This does feel like there's some selection bias here. The assumption is that intelligence hasn't developed before humans. If a planet wide civilization would have sprung up say with the dinosaurs, would we have gotten a shot? It seems somewhat plausible that such a civilization would either have survived ruling any subsequent rise out or have blown up the planet in a way that none would arise either.
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I’m not sure this is what you meant, but onto a tangent:
I feel like us humans have deeply romanticized dinosaurs as these incredibly dangerous, vicious, aggressive creatures. And I’m just not sure there’s any evidence to support that.
If we unearthed bear skeletons a million years from now, we’d think that humans couldn’t cohabitate with bears. Such size. Those teeth. The claws! But bears generally steer clear of humans. Perhaps dinosaurs would too.
Of course I barely know what I’m talking about. But it has me quite curious.
"we can't prove they weren't huge fatbirds!" https://imgur.com/gallery/rmad4
I hate this recent trend of shitting on paleoartists as if they have no idea what they're doing. Many species of dinosaurs had feathers. Thus far there's no evidence T. Rex did. If it did, they wouldn't be a huge coat like that due to thermal consequences.
At the very least we had no particular reason to assume dinos had the canonical stone colored skin with no markings.
I find that equally terrifying.
I’ve seen firsthand what happens to a frog when it hops into a coop of 7 chickens
Humans and their ancestors were strong enough that anything that evolved alongside them adapted to avoid humans or risk extinction. I'm not sure if human evolution from a simple mammal could survive alongside dinosaurs long enough to reach the point where we could effectively defend ourselves. I imagine we'd mostly be stuck either being small enough to evade them or stuck hiding in trees off the ground.
It's a weird assumption that something like a Trex would even bother with a scrawny human with barely any meat on it when there's much more meat to be had from other dinos.
Chickens eat bugs. It's not so far off.
It seems a bit optimistic to say that humans are willing to cohabitate with bears. If there are bears in a human population centre they will be exterminated.
Ignoring a different climate humans probably could have existed at the same time as dinosaurs. We would also have all-but wiped out anything larger than us by now though.
A lot of Canada cohabitates with bears.
Naturally our existence stresses and displaces them. But they’re there and you see them in the news quite regularly. Except for places like cottage country where their presence in your garbage isn’t news worthy.
black bears all over the NE USA and cohabitate. You just gotta chase em out of your garbage sometimes.
This seems like an appropriate time to recommend the book West of Eden [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden].
It posits an earth where humans and dinosaurs co-exist, but the dinosaurs, having been around longer, are the dominant species.
A planet wide civ would be pretty difficult. I don’t think the earth would have enough Coal or oil to allow for easy energy access.
If only there were abundant sources of energy around like maybe nuclear fusion from a giant orange ball in the sky? Or perhaps hydro electric from the plethora of oceans? It wouldn't be easy, but it would be possible to create enormous amounts of energy from the normal daily cycle of the waves if it became necessary.
There are plenty of ways to create energy given the abundance of resources on this planet, even before homo sapiens.
> It wouldn't be easy,
It would be multiple orders of magnitude more difficult, and for all practical purposes impossible. You’re drastically underestimating civilization’s historic reliance on coal.
Also, fwiw you don’t get hydro electric power from the ocean. Hydro power is from water falling. Tidal power is a thing but it’s not easily achieved.
Civilisation started heavily relying on coal a few hundred years ago. The Earth was well-dominated by humans by then. It very probably would have taken a lot longer to get to where we are now, but I don't think there was any danger of seventeenth century civilisation falling to dust because there was no coal to be found.
All coal was produced during a 50 million year window when the earth lacked a decomposition process that could breakdown lignite. Once that evolved the formation of coal around the planet halted abruptly.
There’s a possibility humans might consume that resource dooming all subsequent civilizations to what you point out.
It's possible that absent coal, oil, or natural gas we would have leap frogged directly into solar power first with directed mirrors powering a liquid turbine, wind, and eventually conventional solar panels made from silicone.
There's really no reason to use fossil fuels. The fact that we do actually let's us waste a ton of it. If we had to ration it to the bare essentials we'd be able to get away with using only 5% of the energy we currently use. Our current solar energy production in the United States is 2% but that 2% would have been more than enough to power the entire country in the 1920s.
Wishful thinking with no basis in reality. If we couldn’t use coal, we would cut down and burn trees unsustainably long before we magically manage to invent renewable energy tech without all the benefits of modern infrastructure.
> There's really no reason to use fossil fuels.
Except for the critical dependence on them in almost every aspect of the economy sure.
> If we had to ration it to the bare essentials we'd be able to get away with using only 5% of the energy we currently use.
And how exactly are supposed to organize society into this perfectly energy constrained system?
Maybe future squid civilizations will mine plastic deposits.
There were plenty of dangers. One such threat could be the reliance on charcoal (burning trees) for high heat tasks like smelting metals. If you don’t have coal you’re gonna have a tough time making something like steel in an economically viable fashion. You will, in time, run out of trees to burn. And no, comparisons to modern day don’t count. You need to discount our ability to import tree biomass from other areas against the dependence on fossil fuels that enable that cheap transportation of goods.
Would ot be more difficult? We are yet to feel the fill impact of climate change. Its certainly possoble.
By 200 BC, simple wind-powered water pumps were used in China, and windmills with woven-reed blades were grinding grain in Persia and the Middle East.
The first practical electric car was built in 1890
Climate change is an existential threat. That doesn’t mean reed blade windmills are a viable substitute for fossil fuels.
It is utter nonsense to think you could have fueled human growth with such technology to a remotely similar scale.
