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America through an RV window

(CNN) — On a sunny October day in Woolwich, Maine, photographer Sarah Silbiger is shouting directions at her partner Jason Bernert from the back of their van.

Foward. Backward. Forward. Backward.

The 23-foot Winnebago EKKO moves awkwardly, changing direction every few seconds as Bernert carefully maneuvers it into position. It’s leaf peeper season in New England and the small restaurant parking lot is filled with tourists seeking a bite to eat. The bustle makes the repositioning more difficult.

Finally, after asking Bernert to “readjust the van a million times,” Silbiger said, she has what she’s looking for. Framed up perfectly outside of van’s back window is the 12-foot tall, 700-pound inflatable lobster that sits atop Taste of Maine Restaurant about 35 miles up the coast from Portland.

“What’s more Americana than oversized objects?” Silbiger said.

It’s a hard question.

For anyone who has driven a considerable distance across the United States, this sentiment resonates. Mile after mile, the American landscape is dotted with marvelous nature, maximum kitsch and everything in between.

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Silbiger captures this delightful juxtaposition of the bizarre and beautiful in a series of photographs titled ‘Wanderer’s Window’ that she made while traveling and living in a camper van during a yearlong sabbatical from November 2023 to November 2024.

Up until then, Silbiger had mainly documented the inner workings of Capitol Hill and the White House as a freelance photojournalist in Washington, DC.

After about seven years of covering politics every day, the repetition of the photographs started to wear on her.

“I really just kind of wanted to see the country and see the place we debate about all the time.” Silbiger said.

Silbiger’s creative burnout and yearning to explore the United States coincided with Bernert taking a buyout in the autumn of 2023 from his journalism job in the district. With nothing tying the couple to the city any longer, they pulled out a map and started to plot their route.

“We literally took a map and took a Sharpie and were like, okay,” Silbiger said, “if we start in the winter on the East Coast, how can we follow mild weather for a whole year?”

As the couple headed west, Silbiger started to break out of her creative rut. “Every single mile of the road was a new visual for me. So, it was absolutely like a huge, creative adrenaline shot to the heart,” she said.

One early stop involved the base of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California’s Alabama Hills, where Silbiger captured the photo that sparked the creative vision for her series.

After pulling into their campsite well after nightfall, the couple climbed into bed, wondering what and who surrounded them.

“We tuck ourselves into bed and we wake up the next morning and this was what my bedroom view was,” Silbiger exclaimed while showing a picture of jagged mountain peaks shrouded in low-hanging clouds as the morning sun washed gently over them. The whole scene was framed by the oddly skinny rectangular window of their van.

“Okay, now I had this first photo,” Silbiger said. “How do I make the rest of them?”

Over the course of the next year, Silbiger and her partner zigzagged across 35 states chasing mild weather, vast landscapes and anything that piqued their interest. All the while she used their van as a giant camera.

“It’s really, really satisfying to get it just right because, you know, sometimes with digital photography, it feels too easy,” Silbiger explained. “But a 25-foot RV is not a user-friendly camera to make an exposure with.”

Silbiger’s portfolio is a reflective combination of classic American motifs like Saguaro cacti and herds of bison, and odd roadside attractions like the inflatable Maine lobster. The unexpected nature of the photographs mimics the discovery of what lies on the open road.

Despite driving roughly 25,000 miles, Silbiger is hungry to get back on the asphalt to continue photographing.

“There’s always something cool to see around the corner,” she said. “That’s the beauty of a road trip … What does the next road have to offer?”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

If another advanced civilization lived on Earth before us, would we know?

