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I think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve in time... Asteroid hits. Wipes out al

I think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve in time... Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment, and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been converted to oil and coal discover uncanny hard-to-explain remnants of a past civilization of, get this, bipedal animals.

jrochkind1 5y ago
Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? I don't think that's how evolution works. For humans either.
- ben_w 5y ago
  One thing I sometimes wonder is: if there was a dinosaur species which had reached roughly our level of intelligence and society, would they have left enough of a mark on the world that we could even tell? If they got further than us, tried to capture an asteroid and mine it, could they have wiped themselves out without leaving behind technosignatures that would still be visible?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Humans left a ridiculous amount of stone tools which last basically indefinitely in the fossil record (and unlike bone fossils, don't require super special conditions to preserve them). So I think we'd have enough evidence from modern artifacts made of similar types of materials. A car buried under sediment would rust all out, but you'd be left with a big car-shaped bunch of rust as well as chunks of pure metal which better resist corrosion, like stainless bits or the platinum catalytic converter, various bits of glass and ceramic in very artificial looking shapes, etc.
    - feurio 5y ago
      Maybe the archaeologists of the future would weave scholarly narratives as to how these ferrous-based lifeforms lived, what their diet was and how they came to perish. Film-makers would use stop-motion techniques to depict battles between Fordusprefectops and Chevroletcamaro-Rex whilst their own early ancestors look on, clad in loincloths and bras made from footwell mats.
      - bmn__ 5y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302827 "cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them"
      - jefurii 5y ago
        Like in David Macaulay's "Motel Of The Mysteries".
  - ninjanomnom 5y ago
    While our time has been short on geological scales, that's a point in favor of being discovered later. So much has been deposited by us in the geological record in a stunningly short (by future geologists' viewpoint) timescale like plastics, temperature variations, and irradiated patches of land. To make things worse for a hypothetical advanced dinosaur species, if they were at the point they could capture an asteroid, they would be roughly equivalent or better with us but we could survive an asteroid extinction event just fine. Society as we know it perhaps wouldn't survive but an event that could genuinely end us as a species would need to be exceedingly destructive or long term. Otherwise the remnants will rebuild, give or take a couple 10s of thousands of years, which is basically nothing on the timescales we're thinking about here.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    This is called the "Silurian hypothesis" and is named after the Doctor Who episode that showed an advanced dinosaur race called the "Silurians" that went into cryo millions of years ago. Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there might not be much left for us to find.
    - easygenes 5y ago
      Pretty sure all the radioactive ore refining we have done is going to leave a mark for billions of years. Never mind how we’ve displaced large percentages of the readily available rare earths already. I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their geo-engineering marks.
      - NateEag 5y ago
        Schlock Mercenary is a sci-fi webcomic with a fun thread about sapient dinosaurs fleeing Earth pre-impact. There's no good way to read just those strips, but it starts here: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25
    - Vetch 5y ago
