From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. No fooling fellow conspiracy realists. As we're listening, we are coming to you live ish from the absolute pinnacle of human evolution so far. Think about it. You've got phones that have smart in the name smartphones. You can get hot pockets with almost anything in them. Humanity hasn't gotten everything right, quite the opposite. But you gotta hand it to these scrappy primates, right, they struggled, they strove, they persevered, you know they strode, had those primates well, U strove is actually also the correct past tense of strive. It's not striven, like I've been saying all these years. Dang, it depends, it depends. But it's also American English, so we can we can kind of do what we want as long as people understand us. And that's another evolution that humans achieved. The ability to use language is amazing. You know, you read a book from hundreds of years ago, and you're hearing the thoughts of a dead person in your own mind. I don't think people understand how cool and creepy reading is. But but but there we are, right. I mean, all of this, all of these millions of other primates that we will never meet, play your role in bringing you here to this podcast today. And there are frankly unanswerable questions that remain about the origin and growth of human civilization. But right now most scientists are largely on the same page sort of uh, in the idea that this is the first time this has happened. But what an interesting question to ask, what if it's not, Yeah, at least the first time that a creature has evolved on the planet that is intelligent enough to make machines that make other things. Right, That, in particular, I think is important for this episode. Industrialization, growing a civilization large enough to support huge populations in one place. Yeah, and now, and and that's an excellent way to kind of narrow the scope here too, because, as we'll find, we need to narrow the scope as much as possible. But you might be asking yourself, guys, what are you talking about. I don't read the headlines or titles of the show I got I'm a mover and a shaker. I got stuff going on in the modern world. I got stuff to move and things to shake. Well, here are the facts. Let's start at the beginning. You know, Earth happens billions of years ago. Uh. Humanity is a life form that still doesn't understand how the universe came about. The current theory is the big or the Big Bang, you know. Uh. And from there we know that it is generally accepted right now that the things we call humans evolved from other primates on the African continent. If you look at the lineage as far as people know, from a you know, very imperfect fossil record, then you can see that good old Homo sapiens that I like to call Homo sapiens diverged right uh, from the lineage that would later lead to our friends, the chimpanzees, the bonobos. This happened somewhere between thirteen million and five million years ago. So the ballpark guests, there has millions of years of maybe maybe some time in here. You don't give it. Take eight million when you zoom out far enough. What's eight million between friends? You know? And really quickly, just wanna voice a correction here. Uh, dear friend of the show, Christie pointed out that when I was making a reference to the movie, Um, nope, I said that the ape that is depicted in it was a an orangutan. Is so not right. Orangutans are orange. Uh, it is a chimp. A chimp was the species of that particular character. Terrifying character. Oh yes, terrifying but wonderful film props to Jordan Peele. Uh, I'm not sure what you're doing today, Jordan's but you know, drop a line if you want to be on the show. Would love to chat you up. So, yeah, there's a heck of a ballpark. And this is not a ding on the excellent scientist who have been working for generations to figure all this out for us, let's just keep at high level. So million years ago, possibly due to creative differences, uh, what will become humanity splits paths and as far back as one point five million years ago, the things that would become humans, may have begun to harness fire, to use it to cook, to use it to stay warm in the wild. Again, that's a large ballpark, but it definitely happened by at least two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, so one point five million to two fifty thousand years ago, somewhere in between, about five hundred thousand years ago. Our pal Homo sapien Homo is the genus Homo is Latin for man. So Homo sapien branches off and makes a bunch of uh gosh, what do we call them? In our Ancient Humanity episode Angel Homedy episode called them mix tapes or mix tapes of what would ultimately become all all of most of us listening today. You know Neanderthal's Dennis Sillvans, the real life hobbits out there in Southeast Asia. Do you see the guy that that discovered the Dennis Ovans. Rediscovered the Dennis Ovans won a Nobel Prize recently. I did not know. I wasn't aware. That's awesome and well deserved to, especially because Dennis Silvans are are such a mystery. Do check out that episode, folks, you might be surprised about by just how alive the past is, how it stays with us. And it is a statistical certitude that many of the people listening to today's show have a little bit of Neanderthal or Dennis Ovan lineage in them. Not a bunch, not a ton, you know, like a small percentage. Yeah, I don't even think that Ancestry dot com or three and me picks up on that. It's that it's that level of of small. Yeah, agreeing, there's some populations parts of the world that are much more likely to have larger percentages. But so far as we know right now, there's no like Neanderthal Er Denisovan running around today as far as we know, So if there were, it would be kind of a massive find. It would be like the missing link kind of situation. Right, Yeah, they would have Uh, it would be like winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning twice on the same day. That's how astronomical the odds are. But if it happens, that would be amazing, especially because Homei Sapiens, what we recognize is modern humans at least anatomically. They hit the stage just three hundred thousand years ago, so from thirteen million years ago, all the way up to just three thousand years ago, we have humans that look like humans mostly, but behaviorally they're not what we call modern. They're still very different. That's going to take more than another hundred and fifty thousand years. It's not until seventy thousand or fifty thousand years ago. And isn't it funny that evolution mainly got the basic equipment right that early, and the rest of the evolution kind of happened inside, you know, in the brain, the b camera mind. Yeah, and uh, and there there are other interesting explorations we've done on the idea of psychedelics accelerating