“Wait a second. How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”
-- Gavin Schmidt, director of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
....could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.
-- Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester
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