Who's to say the lizards won't do a better job?

"Are you going to keep throwing
Galileo up in our faces forever?"

-The Pope

Do you know what I love about science? It's that anything, absolutely anything no matter how bananas is fair game. I'm not knocking religion when I say this, but what's nice about science is that you can ask questions without risking a heresy charges or an inquisition or something. Got an hypothesis? Just add science. Maybe you're wrong, maybe you're right. Science doesn't care. Take this new paper by scientists Adam Frank and Gavin A. Schmidt about how maybe there used to be lizard people.

Pictured: A Silurian which, look,
 nobody saw HD TV's coming so...

Yes, lizard people. Ok, not really lizard people, but they did title paper the Silurian Hypothesis as a reference to the Silurians from Doctor Who. The Silurians, according to series lore, are an advanced prehistoric civilization of evolved lizards with telepathic powers which begs the question what the shit does this have to do with science? Ok, settle down. Frank and Schmidt's paper poses the question of whether or not it would be possible to detect evidence of advanced, industrialized civilizations like ours, hundreds of thousands or millions of years after they go extinct.

Ok, so obviously this is dancing super-close to crazy-town conspiracy theories that a secret cabal of shape shifting lizard people secretly run the world government. But Frank and Schmidt are not saying that there was a mighty Reptile Empire that once ruled the Earth, just that if there were, we might not know it.

You know, like countries that aren't America.

Wow, those civilizations must have
been pretty stupid to make it so far
only to go extin-oh...oh, I get it now...

Our planet, the they point out, has been home to complex life for about four hundred million years, but humans have only been around for a couple million years and have only been industrialized for three hundred years. That's a lot of time in which you could see the rise of a species through its own version of the stone age up to its industrialization followed by the invention of computers and the inevitable decline into a complacent, media-obsessed civilization staring at its phones and choking on its own carbon footprint.

Preposterously lucky huh?
 I know exactly who to call.

Yeah, ok, but shouldn't we have dug up ancient lizard ruins or some kind of half buried reptilian Statue of Liberty or something? No necessarily, say the scienceticians, citing another study that says the industrialized surface of the Earth right now is only like 1%, so even if some hypothetical, earlier civilization was similar in size and scope you'd still need a preposterous stroke of good luck to just happen upon some remnant of it like a road or a building or something.

Dirt...the final frontier...

Ok, but obviously the fact that the Earth is too old and tooexpansive to definitively rule out the possibility of ancient lizard people isn't the same thing as "hey look, lizard people." Cool. But what's interesting about the Silurian Hypothesis is that it opens up the search for non-human life to a fourth and somewhat less hopelessly vast dimension: time. Sure, space exploration is sexier, but goddamn is it expensive and very possibly, futile. The geological record is finite and doesn't require billions of dollars and tons of rocket fuel to explore, just like, a shovel.

Of course, lizard people are objectively ridiculous and I don't think I'm being closed minded when I say we're probably not going to find any. But again, Adam Frank and Gavin A. Schmidt are actual scientists posing a legitimate scientific question. It's not about whether or not lizard people used to live in cities and drive around in cars, it's about probing the limits of our knowledge and admitting that we don't know everything.

On the other hand, for all I know the mighty Reptile Empire is, even now,
waking from its eons-long slumber and is preparing to reconquer the surface
world. But they're definitely not telepathic. That's just some sci-fi bullshit.