those behavioral changes, as well as h a lovely episode that I actually we listened to with Joe McCormick from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. That one's a banger. Check out the bi camera mind there. So, all right, we've got we've got our people took millions of years of brutal evolution, and we won't know most of the stuff that went down, but we know largely seventy fifty thousand years ago people are starting to think the way people think now, and that's when we see religion emerge ritualistic burial, other rituals. People are thinking abstractly about a world that they cannot necessarily see. Uh, they start going out on the ocean. I think, maybe a little earlier, even more advanced weaponry. And then multiple groups of anatomically modern humans are leaving the African continent over time. And this is a little depressing, but human civilization has been a series of close calls and bottlenecks at the weirdest moments. So I thought, I don't know about you guys, but I was surprised to find that um, a ton scholars quite like a strong contingent, if not a majority of experts will argue that the earlier migrant waves just died out, like they just couldn't survive. Uh. You know, the further north you go, the environment changes radically and so on. Uh. And so they will tell you that all modern non African Homo sapiens are descended from groups that left right during that seventy thousand to fifty thousand year time period. And they didn't know agriculture either. They were just they were kind of improvising, Right. Can I find something that I can eat that won't kill me? Can I run this you know, antelope down, etcetera. Oh, don't let that tiger get me. That kind of vibe. Very stressful. Yeah, because our our best relics of agriculture, our best understanding of when it came about, was only about ten thou years ago, which if you think about people just moving out and trying it on their own without having a reliable way to create their own food is astounding and then probably honestly moving like other animals. Right, you're responding to environmental pressures, threats from out groups. Uh, not enough food, not enough water, too many predators, not enough prey, that kind of thing. Uh. And you know, I always want to take a moment and just thank whomever was responsible for figuring out agriculture. I think about it constantly. Somebody was paying attention and went through a lot of what ifs, right, a lot of trial and error. Uh, Like how would you you know you would like what? You look at a grain? You look at a seed and you think, I don't know, bury it, Oh, I should bury it somewhere else. It's the kind of thing kids, do you know, It's like just experimentation, just just randomness, and then enough people observe that behavior and observe the results, and then it starts kind of being a part of that historical game of telephone that we talked about, where things get kind of passed down from observation and retelling, and then gradually, over time it starts to kind of resemble what we know and rely on today. Excellent point. Yeah, And you know, over over the span of their existence, humans have tried to bury and grow a lot of things, including teeth, just to see what happens, just get it to go. But but once we figured it out, right around that ten thousand year ago mark, once you figure out how to grow our own food, we started living near that food right the center where we can grow a lot of food. Well, guess what, that's where we live now, a lot of us, way more than we used to welcome home, you know what I mean. Now more of the children will survive to adulthood. Uh. And now you will also be able to increasingly take care of people we might have just left in the woods earlier. You know what I mean, are bad, says early humanity, But we're different now. Uh. This is called the neo Yeah, sure, yeah, this is called the Neolithic revolution. And right now, even in experts still can't agree on exactly why this happened. Why it seems like suddenly around that time people got it. But the you know, the idea uh spread memetically viral. E. You know, people can toss good ideas to one another. Always have been either the best communicators or the worst. Not really in middle ground. Uh this agriculture, like you said, Matt, we live here now. It leads to the first cities, those become the first states during what's known as the Bronze Age, which leads to Bronze Age collapse. Again, a lot of stuff we're throwing at you. At least four ancient civilizations figured out writing on their own, which is also very impressive to Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and parts of Mesoamerica. But if you're looking for the first complex civilization, you're looking in Mesopotamia, in sumer and then look, there's all sorts of stuff. Fast forward, fast forward, Paul gives is like a fast forward que A lot of history is happening, a lot of a lot of empires, religions. They're rising and they're falling. People are falling in love, they're mad at each other, the burning cities, they're sacking towns, you know, profits are born. Uh that's is that a good summation of like the next several thousand years? I would say so. It's like you know, any of those uh, top down civilization type games are like the SIMS even sort of a civilization simulator. You can kind of see that stuff happening on a much faster timeline. Yeah. And our game of telephone is transferring from mouth into technology, right, and that continues down the line til you get to this point right now, where you've got a smartphone made out of precious metals that is replicating our voices. Yes, and this is a result of something called the Industrial Revolution. New horizons for humanity. Uh. They're making technology with consequences that won't be widely understood until centuries have passed. And this period of time is popularly known as the Anthroposyne, the Age of man. Uh. It's pretty impressive when you think about that escalation. Human beings have been in their current form for hundreds of thousands of years, but only in the last few centuries have they developed all that technology we're talking about. And it's also fascinating to think about. I mean, if you want to take a spiritual view, of it as some kind of prime mover creator methos. All of the stuff that we needed to make that technology was there for us the whole time, you know what I mean, Like all of these precious metals that you're talking about, it was just about finding them and putting them to the right use. How crazy is that when you really drill into it and think about it. I mean, all of this stuff. You know, folks that really you know, have religious beliefs, the idea that all of this was made for us, and that usually relates to things like animals that we need to eat and plants and things that we need for shade and oxygen, but it also