      Yep, the [paper's conclusion](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20200000027.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20...) was just as you said, there'd not be much of a record to find for civs older than 4 Ma. Also, there are past anomalous and abrupt events in the geological record that appear similar to byproducts from our anthropogenic activity. Evidence against is that timing for majority of such anomalous events can be matched to mundane geological activity in the record. The rate at which we're accumulating change compared to geological record is also a strong argument against, although they argue limitations in current dating methods reducing how much can be said with certainty about prior epochs. While there is precious little reason and evidence to believe a priori in a previous advanced dino civ, there are studies that could be done on sediment data that'd lend more certainty (such as looking for unusually rapid metal production). > Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent-specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy. It will likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior to the event compared with afterwards. Most of the individual markers will not be unique in the context of Earth history as we demonstrate below, but the combination of tracers may be. However, we speculate that some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause. My opinion is this ultimately boils down to how hard human level intelligence is to evolve, which is why the hypothesis is interesting in the context of the Fermi Paradox. Intelligence might be extremely difficult to evolve, it might require an unusual background environment set of condition or just might not be that useful in general.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Humans could most certainly survive an asteroid if the humans worked at the technology and industrial capacity to do so. Including technology and industrial capacity involved in redirecting asteroids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7zdeQ-Uw8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7zdeQ-Uw8k (To redirect Chixculub would require a MUCH larger capability, probably on the order of 10 million tons in orbit, but that's possible with a fleet of large reusable rockets capable of getting the cost to orbit down to around $10/kg, or equivalent development of in-space resource utilization capacity.)
  - scionthefly 5y ago
    You assume we would be able to organize the social, political, and financial impetus to take on a task like that in a unified way that has a chance to succeed. Recent events seem to say that we are at least as likely to just fight about it until the asteroid hits. For greatest success I think there would need to be two but probably not many more than two major efforts going on simulatneously, in much the same way that CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN were independently looking for the Higgs. If one fails for some unforseen technical reason, the other might not if they took a different approach.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  > Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? Well, yes. It's not fair to the dinosaurs, I admit. They hardly had a chance to develop language and mathematics. They were still too busy ripping each other's faces off. And not having opposable thumbs, of course, really put a damper on technological development. Maybe in a another million years things would have been different, but the asteroid had a different idea. We, on the other hand, are at least on the precipice of the capability to divert asteroids. Hopefully we don't get an asteroid visit too soon.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    I think it's a misconception that we can somehow speed up or direct "evolution", no matter what language and mathematics we have. Diverting an asteroid, however, is not evolution.
    - Tossrock 5y ago
      Of course you can speed up and direct evolution, it's called artificial selection and it's how we got dogs, cattle, and almost all crops.
kenfox 5y ago
Coal and oil formation would not occur due to lifeforms able to digest trees. It would be extraordinarily difficult to reset to those primordial conditions. I don't think an asteroid hit could do it.
- Vetch 5y ago
  Are you sure about this? I actually looked into this not too long ago and that theory no longer seems well supported. Oil forms when sea plankton and algae are buried and exposed to high pressures and heat. Coal forms when dead plant material protected somehow from biodegredation (say by mud) forms peat and is then buried, and exposed to high pressures and heat. I was also surprised to learn that the inabality of fungus and bacteria to degrade lignin is unlikely to have been a key driver of coal formation during the Carboniferous period, instead it was "a unique combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea". Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-fungal-evolution-did-not-cause-the-peak-in-Nelsen-DiMichele/61f89cd66d3ee147e76dc00288aa28846dcac652?sort=is-influential&page=2 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-fungal-evoluti...

