Or that society formed long enough ago that oil has had a chance to form. The OP did say millions of years ago, which would be needed for this.

We could put a bound on this. ~90% of oil deposits come from the Mesozoic or later. So the latest we could see a society show up, use up the easily accessible oil/other fossil fuels, collapse (presumably from energy crisis), and still have the fossil fuels we see today would be the late Paleozoic or possibly the early Mesozoic before it's fossil fuels have formed (~250 million years ago).

I follow the energy field for mostly financial reasons and its a strange but true story that the first time oil was ever radio dated was by a Canadian team just a few years ago and they were surprised to discover the Alberta oil sands are more like a hundred million years old rather than the previous estimate of fifty mil or so.

People have known about radio dating using different isotopes and it always shocked me that the first time someone radiodated crude oil was in the mid 00s just 15 or so years ago. I don't remember the technology the Canadians used it wasn't C14 as that tops out around 100K or so years.

The more you learn the more you find stuff everyone thinks they know, but they don't actually know it, or we just figured it out shockingly recently. Like we've been pumping oil how long, and doing radiodating how long, but nobody never put two and two together until just 15 years ago? That's just wild. You'd assume every field has a birthdate but reality is nobody knows for sure. Except that one field in Alberta as of 15 years ago. Maybe more data available now, donno.

Its just funny that journalist types will cite each other as if they're primary sources for decades until a number like "a quarter billion yrs" is culturally engrained into our civilization, then someone does some actual real world test tube work ONE time in ONE place and get different results.

For a multi trillion dollar business, its not as completely scientifically researched as people would assume. If it doesn't result in more flow at the pump, it doesn't get researched, mostly.

100 million years ago is in the Jurassic period, that's a pretty normal estimate for hydrocarbons?

I used to invest pretty heavily in the energy sector in general and I learned a lot of the science along the way and I really have no idea what fraction of the earth's surface has been geologically surveyed.

I would imagine if someone wanted to seriously pursue the theory (if they'd be permitted to do so, probably not) the way I'd do it is find "disappointing fields" and look for peculiar correlations between them WRT odd permeability test results. So is that field disappointing because its permeability is really low (frac it!) or is it disappointing because all the geology points to a good salt dome and the permeability is great but there's nothing there? The old fashioned way to explain fields that look good but don't produce is the permeability is so high it all leaked out millennia ago (among other explanations boiling down to "we don't know").

I would think you'd find weirder evidence of tailings piles around solid mines and a lack of open pit mines. That would be easier to find than an oil well. Also I expect there would be really weird patterns in sediment related to mercury and similar waste products. "They" never did leaded gas if there's no lead layer in the sediment, etc.

Some of it is sophistry. No civilization beyond monkey tribes could possibly exist 3M years ago because there would be nuclear reactors and space ships laying around everywhere, as though there's no intermediate step between monkey tribes and nuclear reactors. Well, what if they never advanced beyond (fill in the blank with some group that's not very advanced in 2023)? Still centuries beyond a tribe of monkeys, yet culturally interesting none the less. We could detect the industrial revolution from England if it happened in Italy 2000 years previous. But... could we detect the Roman Empire if it happened before in Australia in 4000 BC? or 3M BC? I don't know about that, kind of an open question. If the Roman Empire or similar happened in the USA upper midwest before the mile tall ice sheets scrubbed everything, could we tell today? My educated guess is "no" we could not. It would still be culturally interesting even if no nuclear reactors and space ships were built here 50K years ago. I think it quite likely that bioidentical humans were up to all kinds of nonsense in prehistory that we've never discovered or never could discover. They were as smart as us, and healthier than us, until agriculture was invented.

On that last point I have assumed that agriculture was a necessary precursor to any major technological develolment - ie you cannot build a forge and metal working tools if you need to pack them up and follow the herd every few months.

Or fish

As in humans lived in permanent settlements by sea shore / lake shore and so would have been able to develop technology by the seaside?