Without fossil fuels you have no cheap transport fuel, no green revolution, no industrial revolution, many many metals, plastic, and probably many more things.
I am just pointing out that your measurement as growth might be amazing today, but if, for arguments sake, it is followed by catastrophic collapse, then maybe the schenario without fossil fuels which gives you 'slow and steady' growth could come out ahead at the end of the day.
We might face catastrophic collapse, but that doesn’t mean a slow and steady approach would work. Lack of coal just means you burn up less efficient resources to try and replace it. It wouldn’t be enough. Mostly that means trees. There is no slow and steady. It’s still a race to consume. You’ve just taken out the most plentiful and valuable energy resources humanity has been blessed with.
This view does not require any fondness for fossil fuels now, though realistically we are still highly dependent on them.
Ultimately, hydro power depends on oceans supplying abundant water vapor to precipitate over elevated topography. No oceans, no hydro power. You also need topography: no land, no hydro power.
Sure, whatever. Tidal energy is still not hydro power, but rather a separate thing.
Nobody said tidal power was hydro power. But, for completeness, I will say it now: tidal is also hydro.
It is distinguished from common hydro power by drawing, ultimately, on planetary body kinetic energy rather than insolation.
Well that’s not correct. You can say whatever you want but that isn’t the common definition of the term.
Most fossil fuel deposits formed during the carboniferous period which would have been quite ancient even to the dinosaurs. One of the clues that an intelligent civilization never arose before us is that those deposits are still here for us.
Or that we're the only ones dumb enough to use those resources instead of leaving them on the ground and utilize much more accessible and renewable resources instead.
We ARE using the most accessible and economically efficient resources (coal and oil). The only reason we even have the phrase "renewable energy" in our vocabulary is because we were able to advance our civilization thanks to coal and oil far enough, that we can worry about the consequences and their mitigation.
The only evolutionary leaps to suboptimal energy production that I'm aware of occurred in cases where a more efficient energy source simply doesn't exist (eg geothermal vent communities on the ocean floor).
One would hope that fossil fuels are just a quick step in the technological bootstrap process on the way to clean/renewable energy, though I agree it's not looking too good at the moment. My guess is they are necessary though in order to go from pre-industrial to more advanced. Despite the negative externalities, the amount of energy they contain that is easily unlocked is remarkable.
Do you think humans have been at their current level of technology forever?
Why? We're only using all that fossil fuel for 100 years or so...
Maybe there were multiple intelligent civilizations before humans, then the Great Filter Theory kicks in and they wipe themselves out with Global warming or whatever.
I have a pet theory (just a fantasy really) that Dolphins were once land mammals with an advanced civilization but then they too heated the planet up until all the ice melted and they had to adapt and evolve to be sea mammals.
Afaik we don't see any geological evidence of such a thing
I mean, it's true that dolphins evolved from land mammals.
Sounds like something Douglas Adams would write.
Or something Kurt Vonnegut did write (Galapagos).
Thanks!
The only answer to such questions is "there's no way to know." Which implies that selection bias is the best we can do.
Ultimately, we're here. And we may only be here because we genocided all the other proto-human races (at least four of them). But no one likes talking about that, since it seems much more... personal... than a meteor.
Was it intelligent to slay the neighbors? Maybe. But it was a comparatively rare event, since once it was done, it couldn't be done again.
The interesting thing is that there's no way to know how many events like that have happened throughout all of history. We have very little data compared to the entire timeline. So any kind of measurement of "If this, then that" is very hard, and I have serious respect for the careful work that scientists manage to do in spite of the limitations.
By the time I was done with school, subgroup dominance was shared among jocks and punk kids. Previously, it seemed that jocks were the most admired. After my time in school, the shift towards "weird and smart" kept increasing, to the point that bullying is now anathema and kids seem much freer to express their non-normie views.
I think this is a micro example of a tendency for people to value raw physical power over mental faculties, and how it eventually shifts as the environment changes. On earth and elsewhere, there may be species that evolved to dominate through power, snuffing out those with the potential for dominating through intelligence. I agree, this might be one of those filters that are hard to surpass. For example, by sheer luck, dinosaurs were wiped out leaving room for mammals to take over the planet. Could dinosaurs have evolved to discover computation?
On an intraspecies level, we breached a similar filter when we began organizing into agricultural/specializing societies. Those societies were started as a way for the physically powerful to harness lower-status humans. The consequence was the emergence of information-societies where intelligence is more valuable than physical power.
> Could dinosaurs have evolved to discover computation?
At least judged by brain-case, (predatory) theropods would have been on the upper-end of dinosaur intelligence. Therefore we have that birds/avian dinosaurs are descendants of possibly the most intelligent branch of dinosaurs. Birds had as much time as mammals to evolve a candidate for human level general intelligence but never did. The most intelligent dinosaurs† that have ever evolved seem to be Parrots, Crows, Ravens and their close relatives.
Though bird brains (IMO) are better designed, able to keep up with higher primates using fewer more densely packed lower energy neurons, they do not match later homininans in generality.
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†The Silurian hypothesis essentially observes it would be extremely difficult for definitive evidence of a past advanced civilization to persist for longer than 10^6 to 10^7 years. It also notes that it's more difficult than one would naively assume to rule out the possibility of an advanced civ based on the geological record.
It's unlikely to be correct however. I went into more detail in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514626.
There were some very large mammalian predators around during the time of our early ancestors, and even around today, though not quite as large. And yet here we are. Perhaps if humans had arisen in the time of the dinosaurs they’d have hunted them to extinction or destroyed their habitats.
Intelligence evolving before humans doesn't refute or contradict anything about this article unless it evolved independently on a different branch from humans.