Dinosaurs with laser-beams
posted by saurabh in Gee-whiz |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?
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I live in the South. We don’t believe in dinosaurs or the fossil record here. We do believe in the Flintstones, although I’m not sure how we explain Dino, the family pet.
No, Mist, this isn’t about the Flintstones, it’s about Gilligan’s Island — intelligent life that you never learn about because it’s lost at sea. And maybe not so intelligent.
Saurabh, what is the definition of intelligence? Do they need to invent clothing? Recursive grammar? The ability to learn from their mistakes? Blogs?
woah, consciousness, man — or — are you saying we should be pointing those big radio telescopes at the water? we can run wave pattern analysis on real actual waves using SITI@home?
yeah i always wondered about this though. not just because of undersea kingdom stories. was temperature regulation a key to developing brainpower or something? wasn’t everybody pretty much room temperature until mammals?
(the way people rob grave sites like crazy i’m not surprised we’ve found so little old evidence of the really old stuff of ours.)
A related question is: if humans became extinct tomorrow, how detectable would we be in a million years? Or 100 million years?
U-235 has a half-life of like 700 million years, so we might be leaving a layer with an unusually large amount of that, as well as a few isolated places with lots of it.
Various big canals, like the Panama and Suez, will probably survive for awhile, and would make pretty clear signs.
The extinction crisis we’re causing should also show up in the fossil record. The CO2 record goes back like 650 million years or so.
So my vote is that nothing has topped humans, at least on Earth, so far.
Aram, nothing has topped people in destructive or transformative power. That may mean they fulfilled a better definition of intelligent.
Yeah, what if they were here, saw us coming, didn’t have the heart to kill us, and so they left instead?
Or, what if they can see us, and are hiding out of a sense of self-preservation?
I’m not suggesting we had space-faring, Dinosaucers-style dudes roaming around, just that they might have proceeded to, say, a pastoral fishing society and persisted that way for a long time (just as humans did) before vanishing (just as… um… well, hopefully not). Aram’s question is a good one. It seems unlikely that anyone in the next 100 million years would be able to miss our influence on the planet - the signatures would be pretty clear, and at least some sorts of artifacts would presumably survive intact. My sofa is Scotch-guarded, for example. But dial us back about two or three thousand years and I’m not so sure. What would survive? Roads? Pyramids? Pottery? Is it inevitable that intelligent creatures proceed into industrial civilization? It certainly took us a long damn time, and we’ve been smart for quite a while.
Well, I mean, don’t a lot of people think the Neanderthals weren’t too dumb, had art and culture, and we still ate them or something?
Well, we either ate them, or we had sex with them.
And for a special treat, we had sex with them then we ate them, thereby proving that we were smarter.
I am unconvinced that today’s industrial humans are all that smart. Our system rewards some very stupid, destructive, even self-destructive behavior. We have developed this system and we stick with it not out of smarts but out of fear. The soldier kicks in the door cause he’s scared of his superior officer. The Iraqi lets the soldier kick in his door because he’s scared of the bullet. I pay for the bullet because I’m scared of the IRS, the cops, the courts. The IRS agent comes to arrest a war tax resister because she’s scared for her job. No one really thinks about the big picture, we’re a bunch of cowering cavemen, acting out of what in the end is a fear of living on the streets in a society where the streets are sewers for the worst of human behavior. Smart.
yeah i would say we’re good architects and cosmologists who make for dangerous neighbors because we’re slutty about choosing systems with which to harmonize. even if it’s the most destructive artificial system imaginable, if it’s comprehensible, flattering, and well-stocked with opportunities for advancement, we’re right in there. we have a hard time distinguishing our cheat sheets from reality.
or that could be an appealing oversimplification. hehe.
What if we’ve gotten the whole evolution process backward, and actually animals on Earth are far more evolved than us, they seem a lot happier than people? Perhaps becoming less intelligent is the way forward?
My question though, what is the name of that old cartoon with all the dinosaurs with laser beams and, robot arms and shiz, and people were fighting lizard men or…something?? Cos it was freakin’ sweet.
That cartoon is called “Dinosaucers“.
this is to jim and the old cartoon is called dion raiders
it was awesome