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so today the scientists or actually anyone on the planet still has no clear idea if any kind of extraterrestrial life exists out there we obviously have a lot of propositions we have a lot of speculations and even a lot of studies
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focusing on what we can maybe look for to find some kind of alien life but as it is right now everything out there kind of looks like this it kind of looks more or less empty and more specifically the extraterrestrial
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intelligent life the signals from which we've been looking for for several decades now has never really been found anywhere with all the potential signals so far explained in some other way and that of course includes the most iconic
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wall signal that we discussed in one of the previous videos and so at the moment unfortunately it's looking more and more like we might be the only species out there the only intelligent species able to self reflect and able to create
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technology to help us with daily lives but there's still some hope hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be discussing a relatively important paper that unfortunately i did not get to cover before that i really wanted to talk
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about because i've actually personally been thinking about this idea for a pretty long time the idea that in order for us to actually maybe think about extraterrestrial intelligence or possibly find something out there instead of focusing too much on the out
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there and searching for life on other planets we should maybe first try to find something in the historical record of planet earth because by discovering some kind of signs of previous intelligent life on our planet that
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naturally evolved from life that existed here we might start to speculate about the existence of similar life somewhere out there in the rest of the galaxy and there's a really important reason for this particular idea as i study
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astrobiology more and more i realized that it's actually exceptionally difficult for life to form in the way we believe it form here on planet earth even simple bacterial life the one we find pretty much everywhere on earth
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might have not really had the same luck elsewhere and developing multicellular or even more complex macrolife is even more difficult so making assumptions that this exists elsewhere on other
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planets is actually currently kind of incorrect sometimes this is also referred to as the rare earth hypothesis but we'll discuss this in another video sometimes in the future so make sure to subscribe but all of the recent studies
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kind of really indicate that the actual process of creating complex life on the planet just kind of got really lucky with a lot of really complex steps that would probably not occur elsewhere but it doesn't mean we should stop looking
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as a matter of fact it's maybe even more reason to look harder and one of the better ways to look for potential extraterrestrial intelligent life is to kind of start connecting all of this from the evolutionary perspective so for example when it comes
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to evolution we know that things that are kind of more or less successful tend to evolve independently of anything else i've actually covered a similar concept in one of the previous videos you can find in the description but we know that
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for some unknown reason nature tends to prefer crabs the idea of a crab or morphological crab has evolved on the planet several times in the last few hundreds of millions of years in other words for some unknown reason this right
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here seems to be kind of successful so when we talk about crabs we don't just actually talk about one species in reality this particular morphology applies to a lot of different species so for example this kind of a crab that you see is kind of different in terms of a
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lot of components including genetics from for example a hermit crab it just so happens that for some reason nature tends to re-evolve crabs over and over similarly we know that the idea of flight evolved in the panelists several
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times as well and this of course includes the idea of wings they seem to exist in for example insects they also exist in reptiles they also exist in birds so this also seems to be an evolutionary advantage that repeats
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itself many times and more recently there was actually a study from just a few days ago where the scientists discovered that well the idea of saline or the stuff that snails have but also the stuff that's in our mouth so basically our saliva is also
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exceptionally successful in terms of evolution a lot of different species including mammals independently evolved all kinds of different slime because it just seems to work so well on the planet and it seems to serve so many different
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purposes okay but what does any of this have to do with what we're talking about allen intelligence well using similar concepts here just like for example crabs seem to be successful evolutionary we can kind of make an assumption that
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complex brains and by extension complex intelligence should also be somewhat common in terms of evolutionary success and assuming that it's evolutionary preferential or basically that evolves many times throughout the history of the
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planet we can then make a conjecture that it should exist somewhere out there where life exists on other planets okay just to rephrase this if we truly believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists out there and that
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it kind of evolved in the same way that it evolved here on planet earth it's pretty safe to assume that it might have evolved several times on the planet because we're making an assumption here that this is an evolutionary advantage
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that all planets that potentially have life on them are going to end up with some kind of a species that's going to become super intelligent and that's going to be self-aware able to use technology and essentially kind of communicate in the same way that we
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communicate using for example radio waves now to me personally as a side note that's a lot of assumptions we're making here but that's kind of what a lot of modern astrobiology and specifically astrobiology pertaining to extraterrestrial intelligence is based
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on and that of course means that if we look in the historical record of our planet we actually should be finding more signs of intelligent life existing in the past and this hypothesis was officially proposed only a few years ago
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back in 2017 and it currently has an intriguing name it's known as the silurian hypothesis now this is actually a bit of a play on words it's actually based on the episode of doctor who that had a strange race known as sillurians
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that evolved millions and millions of years ago from ancient reptiles that also possess intelligence but then because of the climatic changes on the planet essentially went into a prolonged state of hibernation in order to survive
