>>938154402
The real revelation comes with the logical concession that this kind of event is a feature, not an exception, to the establishment and demise of civilizations.

Our anthropocentric biases have obfuscated the obvious reality that over the hundreds of millions of years following the Cambrian explosion, it is a statistical certainty that some kind of intelligence arose with parity to our own on this planet. By logical conclusion, any such species was capable of reaching their singularity within thousands or even hundreds of years. A mature, post-technosingularity civilization would be invisible to us today in the archaeological record. Even if they had pursued the same ecologically-damaging technologies we did, they would have been able to reverse such damages within brief timespans post-singularity. A thousand or more such civilizations could have emerged, destroyed themselves, left earth or gone into some yet unknown aspect of reality in the time before humans came on the scene.