Well, no. That’s not an interesting question. Whether or not we’re not the first such civilization, we STILL experience everything exactly the same. Reality is truth. We can’t change the past and see what’s different. There’s no “what if” that makes sense for that topic.
Perhaps my choice of the phrasing was sub-optimal (I’m a non-native English speaker). The intent of this question-post is to identity interesting corollaries of the hypothesis (including testable predictions).
You don’t give any reasons to give it serious consideration.
The core justification for this hypothesis is that it’s basically SETI, but for civilizations in the Earth’s past instead of civilizations in the outer space. And many people in the community seem to find SETI worth a serious consideration.
It’s quite possible that such local and brief civilizations have happened and collapsed multiple times. I would still ask “so what” before “what if”.
Regarding “so what”, I don’t know yet (a purpose of this question-post is to explore this kind of stuff). So far I can see two interesting corollaries:
we can apply something like the Drake equitation or “grabby aliens” ideas, but to the hypothetical previous civilizations of the Earth. This could give us some insight about our own future
the possibility of the ancient genocidal AGIs still roaming around (or lying dormant in some ruins) - seems important.
Perhaps my choice of the phrasing was sub-optimal (I’m a non-native English speaker). The intent of this question-post is to identity interesting corollaries of the hypothesis (including testable predictions).
The core justification for this hypothesis is that it’s basically SETI, but for civilizations in the Earth’s past instead of civilizations in the outer space. And many people in the community seem to find SETI worth a serious consideration.
Regarding “so what”, I don’t know yet (a purpose of this question-post is to explore this kind of stuff). So far I can see two interesting corollaries:
we can apply something like the Drake equitation or “grabby aliens” ideas, but to the hypothetical previous civilizations of the Earth. This could give us some insight about our own future
the possibility of the ancient genocidal AGIs still roaming around (or lying dormant in some ruins) - seems important.