When astrobiologist Adam Frank walked into the office of NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, he had what he believed was the weirdest question: do aliens experience climate change? It took just moments for Schmidt to out-weird him.
Frank, a University of Rochester professor who looks for signs of life in the universe, was digging into whether advanced civilizations would inevitably trigger climate shifts, just as humans are doing now. He was looking at other planets, he told Schmidt that day back in 2017, “because, of course, we know that there have been no other civilizations on Earth.”
Schmidt immediately cut him off. “How do you know that?” he asked.
It was a record scratch moment, Frank said, and it started the two scientists off on an investigation. If an advanced civilization had lived on Earth millions of years ago, powered themselves with energy and wiped themselves out, would we know? Would they have left traces of their presence etched into the record of our planet?
They called the idea the “Silurian hypothesis” — after a fictional advanced race of reptiles in the TV show “Doctor Who” — and published a paper on it in 2018.
