Whenever there is research showing that X thing occurred Y years before we previously thought, the big thing we should update on is our confidence intervals. This research pushes back our estimate of freshwater 500M years. What will the next research show?

It’s analogous to finding evidence that humans were in North America 10,000 years before we previously thought, but there is no way we should treat that as a lower bound: https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/05/tests-confirm-humans-tr...

I'm confused by this. When I was blogging about life on Mars[1] I was using a date for the emergence of fresh water on Earth of 4.4 billion years ago(bya)[2]. But this article says the date has been pushed back from 3.5 bya to 4.0 bya.

But reading carefully, it looks like by "fresh water" they means water on land aka rain, not just the existence of seas.

[1]https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-likely-...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth

Silurian hypothesis!

“If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today” [1]?

TL; DR Difficult after ~2.5 million years unless they had a nuclear war.

As for humans: “some specific tracers that would be unique” include “persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the [Anthropocene] may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause.”

Bonus: “…should any of the initial releases of light carbon described above indeed be related to a prior industrial civilization…these releases often triggered episodes of ocean anoxia (via increased nutrient supply) causing a massive burial of organic matter, which eventually became source strata for further fossil fuels. Thus, the prior industrial activity would have actually given rise to the potential for future industry via their own demise. Large-scale anoxia, in effect, might provide a self-limiting but self-perpetuating feedback of industry on the planet.”

So if we’re going out, we should go all the way and suffocate the oceans out of courtesy.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

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I think much of the sea is there because of massive nuclear war millions of years ago which created enormous craters that the water just seeped into and filled up.

I mean, I never thought of it prior to today. But why not.

The margin of error seems to be +/- 500M years on these things. In no other area of "science" has there been such widely innacurate predictions and hypotheses that we are still changing things by millions of years after all this time.