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Comment by dividedbyzero | Hacker News Reader

But then we often have nothing for millions of generations and absurdly large amounts of biomass for species that we know well enough to know where to dig – but nothing was preserved there, and we can't dig in more than a few tiny spots. The crust's top layers are an immensely big volume and very hard to penetrate and not sure there would be a reason to dig right into an oil well that was emptied millions of years ago. Also, there is a strong aversion to sensationalist explantations in the sciences, so such scratches might even be known but attributed to some ill-understood kind of volcanic activity or earthquake scarring just because speculation towards a Silurian civilization isn't conducive to swift career progression.

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Among the stuff we can use to proof the hypthesis of such a civilization (from skimming the linked paper):

- evolutionary evidence pointing at the possibility of species with large enough brains to build industrial civilizations

- sedimentary proof of artificial pollution and CO2 levels

- fossils

Any hypothesis has to be proven to be true, proofing it to be wrong is impossible and not things work. What the cambrisge paper did, was pointing towards wayw to proof the existence of an ibdustrial civilization millions of years ago. Now the work is on the people believing that theory to proof it.

Speculating without considering the basic principles behind said claim, concluding it is impossible to proof that theory wrong and finishing all that off with a the claim that such a civilization most definetly did or could have existed is just stupid. It worries me so, that this kind of shit shows up on HN more and more often.

> proofing it to be wrong is impossible and not things work.

That's pretty much entirely how science works ever since Karl Popper: You find an observation that the hypothesis cannot predict or predicts wrong. Bam, hypothesis falsified and rejected, no matter how much positive proof was uncovered until that point.

We have a different view when it comes to the hypothesis then: the hypothesis is that there was no pre-historic idustrial civilization, proof that hypothesis wrong. The paper we discuss gives hints on how to proof that non-existence hypothesis wrong, or, in my ill choosesn words, proof the existence of said civilaztion.

Or, if you like, find and show proof making the existence of such a civilaztion likely. And no, the burden of proof is not on the side diaputing the claim of such an civilization, as only the existence of something can be proven, not the absence. Hence the very exact formulation of any null-hypothesis.

Coming back to some pre-dinosaur industrial civilization (why stop at industrial so, why not an instellar one?): there is a ton of data and samples from that time periods (litterally reaching back hundreda of million of years), so everyone trying to find evidence for such a very bald claim has a lot of data to work with. Just putting out the claim and saying it must be true brcause nody can proof it wrong is not how things work, in reality that is, on the internet everything goes apparantly.

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