I found this large herb likely of the Aster Family (Asteraceae) growing on some relatively dry ground. I have had no luck identifying the herb.
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It looks a lot like Erechtites hieracifolia also known as "Pilewort" or "Milkweed" only these are massive specimen and likely some other species. The plant below stands almost 5 feet tall.
The genus Erechtites Raf. (Burnweed) seems the most likely home for this very thorny, very milky herb. See the USDA Classification: Erechtites Raf.
If this is Erechtites -- as I conclude -- its name refers to the Greek, from erechtho, to rend or break, possibly referring to the dissected leaves; first used by Dioscorides, fl. A.D. 40-80, for some species of groundsel, Senecio.
An alternate suggestion is that it commemorates Erechtheus, a fabled king of Athens.
This genus of plants was once used as a tonic, an astringent, and to treat dysentery. In Cuba it is "goat's chicory, in Haiti it is "sun's rib," in the Bahamas it is "dog-weed," and in parts of the USA it is "fire-weed."
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Could intelligent life have existed on Earth millions of years before humans?
Reptilian menaces called Silurians evolved on Earth before humankind — at least in the “Doctor Who” rendition of the universe. But, science fiction aside, how would we know if some advanced civilization existed on our home planet millions of years before brainy humans showed up?
This is a serious question, and serious scientists are speculating about what traces these potential predecessors might have left behind. And they’re calling this possibility the Silurian hypothesis.
When it comes to the hunt for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that might exist across the cosmos, one must reckon with the knowledge that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. In contrast, complex life has existed on Earth’s surface for only about 400 million years, and humans have developed industrial civilizations in only the past 300 years. This raises the possibility that industrial civilizations might have been around long before human ones ever existed — not just around other stars, but even on Earth itself.
“Now, I don’t believe an industrial civilization existed on Earth before our own — I don’t think there was a dinosaur civilization or a giant tree sloth civilization,” said Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and a co-author of a new study on the topic. “But the question of what one would look like if it did [exist] is important. How do you know there hasn’t been one? The whole point of science is to ask a question and see where it leads. That’s the essence of what makes science so exciting.”
Artifacts of human or other industrial civilizations are unlikely to be found on a planet’s surface after about 4 million years, wrote Frank and study co-author Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For instance, they noted that urban areas currently take up less than 1 percent of Earth’s surface and that complex items, even from early human technology, are very rarely found. A machine as complex as the Antikythera mechanism — used by the ancient Greeks, it is considered the world’s first computer — remained unknown when elaborate clocks were being developed in Renaissance Europe.
One may also find it difficult to unearth fossils of any beings who might have lived in industrial civilizations, the scientists added. The fraction of life that gets fossilized is always extremely small: Of all the many dinosaurs that ever lived, for example, only a few thousand nearly complete fossil specimens have been discovered. Given that the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens are only about 300,000 years old, there is no certainty that our species might even appear in the fossil record in the long run, they added.
Instead, the researchers suggested looking for more-subtle evidence of industrial civilizations in the geological records of Earth or other planets. The scientists focused on looking at the signs of civilization that humans might create during the Anthropocene, the geological age of today, characterized by humans’ influence on the planet.
“After a few million years, any physical reminder of your civilization may be gone, so you have to look for sedimentary anomalies, things like different chemical balances that just look wacky,” Frank said.
One sign of industrial civilization may have to do with isotopes of elements such as carbon.
For instance, humans living in industrial civilizations have burned an extraordinary amount of fossil fuels, releasing more than 500 billion tons of carbon from coal, oil and natural gas into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels ultimately derive from plant life, which preferentially absorb more of the lighter isotope carbon-12 than the heavier isotope carbon-13. When fossil fuels get burned, they alter the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 normally found in the atmosphere, ocean and soils — an effect that could later be detected in sediments as hints of an industrial civilization.
In addition, industrial civilizations have discovered ways to artificially “fix” nitrogen — that is, to break the powerful chemical bonds that hold nitrogen atoms together in pairs in the atmosphere, using the resulting single nitrogen atoms to create biologically useful molecules. The large-scale application of nitrogenous fertilizers generated via nitrogen fixing is already detectable in sediments remote from civilization, the scientists noted.
The Anthropocene is also triggering a mass extinction of a wide variety of species that is probably visible in the fossil record. Human industrial activity may also prove to be visible in the geological record in the form of long-lived synthetic molecules from plastics and other products, or radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons.
One wild idea the Silurian hypothesis raises is that the end of one civilization could sow the seeds for another. Industrial civilizations may trigger dead zones in oceans, causing the burial of organic material (from the corpses of organisms in the zones) that could, down the line, become fossil fuels that could support a new industrial civilization. “You could end up seeing these cycles in the geological record,” Frank said.
All in all, thinking about the impact that a previous civilization has on Earth “could help us think about what effects one might see on other planets, or about what is happening now on Earth,” Frank said.
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