Climatologist Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, a scientist at the University of Rochester, decided to investigate this assumption and wrote together an article called “The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?”.
The term “Silurian” was borrowed from the British science fiction series “Doctor Who,” which refers to a reptilian race that lived on Earth millions of years before the emergence of our own society.
Published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the work describes the type of signature that a technologically competent species can leave behind.
Schmidt and Frank use projected traces of the Anthropocene, the current era in which human activity is influencing planetary processes such as climate and biodiversity, as a guide to what we might expect from other civilizations.
