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Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by 7thaccount on Friday December 10, 2021 @12:06PM (#29512293)
This is called the "Silurian hypothesis" and is named after the Doctor Who episode that showed an advanced dinosaur race called the "Silurians" that went into cryo millions of years ago.

Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there might not be much left for us to find.

Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by Vetch on Friday December 10, 2021 @02:47PM (#29514626)
Yep, the [paper's conclusion](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20...) was just as you said, there'd not be much of a record to find for civs older than 4 Ma. Also, there are past anomalous and abrupt events in the geological record that appear similar to byproducts from our anthropogenic activity. Evidence against is that timing for majority of such anomalous events can be matched to mundane geological activity in the record.

The rate at which we're accumulating change compared to geological record is also a strong argument against, although they argue limitations in current dating methods reducing how much can be said with certainty about prior epochs.

While there is precious little reason and evidence to believe a priori in a previous advanced dino civ, there are studies that could be done on sediment data that'd lend more certainty (such as looking for unusually rapid metal production).

> Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent-specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy. It will likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior to the event compared with afterwards. Most of the individual markers will not be unique in the context of Earth history as we demonstrate below, but the combination of tracers may be. However, we speculate that some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause.

My opinion is this ultimately boils down to how hard human level intelligence is to evolve, which is why the hypothesis is interesting in the context of the Fermi Paradox. Intelligence might be extremely difficult to evolve, it might require an unusual background environment set of condition or just might not be that useful in general.

Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by easygenes on Friday December 10, 2021 @01:05PM (#29513250)
Pretty sure all the radioactive ore refining we have done is going to leave a mark for billions of years. Never mind how we’ve displaced large percentages of the readily available rare earths already.

I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their geo-engineering marks.

Re:Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'should... by NateEag on Friday December 10, 2021 @01:25PM (#29513526)
Schlock Mercenary is a sci-fi webcomic with a fun thread about sapient dinosaurs fleeing Earth pre-impact.

There's no good way to read just those strips, but it starts here:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25