HYPOTHETICAL: Which is the Least Offensive Explanation?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Given that these are the only explanations left:

1: Overwhelming evidence of the course and timing of mammalian evolution as well as mass extinction makes this exceedingly unlikely.
2: More likely, but there's still the tricky questions of where are they now, why did they leave, and how did they get here.
3: This is explains the otherwise apparent lack of civilization, except, you know, time travel into the past, which given our current understanding of physics is less likely than interstellar travel.
4: Considering that there are several tool using species on this planet, some of which are the dinosaurs' descendants, and the only thing that sets us in the tool making department is metallurgy, I'd have to go with this option. Some species at that time was able to achieve a level of culture that achieved metalworking, but fell short of industrialization.

They could have had planet-spanning urbanization, and we would never know it.  Not a trace would remain after all this time.

Fair point. They would have had to have died out prior to exhausting carbon fuels though.

65 million years is plenty of time for petroleum deposits to form.

Yeah, but we still have deposits from the Carboniferous Era, which would have been available to civilized dinosaurs.

This is, of course assuming they didn't figure out some other way to power industrialization.

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

Answered 1, but should really have been 4. By humans I meant "some screw-driver using species." Which is, by no means, a reasonable definition of human.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Answered 1, but should really have been 4. By humans I meant "some screw-driver using species." Which is, by no means, a reasonable definition of human.

It is, nonetheless, the definition I am going to adopt and promote whenever possible.

[Telarus]

Think about how incredibly complex the simple screw driver is. It is a tool used to drive other tools into and out of surfaces. The other tools (screws) are two other tools (the inclined plane wrapped around the axle). You also have to be able to abstract it again, though time, and realize that giving each screw it's own handle is silly, so you need to be able to carry one handle around with you. You then have to conceptualize the materials and docking/locking mechanism used to make the handledriver/screw one unit while in action, but easily separable. This now allows you to develop multiple different screws that can all be driven using the same tool.


Man, hominids are smart fuckers (the screwdriver tool-set nearly rivals the rock-napping toolset in complexity). Wtf happened to our species.

[Doktor Howl]

Think about how incredibly complex the simple screw driver is. It is a tool used to drive other tools into and out of surfaces. The other tools (screws) are two other tools (the inclined plane wrapped around the axle). You also have to be able to abstract it again, though time, and realize that giving each screw it's own handle is silly, so you need to be able to carry one handle around with you. You then have to conceptualize the materials and docking/locking mechanism used to make the handledriver/screw one unit while in action, but easily separable. This now allows you to develop multiple different screws that can all be driven using the same tool.


Man, hominids are smart fuckers (the screwdriver tool-set nearly rivals the rock-napping toolset in complexity). Wtf happened to our species.

Death by success.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Recently our species invented the internet, mapped a number of genomes starting with our own, sent a space probe to Mars, and is in the process of landing another probe on a comet traveling at roughly 83,885 miles per hour. Not to mention making some pretty decent headway into observing electron behavior.

The screwdriver wasn't a bad start, but holy shit, yeah, let's hope our ability to plan ahead catches us with our mechanical ingenuity before we render ourselves extinct.

[Doktor Howl]

Recently our species invented the internet, mapped a number of genomes starting with our own, sent a space probe to Mars, and is in the process of landing another probe on a comet traveling at roughly 83,885 miles per hour. Not to mention making some pretty decent headway into observing electron behavior.

The screwdriver wasn't a bad start, but holy shit, yeah, let's hope our ability to plan ahead catches us with our mechanical ingenuity before we render ourselves extinct.

We have been running downhill on ice for 2 million years.

Don't try to stop now.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

 

[Doktor Howl]

Planning ahead only causes problems later.

[Telarus]

Newsfeed.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Planning ahead only causes problems later.

I would argue that human capacity for thinking ahead is severely limited by linear cause-and-effect thinking, and that we rarely actually "plan ahead" beyond "If A then B". We have a spectacularly short time-horizon for forethought, which will likely result in us being extinct.

[Dildo Argentino]

Well being extinct is the fate of all species (though that's an inductive inference)... question is when? I think we're in the process of trying to get through a bottleneck.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Well being extinct is the fate of all species (though that's an inductive inference)... question is when? I think we're in the process of trying to get through a bottleneck.

We're not going through a bottleneck. We're forcing everything else through one. There's 7 billion of us. We're not going anywhere soon. Our buildings might, but not our species.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

We're also the most mobile species on the planet. The same can't be said for some critter artificially cut off from the other half of its population through development and habitat destruction.

[Dildo Argentino]

Well being extinct is the fate of all species (though that's an inductive inference)... question is when? I think we're in the process of trying to get through a bottleneck.

We're not going through a bottleneck. We're forcing everything else through one. There's 7 billion of us. We're not going anywhere soon. Our buildings might, but not our species.

Oh, I fully agree we are forcing all the others, poor things, through a bottleneck! As to humans, I didn't mean in terms of population, but in terms of viability. Meddling with viruses, meddling with nuclear energy, owning a massive arsenal of nuclear bombs and with a dominant form of sociocultural organisation that brutally mistreats the majority of individuals... I'm sure the history of hominids has had a few fortunate turns in the distant path, but I think a massive human extinction event (not necessarily wiping out the race as a whole, but most of us) has been more likely in the last 70-80 years (I would make nuclear fission the dividing line) than for at least ten thousand years beforehands.