the nauseating AI generated thumbnail is really putting me off here even more than the pseudo-conspiratorial speculation
If anyone here watches Doctor Who (most recent seasons), maybe they could tell if the thumbnail is taken from that show or inspired by it. I wouldn't know, since the last time I saw Silurians from that show was many years ago. The video narrator admits the name of the "hypothesis" was taken from Doctor Who.
(yes, I watched the video)
Heck, what if our universe is simply the latest iteration of the universe. How many "big bangs" over trillions and trillions of years may have occurred? Like the old scientist's lament, the more we know, the more we we realize how much we don't know.
The thing about the Big Bang is that before it happened, there wasn't anything - no subatomic particles, no time, no space. So it's not like anything from a previous universe is going to carry over. Assuming that the hypothesis of sequential universes has any validity to begin with. Personally I rather doubt it does.
I took one for the team and watched the video. None of you have to worry about watching it, actually. It's not advocating that there was such a civilization, just explaining a 2018 article that says we can't conclusively prove that there wasn't, and giving that article's reasoning for that considerably more modest thesis.
For myself, the best part is around 12:30. Because there he makes clear what I was thinking all along. There are actually two separate questions: could there have been previous intelligent life? and was there life that imitates our own industrialized carbon-burning societies? At 12:30, he indicates that we tend to conflate those two. What if, I ask, there was an intelligent species that was in fact more intelligent than we are, discerned the importance of sustainability and therefore deliberately took a principled hard pass on all of our forms of "civilization." Contented themselves with staying hunter-gatherers, with no tool more advanced than a sharpened stick. A society like that might well leave no material trace.
In other words, it's rather haughty of us to think that intelligent life necessarily = carbon-burning industrial life. After all, as we are increasingly coming to realize, maybe that's not in fact the most intelligent way to live, after all.
The idea that there could have been an earlier technological civilization that died out and we never found evidence for it isn't a new one. This video does seem to have a bit more of a scientific orientation than the kind of thing that previous ideas have included.
It made for one of the better Star Trek Voyager episodes ("Distant Origin"), in which a civilization of intelligent hadrosaurs made it off Earth before the asteroid hit, and traveled all the way to the Delta Quadrant, settled on a planet, and then developed a religious doctrine that claimed that's where their species first evolved. As I explained over on TrekBBS, the episode itself wasn't about intelligent hadrosaurs,
per se, but rather about Galileo and the dispute he had with the Catholic church over the heliocentric theory, as well as the other discoveries he made (sunspots, mountains and craters on the Moon, Jupiter's moons, phases of Venus, etc.).
www.bbc.com
