Are Humans the First Civilization? The Silurian Hypothesis

According to the Silurian hypothesis, we can't be sure that we were the first advanced civilization on Earth .

The oldest surface land ever discovered is the Negev Desert in Israel .

Modern humans have only been here for about 100,000 years . Complex life has existed, or hundreds of millions of years of life.

There's plenty of time for other intelligent species to evolve, thrive, and go extinct.

Peter Bergen says we need to see a spike in carbon and oxygen levels in the atmosphere to see if there was an advanced civilization present in the past.

He says a sudden global change of carbon, oxygen and carbon levels happened 56,000,000 years ago in what's known as the Paleocene Eosene Thermal Maximum , or PETM .

Bergen: The PETM was caused by a massive volcanic eruption, but nobody knows for sure.

The Drake Equation is a formula for estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our Galaxy .

The number of civilizations out there could be anywhere from 150,000 to 1.5 billion .

Now that we had the Silurian hypothesis, any planet that can develop intelligent life can maybe develop it again and again over millions or billions of years.