 The megalithic features present on this planet are clearly suggesting that at some point in Earth's history, another civilization existed that was separate to that of our own. A planet like the Earth is incredibly anomalous and we probably wouldn't have started questioning our presence here if we hadn't advanced forward exponentially with technological advancements. Even the advancements we are making are curious. Guys like Einstein, Tesla, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and even modern inventors like Steve Jobs are telling us that they made the discoveries that made them famous by visiting a different realm during sleep. They are of course referring to Akashic records. The great realm where conscious beings of the universe can view everything the universe is possible of creating. This includes everything us humans have ever done or will ever do. The modern advancements we make may be based on past echoes. For if a great thinker is telling us that their idea was envisioned rather than thought up then you would have to consider that for whatever purpose the universe is showing us things that have happened so it will happen again. On the Earth the most industrious of all the ancient wonders is the Great Pyramid. It's also the oldest and completely boggles our minds as to how this was achieved leading many alternative thinkers the world over to hypothesize that on this planet before we were here another civilization existed on the Earth and the Earth was a very different place. Imagine the prehistoric Earth without the moon without the tilt. A water vapor fills the air and where there is nothing but water today there was once land. This may have been the world we call home not so long ago. When the moon came into orbit it pulled the Earth onto its axis and of course the displacement of water caused cataclysmic events to every inch of the planet damaging the ancient sites like Easter Island and Gobekli Tepe. If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many thousands or even millions of years prior to our own era what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the epic dating and demonstrate that while clear it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a central occupation of astrobiology and scientists have often looked to Earth analogues for extreme bacteria life under varying climate states and the genesis of life itself. A subset of this search is the prospect for intelligent life and then a further subset is the search for civilizations that have the potential to communicate with us. A common assumption is that any such civilization must have developed industry of some sort. In particular the ability to harness those industrial processes to develop radio technologies capable of sending or receiving messages. One of the key questions in assessing the likelihood of finding such a civilization is an understanding of how often does an industrial civilization develop? We humans are the only example we know of and our industrial civilization has lasted roughly 300 years. This is a small fraction of the time we have existed as a species and a tiny fraction of the time that complex life has existed on the Earth's land surface compared with the overall age of the solar system. This short time period raises the obvious question as to whether this could have happened before. While much idle speculation and late night chatter has been devoted to this question we are unaware of previous serious treatments of the problem of detectability of prior terrestrial industrial civilizations in the geologic past. Given the vast increase in work surrounding exoplanets and questions related to detection of life is it worth addressing the question more formally and in its astrobiological setting? A recent paper titled The Solarian Hypothesis takes a deeper look at the possibility that an advanced group of Earthlings once inhabited this planet in a global setting. If they left us to avoid the changes then perhaps they left clues for us to find. Maybe this is why we find sites all across the Earth apparently buried. The burying could have been an effort to preserve the documentation, a message through time. Adam Frank a professor of physics and astronomy at Cambridge asked a very profound question. How do we really know we were the first technological species on the Earth? Answer we don't know therefore we're not. We may not be and at least consider the following. We've had an industrial society for only about 300 years but there's been complex life on land for nearly 400 million years. If humans went extinct today any further civilization that might arise on Earth millions of years in the future might find it hard to recognize traces of human civilization. By the same token if some earlier civilization existed on Earth millions of years ago then we might be having trouble recognizing traces of that civilization today and indeed at the complexity of the Great Pyramid you must consider that this was accomplished and envisioned by the advanced society of the past. The discovery of physical artifacts should certainly be the most dramatic evidence of a Solorian-style civilization on Earth but when we are presented with things that may be such artifacts we class it away as worship of a deity or a story dreamt up as myth maybe finding ancient bones of one of these beings may uncover the truth. Finding fossilized bones is a slightly better bet but if another advanced species walked on the Earth millions of years ago if they walked it would be easy to overlook their fossilized skeletons if they had skeletons. We are told that us modern humans have been around in total existence for just 100,000 years a thin sliver of time within the vast and foggy fossil record. A deeper understanding of the human environmental footprint will also have practical consequences helping us recognize better ways to achieve a long-term balance with the planet so we don't end up as tomorrow's forgotten civilization. If there was a past civilization that were capable of technological feats then perhaps they left us clues literally set in stone and aligned with the stars so future Earthlings would know where they went maybe to a far more superior part of space where more civilizations exist and what we can only today fantasize about. The specific markers of human industrial activity are however a consequence of the specific path human society and technology has taken and the generality of that pathway for other industrial species is totally unknown. Large scale energy harnessing is potentially a more universal indicator and given the large energy density in carbon based fossil fuel one might postulate that a light signal might be a common signal. Conceivably solar hydro or geothermal energy sources could have been tapped preferentially and that would greatly reduce any geological footprint. However any large release of biogenetic carbon whether from methane hydro pools or volcanic intrusions into organic rich sediment will have a similar signal. We therefore have a situation where the known unique markers might not be indicative while the more expected markers are not sufficient. We are aware that raising the possibility of a prior industrial civilization as a driver for events in the geological record might lead to rather unconstrained speculation. One would be able to fit any observations to an imagined civilization in ways that would be basically unfalsifiable. The moon on the other hand is a favored target of Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright one of a handful of other researchers now applying serious scientific thinking to the possibility of pre-human technological civilizations. He is quoted as saying habitable planets like Earth are pretty good at destroying un-maintained things on their surfaces. So he's been looking at the exotic possibility that such a civilization might have been a space faring one if so artifacts of their technology or techno signatures might be found elsewhere in the solar system. Wright suggests looking for such artifacts not just on the lunar surface but also on asteroids or buried on Mars, places where such objects could theoretically survive for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. SpaceX's recent launch of a Tesla Roadster into space offers an insight into how such a search might go. Several astronomers pointed their telescopes at the car and showed that even if you had no idea what you were looking at you'd still quickly pick it out as one weird looking asteroid. Looking techno signatures in space is an extreme long shot but Wright argues that the effort is worthwhile. There are lots of other reasons to find particular structures on Mars and the moon and to look for weird asteroids. What do you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always thank you for watching.