applies to things way way deeper down in the Earth's crust that we couldn't even get to until we made the tools to do that properly, and then we had to evolve to know how to harness these things. It's a weird concept. God made uranium. We just spun it until it became the dangerous, the really dangerous kind. Well, guy, like, let's assume creative exist. The imagine this for this is like I made your radium for a totally different things. I don't know what, what are you guys doing down there, and because it works, you know, but heck, man, you're gonna blow yourselves up in no time. I meant for this to last a hell of a lot longer than what y'all are leading to. Why are you? Why are you always trying to kill each other? You know what I mean? This is nuts. This is not how we saw it going. That's our god impression or collected God impression. But it's kind of like a Jerry Seinfeld figure. He's like, what's the deal with the humans always doing this crazy stuff? Where did the socks go and the dryer? Why are they so into their weird holes? Anyway, we might addit that one. You can take that however, you ish we dig a lot of holes and we also have we possess weird holes. So yeah, and uh, digging weird holes is actually part of this story. Think you always saved it? So another philosophical thing I would add to that question. Um, not in contradiction, but it's something else that be on people's minds when you think about this concept of intelligent design, is that human beings evolved here. So if something intelligent evolved in a very different place than it, very well might feel that everything was just so and Goldilocks zone for it. So it's it's an important questions the thing to wrestle with, like places we have no understanding of, where the rules might be completely different, where up might be down and they have something else that's uranium like but not. I mean this also gets you to start thinking about multiverse ideas where maybe it's like ours, but things are just a little tweaked, you know, or we could think about it in terms of everything existing on the same timeline. There are just places so far beyond our grasp that have similar Goldilocks zones and rules that just do not resemble ours. Yeah, I think it's um David Brin, I want to say, as a sci fi author who wrestles with a lot of that, like hydrogen based life, silicon based life. Maybe somewhere from what humans know about the size of the universe, it's quite conceivable that somewhere now or once upon a time or in the future, there is a silicon based civilization and there's one nuts so silicon based astrobiology professor zenobiologists, who's going, I think there might be carbon based life forms and they're like, you are freaking you were out of your circuits. Bro, We're gonna burn, right, they wouldn't even have burning, though it would be something else. We're gonna I ify you. I don't know what it would be, but it would be something to you. Yeah. So, while all of this is happening, well, humans are doing their best and for the most part, succeeding in the long, long term. Uh. People start asking questions about the empires communities that came before, and saying, how much do we really know about them? You know, you go far enough back and do civilizations and history transforms into myth, you know what I mean. And it's difficult to prove or disprove some things. But that's not the question today. Question today is more intriguing, and I would argue more ominous. Has life been at this stage before? And would we know if it had. We're gonna on on Earth, on Earth. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsor and we'll be right back. Here's where it gets crazy, Okay. The whole time working on this stuff, we had this one coming. For a while, I kept thinking of, um, the ballot of Buster Scrugs, where the Franco character is getting hanged and turned around and says first time, it's not a spoiler, because that's a meme already. It is. I didn't know that. Do you know of that? It's worth it. It's worth it matter if I ruined it, but it's it's good. It's just one moment in a much larger thing like humanity. Uh so hey, hey, so science fiction literature. They've explored this idea before, the concept of ancient civilizations, ancient unknown civilizations, Atlantis, Lamuria, Hyperborea, things like that. But in recent years, more and more scientists have been captivated by what we could describe as a thought experiment. Um, a thought experiment looking for life, not in this universe or other universes, but right here on our pale blue dot. What's the simple way to put this? Like we've we've all read the paper, and you can read the paper online for free, but um, what what? What's there? What if? What are they? What if? Here? So here it is? If you really want to parse this down to its kind of basic fundamental it is the question, given the vast span of Earth's history, is it possible that some earlier civilization that predates our humanity uh may have reached that industrial level before we did. Uh, And if so, is it possible that there might be evidence of this in the historical record? And I don't mean the historical record like you know what historians have have written in toms. I mean like things like ice cores and fossils and all of that stuff, Like, shouldn't there be some clue that would prove that this had happened? And if not, why well yeah, well and if you think about that, and you think about that span of time, it even leaves in the possibility that it's not a mammalian species that could have reached that level, right. I think it's I think it's very uh self centered for us to think that it would be you know what I mean. It's like if we think of other other potential sal you know, species and civilizations. Again, like we were talking about at the top, the more sci fi kind of um conjecture version of this, I think it's very absurd to think that it would resemble anything that we're familiar with at all. Yeah, there are there are a lot of things that we have to wrestle with when we ask this question, and it's an endlessly fascinating question. Uh. First, you know, if it's old enough mammals weren't really a thing unless mammals evolved twice, which is asking a lot. Not impossible, but asking a lot. It's like, you know, winning a lottery ticket getting hit by the lightning on a second day, you know, after the first day, and you know, like, I gotta, I gotta change of spending all my lottery winnings on you know, trauma awards. But this question captivated to scientists in particular, and they're they're both big deals. Adam Frank, who is an astrobiologist at the University of Rochester and Gavin Schmidt, who is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City out of NASA. And first they were just talking. They were just Frank approached Schmidt and said, hey, what do you think about the