[color=darkblue:5ac1b98bba]Maybe SETI ought to be looking here> just suppose that back in the day, around 3.5 billion years ago there was a stirring of life and, when the age of the dinosaurs began, assume there was a niche available for an animal that was able to think rationally and communicate its thoughts to others who were like him.

Assume around3.85 billion years ago that niche was filled by a dinosaur that had a very large brain case for such an animal and that evolution worked over the next couple of hundred million years to help this special dinosaur develop and increase. It is now still 4.05 billion years in and this dino is walking talking and teaching his children math and science in the dinoschool. Then along comes the great Cambrian extinction and of course this species of dino is taken out never to be seen again.

Is this possible could it have happened? (I know it wasn’t the cambrian extinction that took out the dinosaurs, give a guy a little space - please!!)

It would be fun to run one of the computer programs that shows the earth in motion over the eons and see what the future area will be. It would be very interesting to run the program positing the extinction of humanity in 2010 and see how long it would take the earth to recover from the contacts it had with us.

What would be left of Manhattan if there was no maintenance of the infrastructure or the buildings in 10 years, 50 years, 500 years, 1000 years, and then 100,000 years?

Jim[/color:5ac1b98bba]

Ancient Intelligent Life - A dinosaurial wiseguy?

Maybe SETI ought to be looking here> just suppose that back in the day, around 3.5 billion years ago there was a stirring of life and, when the age of the dinosaurs began, assume there was a niche available for an animal that was able to think rationally and communicate its thoughts to others who were like him.

Assume around3.85 billion years ago that niche was filled by a dinosaur that had a very large brain case for such an animal and that evolution worked over the next couple of hundred million years to help this special dinosaur develop and increase. It is now still 4.05 billion years in and this dino is walking talking and teaching his children math and science in the dinoschool. Then along comes the great Cambrian extinction and of course this species of dino is taken out never to be seen again.

Is this possible could it have happened? (I know it wasn’t the cambrian extinction that took out the dinosaurs, give a guy a little space - please!!)

It would be fun to run one of the computer programs that shows the earth in motion over the eons and see what the future area will be. It would be very interesting to run the program positing the extinction of humanity in 2010 and see how long it would take the earth to recover from the contacts it had with us.

What would be left of Manhattan if there was no maintenance of the infrastructure or the buildings in 10 years, 50 years, 500 years, 1000 years, and then 100,000 years?

Jim

Interesting speculation, Jim. I expect NYC (or any large modern city) would be reduced to rubble pretty quickly. OTOH the brick, steel girders, etc., would almost certainly be preserved in “fossilized” remains, and certainly our rubbish dumps would fossilize ... and they are ENORMOUS. So I do think that an alien archaeologist would be able to tell pretty quickly that there had been an advanced industrial culture on the planet in the past, were we to go extinct.

On this topic, have you seen David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries? It’s hilarious.

Ancient Intelligent Life - a dinosuarial wiseguy ?

It is my understanding that the top layer of continental crust does not subduct.  It piles up as mountains while the underlying plate dives beneath its neighbor.  A good example of this is the building of the Himalayas while the India plate is being subducted under the Asia plate (names subject to correction).

Of course, erosion will eventually wash away continental soil and rock, creating sediment on the ocean floor, which does subduct with the tectonic plate, becoming part of the material ejected by the volcanoes at the plate boundaries.

Geologists mine the Australian continent(plate) for the oldest rocks. It apparently hasn’t contacted another plate since breaking off the Pangian (sp?) great conjunction.

I was driving to a meeting with a friend, he is my wife’s boss, and we were having what I thought was an innocent conversation about the age of things.
I said something about the age of the earth and he asked how old it was.
I said 3.5 billion years or so give or take a few hundred million and was subjected to the worst most abusive cursing out I have ever had the pleasure of receiving. It got so bad I nearly stopped the car and put him out on the side of the road.
I apparently had struck a nerve by attacking the underpinnings of his religious belief’s .
We went on and he found a different way home. We’ve never been the same friends since.
He is an educated African American.
And he has since apologized admitting the correctness of my statement in a backhanded way.
Jim

That’s very sad, Jim. But maybe you played a part in opening his eyes a little.