Or we followed shoals of fish like herds? Avatar like? :-)

What if their society was like the Sierra Club, or the rules around Burning Man, which say leave no trace behind? Like very environmentally conscious? And not into monuments like the Pharaos of Egypt, or similar? For whichever ideological reasons.

Because, at least looking at modern humans it doesn't make much sense that you'd get 100% buy in.

Yes, yes. But that was before they tried to build the tower of Babylon.

Thus they were as ONE!

Here is the true story how it happened:

the Silourians first depleted fossil fuels in the first hundred years of their energy technology journey

they subsequently realized the folly of this after they pretty much made the planet uninhabitable for them

they injected back into the ground biologically produced synthetic substitutes using organically captured solar energy

this large scale carbon-capture project, being entirely organic and sustainable has left no trace

I am only joking a little bit here, but we only use the idea that “oil is the most reasonable energy source for civilization” because it’s how we bootstrapped our civilization.

Suppose there were some extremely stable and energetic combination of elements that was really easy to burn etc. we’d use it, but it’s extremely rare on earth. What if that is the result of the Silurians burning it all up 300m years ago or whatever - it’s rare because it’s been depleted already, leaving only the worthless and difficult to extract fossil fuels that we were forced to use.

This sort of discussion isn’t disimilar to SETI stuff - we look for water rich planets in the habitable zone because that’s what we grew up on - in reality we could be abnormal or rare-ish and has giant life or stuff living on Venus analogues could be the norm. We’re trying to make assertions from a point of informed ignorance - which is still ignorant.

I suspect (but don't quote me on this) that in the very big scheme of things our little fossil fuel addiction is just a fluke. Stars are such an endless source of high quality energy that the vast majority of "advanced" organizational forms ("life") surely figure out how to tap it rather quickly.

I guess the first question to your question is "what compounds fit that description". What processes could have concentrated them both to the point of economic usability and complete depletablity?

That's the hard question you're going to have to work around. Humans cannot 'use up' 100% of the oil/carbon resources on earth. It is energetically impossible for that to happen without turning over a significant portion of the Earths crust. There are always going to be signed of carbon concentrating processes on Earth, at least until our crust is completely remelted. This miracle energy source doesn't seem to exist anywhere now which would defy explanation.

And then they picked up every last glass bottle they made and threw them into a subduction trench.

This assumes they follow the exact same path as us instead of achieving renewable energy first.

Pretty trivial assumption to make, just like it is easy to assume that whilst sea based creatures might be intelligent you won’t have a technological society developing under water.

No it isn’t trivial to make nor are we discussing underwater creatures.

Ofc it’s trivial to make, renewable sources are far more complicated than simple chemistry, wood, charcoal, coal and eventually petroleum require far fewer technological leaps than renewables.

Again, only if you go down the exact path we did instead of using way less energy for completely different reasons and building from there. E.g. discovering solar power strictly for agricultural reasons and discovering electrical storage then other uses of electricity from there.

People who can’t envision the above or the multitude of other ways to get to electricity without it being transpiration focused lack imagination.

I don’t think it’s due to lack of imagination at all… and again you are skipping a lot of steps you are putting solar cells and high energy density batteries before the steam engine or even the forge.

Describe me a basic evolutionary path that leads to this even if it’s not the path of least resistance.

No I’m not. You can gather that light turns e.g. Liquids into vapor and slowly build systems from there. You are so biased looking at todays tech you can’t even step back and picture alternative ways to find electricity. It’s a lack of imagination full stop.

You are still jumping to semi conductors before the steam engine and into optic before the forge…

I’m really not biased at all, there is a difference between being open minded and just not taking into account basic factors for the sake of pretending to be one.

Any civilization will discover fire first, fire is easy and is needed to bootstrap any technological civilization.

Nitpick: wood and charcoal are already renewable resources

> They argue as early as the Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago) "there has been sufficient fossil carbon to fuel an industrial civilization comparable with our own".

Yes, but the point is those fossil fuels remained in the ground. They weren't used up by the hypothetical technological civilization.

People tend to forget that development of industry first requires access to a lot of cheap, easy-to-access energy.