concept of detecting alien civilizations by looking at how they might have impacted the climate of a planet? Right? We you know, can we use ice cores, could we use tree rings? Dendo chronology? To figure something out? And then eventually after they they both were super upboard tent toes down for this and they were like having these late night conversations for a while, and then Eventually they realized, heck, we could expand this question and bring it home. We could ask the same thing about the planet we're on now. They call it the Silurian hypothesis. And this is not uh, this is not a shout out to uh Silurian the way it's the acade Amia and UH and geology. This is a shout out to doctor who fans It sounds like an an alien race to me. The Silurians. They are doctor who. It's just it's perfect. It's a perfect word for it. It is and it's I mean, it's a great name. So they write this paper and it's a legit paper. Again, do read it online. It is free. Keep in mind that it is a scientific paper. It is in a journal, so there's some hard science in there. Not hard. A isn't difficult, but you know, like quantitative data. And they walk through a lot of questions. We're gonna walk through them today and and see what we think about this. Um. There's also great writing about it that is a little more digustible that you can find. Oh yeah, yeah, you can find some great articles and wired you can find um yeah, you can find tons of analysis. But do do check it out. You know, crack open beverage of choice or your vice of choice, and prepare to have your mind blown. What do we all drinking today? I see a bubbly see gatorade. I guess some weird Japanese drink called coffee flavored milk drink. Oh, so it's coffee with a delicious Oh it's Korea's favorite. Okay, you're not drinking Mr Brown today. No, I'm out of Mr Brown. I've got like, I've got a weird disparate collection of kind of a juice box of coffee juice box. That it is there, It is all right. So they're having this conversation and they eventually they published this paper and they say, Okay, is it possible to detect an industrial civilization that preceded what we know of history by looking at the geological record? Could they have? Could there have been something that was on a global scale that made enough of an impact like humans are doing now, such that we can find traces vestiges of this eons later, all the way here in the age of the anthroposyne. And to be fair, they're not making wild claims. They don't immediately blow smoke. You can get that they're very cautious when when you read this and they're not doing a weekly world news tabloid. It's not um, they're not trying to make money. This is published in an outfit called the International Journal of Astrobiology. I'm not going to pretend that I have a subscription, but I did. I did read the paper, but yeah, I'm not up to date on that journal. You know, I know, I know we're gonna get into specifics, but this is the implication being Obviously, we're not talking about an epoch here on Earth necessarily that we missed or that you know, was erased in some way. We're talking about that some star stuff from one of these other civilizations found its way into the formation of ours, and then we would be able to potentially dig deep and find little clues, uh to something that happened you know, are far away. It's both, it's both. They started with uh, they started with the idea of looking in other parts of the galaxy, and they realized they could apply the same thought experiment to Earth itself. And they're pretty skeptical about this because they don't want to come off sound any like crackpots. And guys, if you're listening, you don't at all. Uh. They had one quote that really stood out, where they say, 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 to both astrobiology and to anthroposyne studies. So really they're saying, hey, look, guys, we know it sounds a little out there, but even if you think it's out there, the way we approach this question can lead us to uh more res church in proven things like astrobiology, the age of you know, the age of humanity, the anthroposyne. Uh. And also, we don't have any financial motive. At the very end of the paper, they make that very clear. They're like, we don't have any funding for this paper. We didn't ask for any We just think it would be cool if more people started thinking about this. Uh. And then they do just what you're describing their old They start with a pretty a very approachable intro to like what an astrobiologists would do, what scientists do when they're thinking about searching for non terrestrial life aliens. That's where that's where their origin point was, and they talked about some of the coolest stuff on planet Earth, the things you could compare to possible non terrestrial life. You want to start small. You're looking at extreme of files. If you ever run into extreme of files, you're in neighborhood you are not built for, like some of those deep sea fellas that are just weirdos. They're weird, yeah, man, the ones that like can survive, you know, extreme temperatures and still look cute as a button. Let me say, well, and the concept here is that perhaps some of these survived from that same time, right, Yeah, that would be that would be one of the concepts when they're applying it to Earth, right Uh. And then also, you know, in general, you would if you're an astrobiologist your look or zeno biologists, et cetera. You're looking at extreme aphiles and you want to find ones that you want to find life forms that are surviving in an environment that might resemble something you can reasonably assume is out there in the ink, you know. Uh, That's where that's where they start with. But then they say, okay, well let's let's think this a little further. Right now, It gets increasingly controversial. So of the search for life, Uh, the umbrella is that you search for analogs on Earth that look like they could live in an alien environment. Subset of that under the umbrella, a smaller umbrella, I guess uh is the search for intelligent life, which gets kind of controversial, right, you have to make a lot of assumptions about intelligence. And under that a third, even smaller, tiny umbrella is the holy grail of the entire search, the search for a civilization made of some intelligent life form that also has the ability to communicate somehow with human beings. If that happens, I'm sorry, various religions, that's officially the biggest thing that ever happened. It's not a great mythology, but I I do. And there are things about the movie Prometheus that I enjoyed, um the Alien prequel, because it kind of explores some of these things, the idea that things from another galaxy or another dimension could somehow, you know, interact with humans. And by intelligent in that respect, we mean pure murderous rage, you know what