I have come to believe that it’s likely there were advanced human civilizations on Earth that we have no virtually no record of…4.5 billion years and only 200,000 years of Homo Sapiens = .0044%

99.9955% of time on Earth is enough time to hide the ruins

Evolution is cope

this take blew my mind: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/

"If, in the final 7k years of their reign, dinosaurs built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory space rock hurtling toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell."

honestly it's so good: "extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene."