In otherwords this is a supernatural, not natural hypothesis.
In other words, that’s more of a religious rather than scientific hypothesis.
It’s cool to have inspiration from where-ever, the whole point of religion and art is that they don’t need to be scientific.
But one really shouldn’t confuse non-scientific inspiration with actual science. Confusing the two leads to arguments like earth is 6000 years old and god just faked all the fossil evidence etc.
I get what you're getting at, but I don't think it's so clear cut. Religion is more about organizational beliefs than just beliefs. Many parts of science are pretty far fetched in terms of us only knowing a bit with a very tightly constrained perspective (humans sitting on Earth with limited technology in the Solar System in the Milky Way) but making leaping conjectures. So in fact, science and religion have some shared analogues. (C.f. Paul Feyerabend.)
Certainly, the hypothesis you replied to is incredibly far fetched. But I don't think it's religious. It's more fantasy.
You'd need a civilization that did not produce long-lived technological signatures (e.g. glass panes), that did not have a large number of individuals (i.e. produce remains), that did not substantially alter their environment (i.e. leave geographic markers), AND that did not consume easily available resources (e.g. oil/gas or metal ore).
Which is to say... possible, but not very likely.
This is the topic of the paper, I think the authors settled on climate markers and radiation from elements like plutonium-239 as among the very few pieces of evidence that might still be around on that time scale. They also observe that there has likely been enough exploitable energy in the form of oil, natural gas etc. to support an industrial civilization since about 250 million years ago.
It's chemically inert like aluminum (after oxidizing, e.g. foil), so the processes acting on it are mechanical and subject to probability.
Some amount is going to be abraded, buried, etc, but you only need a few pieces to remain. Given their ubiquity in our culture, there'd be some somewhere.
Yet we can barely imagine a society without wheels, but some human cultures in South America didn't get that idea.
Assuming that every civilization invented glass is very tenuous.
Dinosaurs presumably fossilize very badly compared to many artificial artifacts, like buildings made out of machined stone.
They wouldn’t fossilise. That’s specific to the porosity of organic tissue. They might be preserved, but the Cambridge paper explains why it’s unlikely they would last for a hundred millennia or more.
Why? The Cambridge paper gives a scientist’s reasons for that not being the case being supposition.
Pompeii looked remarkably fresh when dug out.
The point stands, most things don’t survive all that long (in the grand scheme of things). Occasionally, the conditions are exactly right to preserve something, but there is a limit.
However, that happened very early in the history of the solar system, likely before life had a chance to start.
Those things also are all in the probability.
The authors of the Silurian hypothesis paper believe it's unlikely that there was an ancient non-human industrialized civilization. But they think if there was we wouldn't find its fossils. We might need to look for other markers like climate variances, radioactive materials or artifacts on the moon. Maybe some civilization arose, got stuck in the bronze age or early industrial tech for a thousand years, didn't generate those signatures, then died out. If our fossil record isn't thorough enough to find them then that possibility seems hard to disprove.
Wikipedia has a bit more detail on the Silurian hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
And the actual paper is here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...