Intelligent Dinosaurs

[Boerseun]

Actually there is a school of thought that says we are indeed causing a mass extinction on a par with the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. If you looked back from 65 million years in the future the mass extinction going on now would indeed look as sudden as the end of the dinosaurs looks to us.

That's certainly true - if you were to look back from 65 million years ago, you would find a layer in the rock where a lot of species suddenly disappear. In that same rock layer, you will find traces of complex chemicals, world-wide, in all deposits of the same age, that point to a chemical reason for the die-off. That would be our lasting legacy on this planet. However, when you look at the evidence for the end of the cretaceous period, the evidence point to an impactor. If we assume that it was a local species who did it, that that species must have been capable of transforming the planet on a geologic scale so that we can mistake it 65 million years later for an impactor. On such a scale that they would be approaching god-like status - that's way out of our league currently.

[Moontanman]

Actually I am quite sure the impactor happened, the idea in my mind at least is that a dinosaurian civilization was already flourishing at the end and that most dinosaurs were either extinct or being breed as meat animals by the controlling intelligence during the last few hundred or a thousand years or so. If not for their meddling the dinosaurs might have recovered. I do not really believe this to be likely but it does beg the question of how could we detect them if they had existed and have artifacts already been uncovered and dismissed due the impossible nature the main line of science puts on such things. ooparts are real, every bit as real as UFOs, but like UFOs deciding if a oopart is a real artifact of another civilization, or mistaken identity, or if a oopart is some jackass trying to hoax everyone becomes a problem for sure.

[modest]

I think that the ability of plastic to last forever is much exaggerated. Over a time span of millions of years plastic will degrade, bronze is another matter but I notice our landscape isn't exactly littered with bronze implements either.

 

Here's the Daily Show clip I was recalling with the author, Alan Weisman:

 

Video: Alan Weisman | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

 

I transcribed a relevant part for the broadband impaired :shrug:

Plastic though—it took microbes millions of years to learn how to digest the stuff that trees are made of; lignin and cellulose, so that’s why the original trees didn’t decay. They just got buried and eventually they became coal. Plastic—nothing knows how to eat that yet. It’s all still here (except for the little bit that’s been burned) so the conglomerates of the future will have Barbie and Ken and your telephone and your computer and all those things in it. They will enter the geologic record.

 

~modest

[Moontanman]

By 65 million years it could be oil again if it was subducted or folded, ground up by erosion, there is no way to tell what plastic would look like after 65 million years, plastic is not as hard as bronze, erosion would turn it to specs of something too light to go anywhere but the deep oceans.

[carlton-temple]

It seems to be the general trend to assume that being "intelligent" is of a necessity bound to be associated with some sort of technology rather than say developments in the biological directions or culture. Most life forms are more or less "intelligent" yet very few of them use tools or other such artifices. If our dino club had a developed "intelligence" could it not have applied it to psycho/somatic adaptations ect., thus leaving nothing for the poor human archaeologists to dig for. If our dinos lads did "construct" "things", the continental plates have shunted about the place so much in the meantime that such "things" would now be buried deep in the earth's crust or deep under the oceans somewhere. Any way that "dino" lot that so called became extinct managed sneakily to turn themselves into many of the species that are running about the place now! ;);)