I mean. So like the idea of what does intelligence mean? It could just mean the most extreme levels of cunning and uh and and and desire to wipe out and exterminate anything that is not them, kind of a dark forest approach. Uh for for all the sci fi nerds, right, and they you know, they have to acknowledge primary assumptions. One of the big assumptions that supports the whole saluried hypothesis is this. They're saying, Okay, any civilization capable of communicating with humans in some way, we have to assume they have developed an industry of some sort. Now, is it totally possible that there could be a purely organic kind of civilization like they grow their radio or they you know, they have telepathy or something like that. Sure, that's possible, but there's no real there's no real life comparison of that that human scientists know yet. So what human scientists know is stuff like building radio technology. So finding something like that that is the kicker. That's that's the that's the good version of winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning twice. But also like building, we build things that we cannot do with our bodies. You know, we build things because we don't have these abilities. So we want to like level up and and be and have these powers that potentially other civilizations or species that we're not aware of could have innately. I mean, even like you know, dolphins and certain sea creatures do have the ability to communicate vias sonar, and that's not something that we can do with our meat bodies. So the question of industry starts to become a rabbit hole in and of itself, because you know, would a sufficiently advanced civilization even need an economy? Would they even need the ability to like, quote unquote make money if they were situated in such a way where everyone just kind of was able to communicate and coexist naturally without that kind of stuff, I would argue the idea of industry and economy is sort of a negative byproduct of of humanity. Again, uh, no one, No one has yet to uh prove a difference between the concept of economy and the concept of religion. So I'm with you there, uh. And certain focused modes of thought could also be considered a technology in some ways. But you're right. So Frank and Schmidt are asking their assumptions. They say, Okay, if we want to find this diamond in the universal rough, then let's assume life has arisen somewhere anywhere, and that some species are what we would understand isn't legit. If those two things you're true, then how often do these life forms reach what we would call the industrial civilization stage? And this is where humanity is really at a disadvantage because if you if you know basic science, you want a good sample size. Our sample size is one. We have one example. It's humans. That's that's the only that's the only thing. And we talked about Homo sapiens ben what was the min max there up two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Yet when we when we began that trek up towards technology, and if you think about that time scale, we've only been in the industrial age for three years. Um. Again, they're aganst they're against to believe, you know it with that span of time we've figured it all out, or that we have all the answers or something, or that we're the most advanced. But this is this is terribly exciting when when you think about the Silurian hypothesis, because complex organisms life on Earth have been around for millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of years. So the potential for something even an industrial civilization to develop out of that? Is there? I mean, it really is, just from a time scale perspective, because it would be a quick blip really for me guys, the big question is when something like that occurs, when an intelligent species you know, emerges and then technology is found in an industrialization occurs. Is there some kind of end point to the beginning of that industrial state that ends in the collapse of that industrial state with like the loss of the species. Right is the brought Like? Are these collapses um somewhat predictable and predetermined? Right? Is the Bronze Age collapse something that just every every life form at a given threshold the bed uh? And then is post industrial the post industrial threshold? Another one of those oopsies? Yeah, I mean you see examples of it even in the Bible, with like the Great Floods and like Sodom and Gomorrah and all these things, and civilizations that you know got too big for their bridges being wiped out by virtue of their own arrogance, you know usually and I would argue that it is predictable, but you know, as we know the timelines kind of maybe honestly, we're probably due for one because of the exponential escalation of the damage that we do, you know. Yeah, But also it's when is due for one. It's kind of like when when someone says Yellowstone is due for an eruption. Again, there's a ballpark there and human lives are infinitessimal fraction of that time. So this is again, like you said, Matt, this is such a short time period, it is reasonable to ask, could this have happened before? If so, how would modern civilization? No, how would you be able to prove it? Well, if we were to look to Earth for proof of some previously unknown beyond ancient civilization, we gotta dig. Literally, we'd be looking into the planet. And this is where we learn about stuff like the quaternary, which is the past two point five million years. It is not a measure of time that the average person uses very often, right, We think more like fifteen minutes. Uh, and you know I'll be there in a half hour, et cetera. And if you were in the South, please know we're lying to you about that punctuality. What you know, eventually someone from the South will get there. But okay, if you look at the past two point five million years, there is loads of evidence for hominids like DENNISO Vince Neanderthals. They lived, they left a mark. You can see evidence of their cultures. You can also see evidence of things like climate change, soil horizon, the passage of time, and the change in the surface. But the fossil record, the geological record, i should say, is woefully incomplete. Once you get past that two point five million mark, you're you're in You're in an uphill situation. That's where you gotta start making all the holes. You know. That's why mining operations and drilling operations find weird stuff all the time. That's why Russia, uh this way before the war with Ukraine, that's why Russia one day said let's just dig a hole as deep as we can and see what happens. But you know, frankly, they're not doing that in the service of science and discovery. So you know, as we know, things tend to get funded more if there's like a monetary gain in alved and it also means that, yeah, maybe they might report it to