How do we know that there wasn’t an intelligent species living here on earth before humans?
In: Earth Science
For “intelligent life”, that is hard to know for sure. That begins with the problem of defining what “intelligent” even means. Like, do we count whales as intelligent?
But we do know that there has certainly never been an industrial species on Earth that has been anything like us. If there had been, we would have found signs long ago, like layers of plastic in the geological record, or quick changes in the atmospherical composition.
However, the most obvious sign that there never was a human-like species on Earth is this: We have found lots of resources in easily reachable locations, like oil. Then we exploited those, and now we can only find oil several miles below the surface. If there had been an industrial species before us, they would already have exploited all that easily reachable oil (and other resources). This alone shows that, if there has ever been an industrial species in the last 200 million years, it would have been very different from us.
On a side note, this also means that humanity cannot just “start over” after an apocalypse. Whatever civilization follows ours would have very different starting conditions.
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