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"The Earth has no memory for the dead-ends of evolution. In a few hundred thousand years glaciers would grind our works and our bones into gravel, would grind t
by api 10y ago
"The Earth has no memory for the dead-ends of evolution. In a few hundred thousand years glaciers would grind our works and our bones into gravel, would grind the gravel into sand, and in a few hundred million years the movement of continents erase the last of any trace of our brief existence, save perhaps for a handful of deeply-buried and enigmatic fossils."
This brings up a question I have often wondered about: do we really know we are the first intelligent conceptual life to do things like use tools and language on this planet?
If let's say a dinosaur reached the level of stone or bronze age civilization would anything be left other than... well... a couple enigmatic fossils that are easy to dismiss?
I doubt a massive high tech civilization like ours could come and go and leave no trace, but what about something much smaller scale?
- rbanffy 10y agoWe can be sure dinosaurs didn't have nukes and rockets, at least. You are probably right about a Bronze Age civilization not leaving much that would survive a couple million years. 50 million years is a very long time. In not much more time than that, Hawaii will be part of Japan.
- rpgmaker 10y agoSometimes I think that, sure, the universe it's huge and it's very possible (in my mind, almost certain) that there are other planets with advanced life forms like we can find here on Earth. If we accept this then it's safe to assume that not all life in the universe evolved at the same time. Most of the time we implicitly assume (probably because of sci-fi) that there must be a more advanced species somewhere but what if we actually are the more advanced species? From what we know right now it's just as likely for us to be the more advanced as it is for, say, the habitants of Kepler-22b. And somehow that feels more disappointing than if we were completely alone in the universe.