scientists, and they you know, they have scientists, but these are like oil scientists that their job is to figure out the best holes to drill to get the best return. On their investment. But it does mean that we're probably lacking some information in the historical record because it is very expensive to to dig that deep, literally, and then the poor, poor creator out there beyond the bounds of the heavens is going, oh, come on, what's what's the deal with the guy's oil? Is just like a thing, It's just a thing that happened. You're supposed to be in a fern based economy anyway, So uh, I mean fern gully. You know they had to figure it out, the last rainforest or the tanuki and palm pom poco pomp poco. Yeah, m hmm. Uh So maybe we could look at fossils, right, that makes sense. People know about dinosaurs because they found fossils, fossils that probably launched at least some of the myths of dragons. But you know, fossilization if as you've learned from movies like Jurassic Park, a documentary Jurassic Park, it's a real crapshoot. It's got to be the exact right conditions to generate that fossil record. Um, you know, it has to do with climate, it has to do with how the creature in question or the organism in question died where it was the situation, it really is kind of like that whole winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning on the same day scenario. So therefore we're depending on I mean, sure, it's a long timeline, so you know, technically you're you're likelihood to find some over a longer timeline for those conditions to have occurred multiple times, it does get more likely, But it doesn't mean it's complete because it's not based on anything specific. It's not based on any thing that's meant to show us the way. It's just a bunch of random elements aligning in such a way that it shows us some stuff. Think about how many humans are on the planet right now, Ben, what's the latest numbers? Eight it's close to Oh, we get to do the world population clock. Last time we checked, it was a little bit north of seven point eight billions, and right now it is seven point nine eight billion, So it'll reach it in your life. So like, there's eight billion of us, and if we all died, and if every time a thing died, we would all leave a fossil, right, and you would have a really good chance if you were the next civilization of finding us. But that's not the case. As you said, these very specific things environmental factors have to meet to make a fossil, and we've only got a couple of thousand dinosaur fossils. That's crazy town. Millions and millions of dinosaurs will never know. It's actually it's completely possible that there were multiple species of what we call dinosaurs today that in their glory days numbered in the millions, and just where they were and where they died, they happened not to have the right environment to become fossils, right, Like, not everybody naturally mummifies, you know, because they're not in the right area conditions. We found some of the best ones out west because of things like tar pits, you know, because that was just a larger trap kind of where they would you know, decay and be preserved in just the right way. But other parts of the world don't have those, you know, and so it's a it's a lot more rare to have those situational kind of factors align. Yeah, otherwise we would be you know, inundated in the bones of the dead. Modern Earth would be even more of a graveyard than it actually is. It would appear to be more of one. But so from this, Frank and Schmitt say, a species as recent as our good old pal homie sapiens might not end up existing in the fossil record at all. Uh. And add to that the likelihood of objects made by the homies. Uh. Those surviving those odds are also pretty bad because Earth eats things all the time. Even giant structures that you imagine would be around or we see in post apocalyptic movies that are supposed to take place for in the future, the skeletons of those structures, their fossils would not be around. Yeah, here's here, which means cities are you know, they're going to go the way of the Dodo too. I mean, this is a statistic that might surprise people. So the majority of the human population currently lives in urban environments, that's true, that's a threshold that was recently crossed. Even with that today, no matter how busy your city or community feels, you might be astonished to realize human urban centers make up about one percent of Earth's entire surface area. Uh. So there's not as much out there as we might think, right, and without constant maintenance, those few structures that do exist will be eaten by nature, and it won't take a thousand years. Most of them. It's like a couple of decades and then you know you have that um I am the grass, let me work moments. Uh, I remember the poem. I'll find it later, but it's moving anyway. Fast forward a million years. Any physical evidence would long ago have vanished. A million years is such a long time that tectonic plates can move, right, and so something like if there was something that was built on the San Andreas Fall and it was a stone structure that said this is gonna last forever. Yeah, audios, you know, go with God. But the best we could hope to find then and there, from their perspective, which seems very logical, is minor anomalies, stuff that doesn't quite work out in sedimentary layers. So humanity's probability of finding direct evidence is pretty low. It'd be super cool to find long buried ancient technology. That's what some of our favorite sci fi films and stories are about. Uh and video games, by the way, But the odds just aren't there. The planet is alive, it's a living thing over multiple natural processes over nigh incomprehensible spans of time. It's a hungry boy and it eats everything. But we're not left alone in the dark here. Luckily, Frank and Schmidt have provided a decompelling an argument for the stuff we should be looking for. