Rhinocrisy

How do we know, exactly, that ours is the first civilized species on this planet? In 500 million years of life, it seems at least plausible that intelligence could have developed at other points. After all, there’s a number of existing tool-using, improvising species besides ourselves. It doesn’t seem implausible that, in our absence, some evolutionary contusion would produce in them the necessary burst of intelligence that would allow them to develop reason and the ability to build on acquired knowledge.

Human beings have been around for a scant few hundred thousand years. Of all that history, we find precious little in the form of remnants - maybe a few tools here and there, some bits of clothing or weapons, if we’re lucky. But the record is sparse. Meanwhile, the history of life is vast. There are 1100 extant mammalian genera. The total number of known dinosaur genera is 572, spanning a period of almost 200 million years. Recent estimates say that there are probably around 1844 total discoverable genera of dinosaurs. It seems unlikely to me that this represents more than a tiny fraction of the true diversity. Whole swaths of the fossil record might be missing. So if some small saurischian species at some point diverged and produced a brief flutter of intelligence, which might have only survived for a scant few hundred thousand years, would we know about it? Would any of their tools or clothes, their habitations, have survived? Perhaps not.

If this seems implausible to you, let’s consider the ocean. There’s a number of intelligent sea-faring creatures, not all of them mammalian. And the ocean is far more vast and impenetrable to us than the continents are. Much of what lives there even today is unknown. So how likely is it that some kind of civilization might have formed in the ocean at any moment in the long history of life and have escaped our notice?