Pearl Ellen

A book by Pearl Ellen

The Cosmic Succession Hypothesis

Did Life and Intelligence Rise Before Us?
Alien Worlds, Lost Civilisations and the Evidence That Separates Fact from Fiction

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Sample: the Prologue and Chapter One, free to download as PDF or EPUB.

Front cover of The Cosmic Succession Hypothesis: a circular view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field above the title on a deep navy background

Wonder, with its receipts.

If someone, somewhere, got here before us, would we even know? This book asks that question properly, and then asks the harder one: what would count as evidence?

Real science

Deep time, the chemistry of early life, Mars, icy moons and distant exoplanets, with sources you can follow.

Old mysteries, checked

The Sphinx, Nazca, Teotihuacan, the “face” on Mars and the UAP file, each weighed against what the evidence supports.

A sceptic’s toolkit

A five-rung evidence ladder you can use on any claim, in this book or on tomorrow’s headline.

The evidence ladder

Every claim in the book gets a rung.

Claims are placed by the quality of their evidence, not by how exciting they sound.

EstablishedMultiple lines of reliable evidence; accepted in the field
Plausible but unresolvedFits the evidence and is worth investigating; not yet shown
DisputedSpecialists disagree; no decisive evidence yet
SpeculativeConceivable, but rests on assumptions or thin evidence
Unsupported as factPresented as true without reliable evidence
I should say where I stand before we begin. I am a sceptic who would genuinely like to be proved wrong, and I would rather lose an argument to good evidence than win it with a good story.From the Prologue

Inside

Twenty-four parts, one question.

  1. Prologue · The Question That Changes Everything
  1. A Small World in a Vast Story
  2. What Do We Mean by Life?
  3. How Life Began Here, and What We Still Don’t Know
  4. Evolution, Convergence and the Rise of Intelligence
  5. The Succession Hypothesis
  6. Earth Before Us: The Deep-Time Record
  7. Lost Civilisations: What Archaeology Actually Shows
  8. The Sphinx, Giza and the Problem of Dating
  9. Nazca, Teotihuacan and Monumental Imagination
  10. The Face on Mars and the Meaning of Anomalies
  11. Myths, Floods and Memories of Earlier Worlds
  12. Consciousness: The Inner Cosmos
  13. Ancient Knowledge and Modern Speculation
  14. Mars: A World with a Past
  15. The Hidden Oceans and Chemical Worlds
  16. Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Genesis
  17. Panspermia: Did Life Travel?
  18. Intelligence Beyond Earth
  19. Civilisations That Rise, Change or Disappear
  20. UAP: Mystery, Data and Extraordinary Claims
  21. How We Would Know
  22. Humanity’s Place in the Succession

Epilogue · The Next Chapter Has Not Been Written

Chapters open with real archival or space images in the public domain, or with diagrams drawn for the book. Credits are in the book.

Monogram of the author’s initials, PE

About the author

Pearl Ellen

A curious reader with a sceptic’s eye.

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