The comment presents no arguments aside from a fallacious one (argument from authority).
>but given what we have done to date there would have been time enough to find evidence of a society like ours
Geology is a relatively young science. Today's widely accepted facts were laughed at only a few decades ago. Take Wegener's plate tectonics theory: He was ridiculed for it and it only started to become mainstream accepted opinion among geologists after his death, around the 1960s. Your grandparents may still have been taught the land bride idea¹ when they were kids, which nowadays is seen as extremely ridiculous. Yet many today, who may not consciously be aware of these developments, assume that science™ has always known this and that we basically understand earth. We've barely started scratching the surface, in the literal sense.
As for hypothetical civilizations lost millions of years ago, there is no way one can rationally claim to know for certain, it depends on so many factors. The Silurian is merely an example, since this is a thought experiment. It could have been much longer ago, it's speculation. But let's assume Silurian it is, and let's say plastics would stay detectable that long (we don't know this for sure). All you have to have is a civilization that didn't invent them, or didn't widely use them. And no nuclear bombs either - hardly inconceivable. Though as an aside, the half-life of Plutonium-239 is only around 24k years! So good luck detecting that.
“Laughed at” and “ridiculed” seem to be common aspects of a dysfunctional science culture. In that, I always maintain heavy skepticism of loud, and especially media-echoed, claims scientific consensus. I say that generally.
Science that's far from politics and monetization seems generally in good shape, at least from a distance? For instance theoretic cosmology has all sorts of 'deviant' theories being widely pursued and researched in a healthy fashion. At least this correlation definitely seems to hold in reverse, where science that is closely tied to monetization or politics seems to be exceptionally intolerant, dysfunctional, and (probably consequently) also prone to absolutely abysmal replication rates.
How is monetization the problem? The biggest issues with non replicable science are all in academia which is grant funded. Corporate labs don't seem to have unusually big issues with non replicable research. Obviously, add if they couldn't replicate it they can't monetize it.
Tobacco funding research to prove smoking is healthy.
> The biggest issues with non replicable science are all in academia which is grant funded.
Yes, that was his other point, politically charged topics are bound to create bad science. So things related to poverty, intelligence, gender, race, education etc.
Medical research, especially pre-clinical, stands shoulder to shoulder with social psychology in terms of replication rates. Wiki has a brief paragraph on it on their replication crisis page [1], but this [2] page does a far better job of conveying and citing all sorts of interesting data and studies.
The pathway to profit for medicine is getting the FDA to approve your drug. This should only happen if the drug works, but the way the FDA determines that is by the data and studies you give them. Well at least in theory, there's also complete nonsense like aduhelm where the FDA even approved a drug their own medical panel concluded didn't work, leading to mass protest resignations. [3] That's probably an argument against shenanigans (why even bother?), but I still think it's relevant just to emphasize how dysfunctional our medical regulatory system has become.
Yep. To be fair the plate tectonics one is an extreme example, it's a famous paradigm shift. But it should make you think, eminent experts in the field went as far as calling it "pseudo-science". They didn't simply disagree with it on a professional level, some of the personal attacks against Wegener were quite vile.
>but given what we have done to date there would have been time enough to find evidence of a society like ours
Geology is a relatively young science. Today's widely accepted facts were laughed at only a few decades ago. Take Wegener's plate tectonics theory: He was ridiculed for it and it only started to become mainstream accepted opinion among geologists after his death, around the 1960s. Your grandparents may still have been taught the land bride idea¹ when they were kids, which nowadays is seen as extremely ridiculous. Yet many today, who may not consciously be aware of these developments, assume that science™ has always known this and that we basically understand earth. We've barely started scratching the surface, in the literal sense.
As for hypothetical civilizations lost millions of years ago, there is no way one can rationally claim to know for certain, it depends on so many factors. The Silurian is merely an example, since this is a thought experiment. It could have been much longer ago, it's speculation. But let's assume Silurian it is, and let's say plastics would stay detectable that long (we don't know this for sure). All you have to have is a civilization that didn't invent them, or didn't widely use them. And no nuclear bombs either - hardly inconceivable. Though as an aside, the half-life of Plutonium-239 is only around 24k years! So good luck detecting that.
¹ https://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/biogeog/pics/sim1940e.j...