Intelligent Life on Earth 56 Million Years Ago

Almost 56 million years ago the Earth's climate suffered a fast and significant warming. It's quite possible that an ancient industrial civilisation was intensely active at that time.

The warming, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, was due primarily to a rapid rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The event may have happened over a very short period of time, possibly as short as 1,500 years, and the number of species that went extinct rose to several times that of normal levels.

During that period the average temperature was already several degrees higher than today, meaning there were no polar icecaps, but nevertheless sea levels rose due to thermal expansion. If a civilisation existed at that time it would have had to deal with relatively rapid changes to its coastal habitats and to weather patterns.

The parallels with what is happening to our climate right now are eerily obvious.

If the warming was due to the activities of an advanced civilisation it is likely that the rapid climate change was responsible for its demise. Finding out exactly what happened could give us valuable information that may help save our own civilisation.

A city on Earth, more than 56 million years ago. During that time the climate warmed rapidly. The civilisation that existed at that time would have found its existence increasingly threatened as a result of its unsustainable use of the planet's resources. We are facing the same threats. We must find a way to avoid making the same mistakes that that were made by previous advanced civilisations on our planet.

Finding the evidence of a civilisation that existed 56 million years ago is extremely difficult. Over such a timescale geological processes (plate tectonics, weathering and erosion) would wipe the Earth's surface clean of almost all traces of buildings, technology and transport infrastructure. For example, if our civilisation ended now, within a few million years there would be nothing left of any artefacts we created, or of our urbanisation which only covers about one percent of the surface of the planet. The only signs would be spikes of metals and possible traces of plastics, and certain radioactive isotopes in sedimentary deposits (if we destroy ourselves with a global nuclear war the evidence would be readily detectable millions of years in the future). Such chemical signatures would be the only evidence that we could reasonably hope to find, and even these would be very hard to find if the civilisation was only industrially active for a few hundred years.

If the civilisation had developed space flight capability then that would offer more hope. The best place to find evidence of its existence would be away from Earth. There may well be ancient space probes orbiting within our Solar-System, and on the surface of its airless worlds, that have been preserved quite well. Of course, the vastness of space would mean finding them will still be a challenge, but as we map the surfaces of many of the Solar-System's planets and moons in ever greater detail we may soon find something.

A previous industrial civilisation on Earth millions of years ago may have developed spaceflight capabilities. Evidence of their activities away from our planet would be the best way to prove their existence. Spaceships such as this one may have been built to enable the colonisation of our Solar-System and beyond as an attempt to survive the warming event that their activities on Earth inadvertently caused.

I discussed the possibility of finding evidence of ancient mining activity in the asteroid belt in my earlier article titled 'Pre-Human Technology in the Asteroid Belt'. If such evidence is found then it is possible that the civilisation felt the need to construct interstellar ships to colonise planets around other stars, probably as a way to preserve at least some of their knowledge and culture as the Earth rapidly became hostile to them. Right now there could be one or more Earth-like planets in nearby star systems that are thriving with the descendants of Earth life. The civilisation that populated those worlds may still exist, or another may have since risen to take its place. Perhaps they even returned millions of years later and influenced the rise of human civilisation on Earth.

Colonists from a pre-human Earth civilisation walk upon their new world. Their civilisation's activities on Earth millions of years ago damaged the climate to such an extent that their species faced extinction. Colonising an Earth-like planet orbiting another star seemed to be the only way for their species to survive. Perhaps one day, when we are able to visit other star-systems, we will discover life descended from Earth life.

The rapid climate change 56 million years ago is not the only time a possible industrial civilisation existed before our current one. There has been speculation that there could well have been a dinosaur civilisation, possibly created by a descendent of a Troodon, that would certainly have ended when the Cretaceous-Palegene extinction event occurred 66 million years ago. And extinction events such as the Toarcian turnover 183 million years ago could also be related to yet another industrial civilisation abusing the Earth's resources.

Discovering proof of the existence of pre-human industrial civilisations on Earth is quite an intoxicating prospect. Life has existed on our planet for at least 3.5 billion years, and life with very complex brains, and consciousness, has existed for hundreds of million of years. There has been ample time for multiple civilisations to rise and fall. The chances are that at least one of them would have developed to an industrial and even highly technological level.

With the right kind of research we will be able to find strong evidence of the existence of such a civilisation. Paleontological and geological expeditions with the sole purpose of uncovering that evidence should begin at the earliest opportunity, and all space missions, past and future, should have their data examined to see if evidence of an ancient technological civilisation is present in our Solar-System. It is exciting to think that there may well be evidence hidden within the vast amount of data already collected by NASA and other space agencies.

If evidence of an ancient pre-human industrial civilisation on Earth is discovered it would have profound implications. It would mean that intelligence, at least to our own level, is a natural and relatively common evolutionary occurrence. And it would mean that industrial civilisations on other life-bearing planets should be common, too.