The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
A careful examination of the fossil record and the distribution of species around the planet, would also reveal an era (in geological terms extremely brief) of unusually rapid long distance migrations of plants and animals; as well as the mass extinction). This is evidence independent of the direct discovery of fossil humans and human artifacts.
I suspect all these strands of evidence would be diagnostic of an intelligent species which was not wise enough to avoid global catastrophe.
Of course, as the ultimate technological fix, we might have downloaded our minds to machines or created artificial intelligences as our successors; so the aliens could get a first hand account of what happened.
One funny possibility is that we would leave enough evidence to suspect existence of our civilisation of this level, but not enough to establish it up to scientific certainty. We can imagine a bunch of rather gifted allien enthusiasts of Terrestial civilisation being derided by their scientific "establishment" :-)))
Intelligence detection is an interesting problem for science. Positive confirmation by single artifacts looks more feasible than falsification of the hypothesis by single observations. What would Popper say?
by Frank Schnittger - Dec 8 25 comments
by Oui - Dec 4 49 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Dec 1 4 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 27 71 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 23 37 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 20 72 comments
by Oui - Nov 21 2 comments
by Oui - Nov 15 9 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Dec 825 comments
by Oui - Dec 449 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Dec 14 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 2771 comments
by gmoke - Nov 26
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 2337 comments
by Oui - Nov 212 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 2072 comments
by Oui - Nov 159 comments
by ATinNM - Nov 135 comments
by Oui - Nov 134 comments
by Oui - Nov 124 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Nov 10115 comments
by Oui - Nov 428 comments
by Oui - Oct 2916 comments