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the inhibitable earth waking up on modern earth and then interacting with the doctor and so because of this episode the scientists behind this paper decided to give it a kind of a tony chick name calling it the silverine hypothesis which by itself comes from a
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geological period roughly around 440 million years ago and honestly for me personally this right here represents one of the more important papers or one of the more important propositions when it comes to
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the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence because at the moment there's really only two possible answers either we're completely alone and we kind of evolved completely by accident and there's really no other intelligence anywhere out there which makes it a kind
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of an evolutionary fluke and it's unlikely to repeat anywhere or anyone in the universe or extraterrestrial intelligence and any kind of intelligence is pretty common and we should be finding a lot of it here on
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planet earth in the historical record although obviously this is not a new idea and even that doctor who episode was not the first time this was ever proposed there's actually at least one other science fiction book from the 50s written by alice mary norton who used to
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write under andre norton pseudonym who talked about a relatively similar concept in the time traders although the idea here was a little bit different here the author explained that pretty much all the signs of modern civilization are going to be completely
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erased by the time the next glacial period begins in other words everything you see around you all the cities all the technology every major building every major structure we've ever built will basically be gone there will be no
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signs of it left and within just a few million years there will be no one to tell the story and that's of course not really far from the truth as a matter of fact that's exactly what the scientists in this hypothesis propose and explain as well and that's of course why it
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makes it so difficult to either prove or disprove this we currently have no idea if any of this is correct here i actually wanted to show you this beautiful illustration by one of the authors we basically have no idea if back in the
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day when the dinosaurs were around they also had some kind of a super intelligent species that would drive their own versions of cars have their own versions of smartphones and eventually result in their own demise over time all of this would be gone to
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history because of the way that geology works on our planet but in this paper the scientists decided to actually work out any potential ideas or experiments we can conduct on the planet to try to find out if this actually existed and if
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it was possible in the past so just to clarify they're not saying it did exist or did not exist they're just saying it's about time we started thinking about potential experiments where we can maybe explore this more scientifically
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with one of the i guess stranger or slightly scarier conclusions proposed by the scientists in the study is that a lot of the signs we see in the geological history of the planet kind of resemble what we are now observing in
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the anthropocene the period when humans started to dominate the globe or basically how the modern climate change to some extent actually resembles a lot of sudden changes that did happen in the last few millions of years with one
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specific type of an event currently still unexplained by scientists often referred to as hyperthermals the sudden increase in temperature that usually lasts for a few thousand years but happens in a very short period of time
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and currently doesn't have a very definitive explanation but one very well known example we explored in the past in one of the videos should be in the description known as p-e-t-m paleocene using thermal maximum the event that
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happened approximately 55 million years ago when the global temperature suddenly increased by 5 to 8 degrees celsius or 9 to 14 degrees fahrenheit just to then drop suddenly within a few thousand years and there's been quite a lot of
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explanations for what might have happened maybe an asteroid collision that released huge amounts of co2 gas or a lot of other gases that usually warm up the planet maybe volcanic eruptions doing the same but at the moment there's
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just not enough clear evidence specifically craters or any volcanoes that were produced during this time to suggest any specific explanation on the other hand all of these observations kind of resemble what's happening to the planet right now as well and so trying
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to figure out exactly what caused these warming conditions is one of the potential ways we could start assessing the hypothesis and try to answer these some of the difficult questions also likewise any kind of alloying industrial
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civilization should maybe produce very similar effects on their planet as well at least that's what the modern science expects but what are some of the questions we can ask ourselves in regards to the history of our planet in
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order to see how viable the hypothesis is well first of all generally speaking the geological record of our planet is usually very incomplete and it becomes even more difficult to study it as you go back in time for example today we
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know that only about three percent of the entire surface of the planet has any kind of urban activity on the surface or basically anything that would potentially resemble modern technology and so the chance for a lot of these cities to survive for thousands or even
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millions of years is exceptionally low which also means that within just a few thousand years the chance for discovering these techno fossils for some future humans living here is also going to be pretty low as well you can
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kind of see that there are some bottles here and a lot of other leftovers but all this is going to disappear in time turning into nothing but almost completely indistinguishable sediment and for any major city to leave any mark
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inside the sediment it really depends on where it's located if it's located on the subsiding plate it might eventually become sediment and get locked inside rock leaving behind certain marks but if
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it's on the rising plate or if it's somewhere in the middle everything here might eventually be eroded with time by different types of rain and wind especially as the rain becomes more acidic leaving pretty much nothing
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behind on the other hand when it comes to things like for example dinosaur fossils we usually discover one fossil for every 10 000 years with the footprints of dinosaurs being even more rare but even though humans have been on
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the planet for at least 300 000 years the civilization that we're used to has only been around for just over a few hundred years and technically even less than that and so the chance for something from our modern civilization