jrochkind1 5y ago

Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? I don't think that's how evolution works. For humans either.

ben_w 5y ago
One thing I sometimes wonder is: if there was a dinosaur species which had reached roughly our level of intelligence and society, would they have left enough of a mark on the world that we could even tell? If they got further than us, tried to capture an asteroid and mine it, could they have wiped themselves out without leaving behind technosignatures that would still be visible?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Humans left a ridiculous amount of stone tools which last basically indefinitely in the fossil record (and unlike bone fossils, don't require super special conditions to preserve them). So I think we'd have enough evidence from modern artifacts made of similar types of materials. A car buried under sediment would rust all out, but you'd be left with a big car-shaped bunch of rust as well as chunks of pure metal which better resist corrosion, like stainless bits or the platinum catalytic converter, various bits of glass and ceramic in very artificial looking shapes, etc.
  - feurio 5y ago
    Maybe the archaeologists of the future would weave scholarly narratives as to how these ferrous-based lifeforms lived, what their diet was and how they came to perish. Film-makers would use stop-motion techniques to depict battles between Fordusprefectops and Chevroletcamaro-Rex whilst their own early ancestors look on, clad in loincloths and bras made from footwell mats.
    - bmn__ 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302827 "cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them"
    - jefurii 5y ago
      Like in David Macaulay's "Motel Of The Mysteries".
- ninjanomnom 5y ago
  While our time has been short on geological scales, that's a point in favor of being discovered later. So much has been deposited by us in the geological record in a stunningly short (by future geologists' viewpoint) timescale like plastics, temperature variations, and irradiated patches of land. To make things worse for a hypothetical advanced dinosaur species, if they were at the point they could capture an asteroid, they would be roughly equivalent or better with us but we could survive an asteroid extinction event just fine. Society as we know it perhaps wouldn't survive but an event that could genuinely end us as a species would need to be exceedingly destructive or long term. Otherwise the remnants will rebuild, give or take a couple 10s of thousands of years, which is basically nothing on the timescales we're thinking about here.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  This is called the "Silurian hypothesis" and is named after the Doctor Who episode that showed an advanced dinosaur race called the "Silurians" that went into cryo millions of years ago. Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there might not be much left for us to find.
  - easygenes 5y ago
    Pretty sure all the radioactive ore refining we have done is going to leave a mark for billions of years. Never mind how we’ve displaced large percentages of the readily available rare earths already. I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their geo-engineering marks.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Schlock Mercenary is a sci-fi webcomic with a fun thread about sapient dinosaurs fleeing Earth pre-impact. There's no good way to read just those strips, but it starts here: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-25
  - Vetch 5y ago
    Yep, the [paper's conclusion](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20200000027.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20...) was just as you said, there'd not be much of a record to find for civs older than 4 Ma. Also, there are past anomalous and abrupt events in the geological record that appear similar to byproducts from our anthropogenic activity. Evidence against is that timing for majority of such anomalous events can be matched to mundane geological activity in the record. The rate at which we're accumulating change compared to geological record is also a strong argument against, although they argue limitations in current dating methods reducing how much can be said with certainty about prior epochs. While there is precious little reason and evidence to believe a priori in a previous advanced dino civ, there are studies that could be done on sediment data that'd lend more certainty (such as looking for unusually rapid metal production). > Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent-specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy. It will likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior to the event compared with afterwards. Most of the individual markers will not be unique in the context of Earth history as we demonstrate below, but the combination of tracers may be. However, we speculate that some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause. My opinion is this ultimately boils down to how hard human level intelligence is to evolve, which is why the hypothesis is interesting in the context of the Fermi Paradox. Intelligence might be extremely difficult to evolve, it might require an unusual background environment set of condition or just might not be that useful in general.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Humans could most certainly survive an asteroid if the humans worked at the technology and industrial capacity to do so. Including technology and industrial capacity involved in redirecting asteroids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7zdeQ-Uw8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7zdeQ-Uw8k (To redirect Chixculub would require a MUCH larger capability, probably on the order of 10 million tons in orbit, but that's possible with a fleet of large reusable rockets capable of getting the cost to orbit down to around $10/kg, or equivalent development of in-space resource utilization capacity.)
- scionthefly 5y ago
  You assume we would be able to organize the social, political, and financial impetus to take on a task like that in a unified way that has a chance to succeed. Recent events seem to say that we are at least as likely to just fight about it until the asteroid hits. For greatest success I think there would need to be two but probably not many more than two major efforts going on simulatneously, in much the same way that CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN were independently looking for the Higgs. If one fails for some unforseen technical reason, the other might not if they took a different approach.
crispyambulance 5y ago
> Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? Well, yes. It's not fair to the dinosaurs, I admit. They hardly had a chance to develop language and mathematics. They were still too busy ripping each other's faces off. And not having opposable thumbs, of course, really put a damper on technological development. Maybe in a another million years things would have been different, but the asteroid had a different idea. We, on the other hand, are at least on the precipice of the capability to divert asteroids. Hopefully we don't get an asteroid visit too soon.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I think it's a misconception that we can somehow speed up or direct "evolution", no matter what language and mathematics we have. Diverting an asteroid, however, is not evolution.
  - Tossrock 5y ago
    Of course you can speed up and direct evolution, it's called artificial selection and it's how we got dogs, cattle, and almost all crops.

kenfox 5y ago

Coal and oil formation would not occur due to lifeforms able to digest trees. It would be extraordinarily difficult to reset to those primordial conditions. I don't think an asteroid hit could do it.

Vetch 5y ago
Are you sure about this? I actually looked into this not too long ago and that theory no longer seems well supported. Oil forms when sea plankton and algae are buried and exposed to high pressures and heat. Coal forms when dead plant material protected somehow from biodegredation (say by mud) forms peat and is then buried, and exposed to high pressures and heat. I was also surprised to learn that the inabality of fungus and bacteria to degrade lignin is unlikely to have been a key driver of coal formation during the Carboniferous period, instead it was "a unique combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea". Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-fungal-evolution-did-not-cause-the-peak-in-Nelsen-DiMichele/61f89cd66d3ee147e76dc00288aa28846dcac652?sort=is-influential&page=2 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-fungal-evoluti...