(CNN) — When astrobiologist Adam Frank walked into the office of NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, he had what he believed was the weirdest question: do aliens experience climate change? It took just moments for Schmidt to out-weird him.Frank, a University of Rochester professor who looks for signs of life in the universe, was digging into whether advanced civilizations would inevitably trigger climate shifts, just as humans are doing now. He was looking at other planets, he told Schmidt that day back in 2017, “because, of course, we know that there have been no other civilizations on Earth.”Schmidt immediately cut him off. “How do you know that?” he asked.It was a record scratch moment, Frank said, and it started the two scientists off on an investigation. If an advanced civilization had lived on Earth millions of years ago, powered themselves with energy and wiped themselves out, would we know? Would they have left traces of their presence etched into the record of our planet?They called the idea the “Silurian hypothesis” — after a fictional advanced race of reptiles in the TV show “Doctor Who” — and published a paper on it in 2018.It is a mind-bending idea that not only looks deep into the Earth’s past but also far into its future, as humans change the climate swiftly and dramatically by burning fossil fuels. “It is a thought experiment, but one that exposes our potential vulnerability globally,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, who was not involved in the research.The Silurean hypothesis opens big questions about the trajectory of advanced civilizations and whether all those that harness energy on a global scale are destined to burn out, or whether there’s a chance to live sustainably and survive for millions of years.“These questions are all relevant to exactly the moment that we’re in,” said Frank. “We are pushing the planet into a new climate regime … we know this is true, right? And yet we’re not doing anything about it.”The reason Schmidt had been mulling the possibility of previous advanced civilizations on Earth was an event deep in the past.Around 55 million years ago, the planet’s climate signals went haywire. Global temperatures spiked up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit and ecosystems collapsed, as huge amounts of planet-heating carbon were injected into the atmosphere.This period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and first noted in the 1990s, may have been the result of an enormous volcanic eruption, or maybe a sudden release of methane. But exactly why it happened is still something of a mystery. What intrigued Schmidt were the similarities to what’s happening now as humans push up temperatures and drive extinctions.And it’s not the only unexplained change deep in the planet’s past that echoes our present, other periods have seen oceans starved of oxygen and sharp hikes in temperature.The likelihood is these are natural climate events, but what if they weren’t? How would we know? In their report, Frank and Schmidt go through the chain of possible evidence that might exist in support of a past advanced civilization.Today, only around 1% of the Earth’s surface is urbanized and it wouldn’t take long for what we’ve built to be erased. The further back in time a hypothetical civilization existed, the harder it would be to find direct evidence, like objects.Over millions of years, the planet is resculpted as tectonic plates shift, volcanoes erupt and land erodes. The Earth’s oldest large-scale stretch of land is the Negev Desert in southern Israel, at around 1.8 million years old.Surface features may not provide much evidence, so the scientists looked at fossils. A vanishingly small fraction of animal species is fossilized, however, and even fewer are ever found. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for about 180 million years, but only a few thousand near-complete fossils have been discovered.It might be easy to miss a civilization that only existed for 100,000 years, a mere blip in the 400-million-year-old history of complex life on the planet.The researchers then considered traces left by chemical changes. Think of the Grand Canyon, Frank said, where you can see line after line representing different ages of the Earth. “Every one of those strata is ground up rock that keeps a memory of what the chemistry of the Earth was like then.” If a previous civilization had altered the planet’s chemistry — as humans have done by releasing vast amounts of carbon pollution — there might be a record.The scientists also considered what other evidence humans might leave behind after our civilization has ended, like the vast amounts of plastics as well as artificial hormones for agriculture and persistent chemicals, which do not break down in the environment. These might all show up in future sediments, many millions of years from now. As might the heavy metals used in electronics.The point of the paper wasn’t to establish whether the Silurian hypothesis is correct, Frank said. Instead, it was “to say here’s the things you’d want to look for in a much more high-resolution way in order to see whether or not there was ever a civilization before us.”Both Frank and Schmidt are in the strange position of having written a study about a theory neither believes in — they just say we cannot yet rule it out.No one appears to have picked up the call for a deeper investigation in the years since, but some scientists have raised questions.Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist, paleontologist and emeritus professor at the University of Leicester in the UK, said the Silurian hypothesis is “wonderful and deeply thought-provoking idea.” But Schmidt and Frank underestimated just how much modern humans have transformed the planet, as well as “the effectiveness of the fossilization process and how good it is at preserving a history of what has happened on our planet,” he said.We can’t rule out intelligent pre-human societies, “dinosaurs that could sing complex arias, say, or Jurassic ammonites that could compose poetry,” said Zalasiewicz, who co-wrote the 2025 book “Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy”. But as soon cities are built, metals are smelted, plastics are made and discarded — these will leave a clear footprint, he said.Zalasiewicz is comfortable ruling out the prior existence of the kind of advanced civilization we live in today — “energy-guzzling, manipulative, constructional, and producing waste in colossal quantities.”And that’s the beauty of science, Frank said. “You publish a paper, it’s like, ‘Woo, this is great,’ and then somebody comes along and says, you’re wrong.” Someone else may find something that points in a different direction, and eventually, as research accumulates, a consensus will be formed.For now, perhaps the most important reason to explore this hypothesis is the important questions it poses about the longevity of advanced technological civilizations like ours.We’re smart enough to develop technology, but we might not be smart enough to figure out how to deal with its climate-shifting consequences, Frank said. “Are we an experiment that the planet has run, which is going to fail?”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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