Could an advanced civilization have existed on Earth millions of years before humans? Dr. Gavin Schmidt discusses the “Silurian Hypothesis”, a thought experiment to assess our scientific ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization and study the signature that our own civilization will leave behind.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt is a climatologist, climate modeler Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate.
Dr. Schmidt has a BA in mathematics from Oxford and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London. He research includes work on the variability of ocean-atmosphere circulation models and paleoclimatology, and he helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs climate models.
Dr. Schmidt’s awards and honors include being named one of Scientific American's "Top 50 Research Leaders" of the year in 2004, recognition by the joint award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, and being awarded the inaugural Climate Communications Prize in 2011.
LINKS & RESOURCES:
The Silurian Hypothesis (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6#