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. Okay, we're back. The question I think we've arrived to at this point is what should we be looking for? We know how incomplete the record is, even for our you know, civilization, So what are these marks? What are these kind of flags that we should be looking for that might potentially point to other civilizations beyond our you know, galaxy, beyond our anything that we know. Well, this it's kind of what we talked about. You look at the Earth itself, you look at the layers of it, and you go, mmmmm, what could have happened in this general area at this time? Hmm. I wonder what the CEO two levels were like. We're there high levels of some specific chemical in the atmosphere within a certain range of years, which you could imagine would be pollution or something, right if there was an industrial civilization. It's really the only way to do it. It's indirectly looking for evidence of this stuff. Yeah, like you could see evidence of things like rapid changes in temperature or climate way way back in the day. Uh. And this is this is not controversial science. You can find those indicators. They're fairly Uh, they would make sense to the experts. Or someone taps geothermal power sources, I mean, they'd have to put a lot of work in, but they could leave a mark. Uh. And then another thing's interesting slash Depressing nitrogen based fertilizers could result in an anomalous chemical composition in sentiments or the thing that you alluded to so beautifully earlier, matt isotopes isotope ratios. Remember flashback to your high school or college teacher telling you about half lives of different elements and things. There are two things capable of producing something like plutonium to forty four. They are supernovas any human beings, which is a pretty cool list to be on. Uh. So it's a it's like Hawkeye teaming up with the Dark Phoenix. Um, this comic book reference is unnecessary, but we're going to keep it. So is the Dark Phoenix Gene Gray the bad guy version of Jean Gray, or at least I think maybe you turned good. Eventually, I don't get deep into the actual comics and then I'll wait till it comes out in the movies. But I think that's right. Yeah, you guys are right. Also, I would skip the Dark Phoenix film. Uh. That one was problematic and like had a really troubled production and apparently it shows in the in the final product. Comic is great, though, So discovery this stuff like that would be almost a smoking gun. If you discovered plutonium to forty four, you would have to start asking some pretty haunting questions. And then, of course there's the idea of plastics, right, they take forever to degrade. I know, we talked about this all the time and the show, because plastics are going to be a continuing danger for everybody alive now. But also when we're talking, we're talking about the time scale so large that plastics might also not not be a huge player for much of Earth's surface. Because all right, here's my understanding, correct me if I'm if I'm off base here. So plastics can last like one thousand years. They degrade do primarily to solar ultra violet radiation. That's the number one cause of plastic degradation. So you leave plastic like just like mummies and fossils need specific circumstances, plastic does too. If you leave it out in the sun, eventually, you know, a millennia later, bye bye. But if you go past the photic zone of the ocean, if you go so deep into the sea that light no longer penetrates like sinking you know, sinking plastic ultimately making it to the sea floor, then your odds of if you're a little piece like your little you know, bottle of soda or something, or gatorade, powerade, then your odds of surviving on the sea floor are much higher for a much longer period of time. Until a species of shrimp comes along and it's evolved to eat plastic. They're my favorite god shrimp. Yeah, the ones that can just shoot photons right out of their little shrimp eyes. I can't there, Okay, I know you are, I know and I and I ruined that, But I still stand by what I said. I love the idea. I love it. I hope I hope those shrimp grow larger. I don't know why we're not doing more genetic experimentation on them. Come on, you gotta be the change anyway. Uh, well, there's I'm sure there are some people in the crowd who are saying we can't save every falling sparrow because humanity is too busy killing every non human thing. That's true, humans are amid a great mass extinction. It's not the first one ever, but it's it's one that humans are at least partially responsible for. Would be very diplomatic there, you are, good, good, good on you. You got a political career ahead of you, my friend, Oh gosh, I hope not. But so there's this, uh, there's this thing. Right, we know it's reasonable to assume that if there is a great die off, it will show in the fossil record. Large mammal extinctions that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age can be associated with the beginning of the anthroposy. That's from Frank and Schmidt. So that's interesting because it means the sudden absence of a lot of things in the fossil record maybe proof all its own they like. And we know this because evidence of mass extinctions are found by sudden absences in the fossil record, correlated with other changes that seem to happen suddenly, at least suddenly in geological terms, and they go further Frank and Schmidt. And by the way, Frank, when you say it Frank and Schmidt, I just I think it sounds like a vultron kind of situation. I love that. So they proposed that you imagine that the civilization did exist, and then they asked, could have shared this great dream of you know, our humanity and our civilization, the thing that we kind of hang our hat on and terms of like our you know, progress as a species. Two go forth to Sally forth into the great beyond and I'm talking about the afterlife here, I'm talking about the stars. I'm talking about space, the space beyond and between. Well, yeah, and what if they knew that a massive impact was going to occur on Earth at a certain time because they were tracking when it was going to happen, they didn't have the technology to stop it. So enough of them ejected, if you will left and maybe one day return, You guys as reptilian extraterrestrials with laser eyes, you know, that's the noise they make. That's clearly the noise they make. And pew pew. So the thing is what's fascinating, the reason they bring this up is because Earth being such a hungry thing and continue to be a living planning genually having these processes, it's tough to keep things permanent over the long span. There's tectonic activity, there's erosion, But the Moon and Mars they don't they don't roll like that, they don't orbit like that. I should say, God, that's a terrible joke. But the Moon does have like a sort of erosion, you know, it's just way more chilled than the terror version. So it may be that the evidence or the question of the seleriand hypothesis could be answered not by something discovered on Earth, but by something discovered on Mars. That's interesting because it's less likely to have been wiped away. M hmm, yep, that's the first I know. Uh curious or in curious or so uh there are you making a great point, Matt. There are also a lot of caveats we have to add, because you just had one of the most important caveats with the Mars question. What was it? What did it used to be? Like? You know, that's a great time title for a podcast. What why don't we give it a try? Why don't we do a podcast that I was talking with Laura voge Obama while back good friend of the show. You've heard her on the show before. Check out her shows bringing Stuff and savor Um. And I was pitching this idea. It was just a