and the Piri Reis map? Doesn’t all that prove the existence of extraterrestrial beings and/or civilizations? Well hold on there, pardner. You are talking about thousands of clues mixed with legends and tall tales and apocrypha that together probably mean just that; thousands of clues of unexplained events, objects and occurrences that may one day prove to be related to other civilizations or, like crop circles, simply frat boys fueled by alcohol and intent on laughing themselves silly when the press yells “aliens!” I don’t think aliens would fly all this way just to leave mysterious geometric figures in fields of growing plants…but they might. Especially if they snuck the intergalactic cruiser out of the garage without their parents’ knowing. They probably thought if they went to the next galaxy over to do stupid stuff their parents wouldn’t notice a few extra light years on the odometer.

Scientists have, however, concluded that at present there is no evidence to suggest there have been any civilizations on Earth before man. One scientist did observe, with typical scientific understatement, that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” So you’re saying there’s still a chance? There’s always a chance, however small, that we were not the first intelligent beings on Earth. Chances are there might still be a Star Trek crew member in a red shirt still alive after the series ended, too, but nobody’s discovered him yet. Small, unlikely and endangered, but still a chance for the red shirt guy and the Silurians or whatever they called themselves this millennia. I’m still hoping against hope to one day discover some semblance of intelligent life on Earth in my lifetime.