ok... i get your point, but the major counterpoint:
as earth / plate tectonic move around, underneath earth is constantly surfaced... from dinosaur fragments, to Cambrian era mollusks found in top of mountains (due to earth's crust movement).
If there was a previous 'intelligent' civilization previous to us, they would have altered their environment to be detectable to us even today.
OK then let's find it. We're not really looking. Maybe it is indeed detectable, and maybe it will be hard. Maybe it's already staring us in the face, and our ideas about it are -wrong-.
We -believed- the Clovis story. Until some people -looked harder-. Plate tectonics ... laughed at. Until some people -looked harder-. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Exactly. Mullusks. Think of them like ants. Almost exclusively small dinosaurs. Things that would have been everywhere, including many places civilization would never choose to go. They are things that would be much more widespread than gameboys (just giving an example).
as earth / plate tectonic move around, underneath earth is constantly surfaced... from dinosaur fragments, to Cambrian era mollusks found in top of mountains (due to earth's crust movement).
If there was a previous 'intelligent' civilization previous to us, they would have altered their environment to be detectable to us even today.