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to turn into a fossil that can be discovered in the future is actually super low and so right now there's a really big chance that after a few million years everything we take for granted is going to look like this and
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so the natural question here is how do you then tell if any intelligent species ever existed on the planet like we do right now well we might be able to distinguish certain sedimentary anomalies even present in the sediment
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today and then combine this with observations of various hyperthermals or any other major changes in the temperature that don't seem to have any other explanation for example all the technofossils are going to leave behind
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a very specific isotopic ratio that's extremely difficult to find in nature including of course residues of carbon that doesn't exist in nature such as various microplastics these should linger for quite a while there should
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also be geological record of a major extinction event that doesn't really have any good explanations also signs of unusual chemicals that are generally not produced in nature either for example things like cfcs or more
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specifically various types of transuranic isotopes from nuclear fission which obviously all the chemical signs we're currently living on the planet by doing a regular stuff
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by being ourselves and so we kind of expect something similar could have happened in the past there could have been another species that was basically exploiting the planet and as a result left some signs of this in the
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geological record but that's of course assuming that any civilization is going to have a lot of very specific needs in terms of energy and a lot of civilizations are going to eventually result in similar types of pollution
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naturally a pretty big assumption but it's really the only assumption we have right now in order to figure out if this hypothesis has any merit but even here there's still a major problem if this type of a civilization has not existed
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for longer than let's just say a few hundred years the chance for it to even leave any kind of a mark and that includes the fossil mark is still pretty low and even things like microplastics or things like transuranium elements
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might have already mixed with a lot of other stuff or disappeared completely especially if this happened a long time ago and so if these ancient civilizations ever existed and if they managed to somehow change the planet in the past the signs of their existence
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would still be extremely difficult to discover with the only signs left after millions of years really just being various types of isotopes that could still be out there in the sediments on the planet but the scientists in this
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paper also propose some other ideas that we can kind of learn from ourselves and from the way that we change the planet so for example we know that humans also got really good at the idea of geoengineering changing the environment
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of the planet by for example redirecting water so for example detecting various deposits from ancient rivers or ancient lakes that should not exist naturally we know that something like this is going to exist in the future because of the
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dams that we have we also know that the widespread use of fertilizers and huge amounts of agricultural activity is going to leave behind a very specific mark in terms of the excess of nitrogen
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that should not be possible naturally and a lot of other manufacturing and industries are going to leave behind a mark in terms of heavy metals and things like rare earth minerals that will suddenly be deposited in a single layer
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as opposed to being widely distributed as they usually are these would be very specific tracers that would be a total sign that something unusual is happening somewhere in the sediment and so if suddenly somewhere in the sediment we do
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find signs of this all happening all at once it will be a pretty good sign that something was going on in that particular period at the moment there's really no sign of any of this but also because it hasn't really been studied
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thoroughly yet and also because detecting some of the stuff is still pretty difficult but the point of this paper is to kind of ask these questions and to maybe lay a groundwork for potential future studies or for
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potential future research of any kind of terrestrial intelligence that existed in the past something that's extremely important if we ever want to find extraterrestrial intelligence but the main conclusion being that we need to look for these multi-factorial
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signatures not just one or two signatures but all of them all at once it's really the only way we're going to be certain that we found something that does not have a natural explanation something that could have been created by an ancient intelligence although
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obviously there are some other ways as well for example if some kind of ancient intelligence had spaceflight we may also find signs of this somewhere on for example the moon maybe they also crashed a bunch of probes here millions of years
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ago which are still somewhere on the surface because the moon doesn't change as much but we know that as of today from all the explorations we've done so far there doesn't seem to be anything here and so until we find something
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anywhere it's still going to remain an interesting question an intriguing proposition and a hypothesis although i'm sure all of us would love to believe this and once again as i mentioned in the beginning if this never existed on
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our own planet if intelligent life never actually evolved or existed any time in the past well that's actually a pretty bad sign for any potential study trying to discover extraterrestrial intelligence
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as well it really just means that intelligent life is just a fluke and the brain is an anomaly something that might not exist anywhere else but these of course questions we cannot answer yet and will probably not be answering for
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many years to come but these are the questions i'm going to be asking and exploring in many future videos for many years to come because it's been bugging me for so many years now which also means that if you want to know the answer at some point maybe subscribe and
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maybe share this with someone who learned about space and sciences and maybe come back tomorrow to learn something else either way stay wonderful i'll see you tomorrow maybe support this show on patreon by joining channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the
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description see you tomorrow and as always bye-bye [Music] and honestly i really love this picture [Music]
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do you
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