How sure are we that there were never any intelligent dinosaurs? How much of fossil evidence would survive 66 million years? Would pyramids survive this long?
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@BartoszMilewski If you invert the question, it feels less puzzling: why do we treat “66 million years” as a naturally meaningful chunk of time at all?
Most of our deepest claims about reality - causality, locality, stable constants - are extrapolations from an absurdly tiny empirical foothold: a thin slice of time and a minuscule patch of accessible space.
So maybe the real surprise isn’t that our theories feel incomplete—it’s that our pea-brain models generalize as far as they do.
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@mathemagical
The biggest example of hubris is to imagine that our monkey brains should be able to figure out the workings of the Universe
@BartoszMilewski
The (relative) size of the brain would be a pretty good indicator. A skull with unusually large cavity could survive that long. AFAIK we have not found one yet.
+Question: by your standards are there any extant intelligent species outside humans?
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@kupac
I thought about the brain thing, but there are birds (descendants of dinosaurs!) with small brains that exhibit a lot of cleverness, if not intelligence (corvids, parrots).
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@BartoszMilewski
Yup, it's not impossible that they could have been quite clever. But they were certainly not smart enough to discover and divert a meteor 🥲
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@kupac
Maybe they migrated to Mars?
@BartoszMilewski there was some speculation that such species not only had existed, but survived and founded Facebook
@BartoszMilewski It’s very difficult to prove a negative.
But if any had developed it, they likely had millions of years, many times longer than humans, to:
- Spew unnatural but long-lived radionuclides all over the environment. *That* we would have noticed, as the K-T boundary (iridium) layer has been extensively studied.
- Strip-mine various obviously-valuable mineral deposits.
- Leave vast landfills of low-entropy materials and constructions around the planet.
So, at some point, I think we are justified in interpreting the absence of evidence as evidence that dinosaurs did not attain human-level intelligence.
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@marshray
Does intelligence always lead to the destruction of the environment? It's possible that a sustainable economy would leave no scars on the surface of the Earth. Especially if they were to survive for millions of years.
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@BartoszMilewski @marshray if this is just a thought experiment you could end up with a conclusion, that randomly scattered rocks are the work of art of dinosaurs
@BartoszMilewski Pretty sure an intelligent species would never make anything like a pyramid.
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@skewray
Isn't intelligence the ability to produce useless things?
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@BartoszMilewski So, the question becomes: what useless things would dinosaurs make? I don't see how a dinosaur could use a pyramid, but looking for 650-MY old pyramids on that basis may not be an optimal strategy.
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