terrible podcast based on all the ideas we had come up with and decided not to pursue at the company and all the weird one offs we did. Would you guys be in could I get you to go on that if we do it down to clown? Yeah, that just splashed the evil eye. This uh this caveat though, is put very uh Frank and schmidt Ley by Frank and schmidt Um. Thus lee uh quote. There is an interesting paradox and considering the anthropogenic footprint on a geological time scale, the longer human civilization lasts, the archer the signal one would expect in the record. However, again, that goes back to what we were saying about fossil record. A longer timeline, you're gonna have more hits, even if it does require very specific situations to lead to those those hits. Um going on. However, the longer civilization lasts, the more sustainable it's practices would need to have become in order to survive. Yeah, oh here that homye sapiens. Uh also shout out to the book Sapiens by Uh Noah you of all Harari. Excellent read, worth your time, controversial, but would love to hear what you think. Oh and by the way, off air aside, thanks to the good mister Matt Frederick, we've confirmed the poem I was alluding to, like like someone with brain adult's brain fever is a real thing. It's called grass. It's by a guy named Carl Sandberg. It's excellent, it's short. Read it and then just have it locked and loaded, be ready to drop and winp Yeah, you'll sound really deep because it is a deep, cool poem, and I wish it wasn't so apropos to these are modern days. But yeah, Frankin Schmidt go on, and they make another great point when they're talking about this paradox we introduced. They say, quote, the more sustainable a society, for example, in energy generation, manufacturing, or agriculture, the smaller the footprint on the rest of the planet. But the smaller the footprint, the less of a signal will be embedded in the geological record. Thus, the footprint of a civilization might be self limiting on a relatively short time scale. Yeah, I'm thinking about like space trash. You know, if you were doing a good job, there would be no space trash. You know, we're the ones who leave that stuff behind because we're not very sustainable. But it is interesting right that that we haven't found a lot of space trash that predates human civilization, That's what I'm saying. Almost none. Well that's because well except for the Black Knights. You you could argue though, that if there was, you know, to to this whole line of thinking, if there was a civilization that predated ours that was better and more sustainable, they just wouldn't have done that. They wouldn't They would have they would have been more thoughtful, they would have done a better job. Guys, we learned our lesson from Mars. Okay, we we they were very lucky to have a mulligan here. Let's do a better job next time, and for some reason, let's make sure we keep it a secret. So MAT's I wish that's emphatic nod. There's doing. Is there a science fiction story? There has to be. The twist is that were the least evolved culture and civilization of them all. M hmm. Yeah, and there are some uh, some academic who have speculated the same thing. The argument is basically like, would we want to talk to us knowing what we know? I mean, I said it before, and I know we're running along here, But imagine if you are an extraterrestrial and you're an advanced civilization, then you have to understand that Earth looks like a really trashy house with a bunch of rusted appliances out in the front yard. You know, we got cars on bricks, We got like, you know, the space equivalent of a of a half open fridge just dangling somewhere. Who knows what it's gonna fall? Drive by that house. Yeah, it's like a universal Jeff Foxworthy joke, you know. Yeah, just so. And Okay, there's another caveat all this Again the small sample size. All the stuff humans are looking at is all the stuff humans have done. So the assumption then is that other civilizations would have approached the industrial age and technology the way humans did. It is completely possible some earlier civilization took a different path. Human beings could be the outlier. That's a huge part of the issue. This this thing leads to um what's called unfalsifiable speculation. That is a much fancier, much more diplomatic way of saying someone could make something up off the top of their head, claim it's true, and confidently go, well, you can't prove it didn't happen anytime someone checks on them. What's the villain nouva movie where they do make it's not contacts, and they do make contact, and of course the alien species doesn't resemble us at all, and they have to figure out how to you know, communicate with it in some very kind of broad general way, which one is that arrival? Thank you, That's that's exactly right. And we've been saying that the whole time. Of course, they wouldn't approach industrialization the same because they probably don't even have the same equipment that we do. They would have to like, you know, suit it to their own their own bodily needs and and the nutritional needs and civilization all if that's the word needs m Yeah. And I know we're naming a lot of like sci fi authors. This is just perfect for it. Uh. Check out writer named Adrian Tchaikovsky. Uh, this spelled like the composer. Uh. This guy wrote a series called Children of Time Children of ruin which no spoilers, examines how different life forms might evolve an approach technology differently. That's a huge part of the Silurian hypothesis. The authors said, look, okay, we're skeptical. We can't prove it, but it's interesting. We're not in it for the money. We want other people to look at this. We're priming the pump for future scientists and it should be uh fascinating. There's an addictive, frustrating allure to the Silurian hypothesis. Humanity overall cannot completely rule it out. I'm doing the explosion noise that stuff to blow your mind noise. You can't prove it didn't happen, which is nuts. That's a problem, a problem we're not going to solve today. But we do want to know what you think about it. Seriously, what do you think? Have you found anything? Do you know of anybody doing research into this stuff? Right now? Just what are your thoughts? You know, grounded or high or whatever? We want to hear them. That's right. You can find us all over the internet. We are conspiracy stuff on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, or we have a Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. And if that doesn't quite bag your badgers. If your hypothesis is that one should not sip the social meds, then we have another way to contact us. That's our telephone number. Say it with me, folks, one three S T D W y t K. You'll have a beep like so beep. You'll have three minutes. 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