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Draviddavid t1_j0ynvpd wrote

Reply to comment by Dry_Author8849 in Which theory about aliens is the most likely? by [deleted]

I listened to a podcast the other day that suggested there could have been many intelligent forms on earth before us.

We'd only have to be gone for a few hundred thousand years for there to be no trace of us left and the next intelligent life be none the wiser to our existence previously.

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TheTimeShrike t1_j0yonkv wrote

That doesn’t sound right at all. We know about dinosaurs from millions of years ago, I don’t think all evidence of humanity with our ridiculous megastructures and plastic garbage islands the size of states are going to completely disappear anytime soon. But hey, I could be wrong.

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Draviddavid t1_j0yp20t wrote

Maybe it was 400 million years. But even that is a pretty short time scale in universe terms.

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quadriplegic_cheetah t1_j0yug6l wrote

No really. Thats a pretty substantial amount of time even relative to the time of the Big Bang. Especially when you consider how long it takes for life to form at random.

And even then, after millions of years, an advanced civilization could probably find traces of us on this tiny rock. Even after 100’s of millions of years.

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ridgecoyote t1_j0yubkh wrote

One theory is that former tech relied on biological advances rather than material advances.

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Optimal-Firefighter9 t1_j0yp813 wrote

We have fossil records of Oculudentavis khaungraae, which is a dinosaur less than three inches long that lived 100 million years ago.

If there were intelligent civilizations before us we would absolutely know.

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I_Also_Fix_Jets t1_j0ysgde wrote

That's something that gets me, too. No spear heads or metalwork in the fossil record? No landfills? No burried stone tablets from some random agricultural exchange? Plausible, but the burden of proof is still on the claim makers.

Edit: punctuation

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CalligrapherDizzy201 t1_j0yr7rp wrote

Maybe dinosaurs were intelligent. We don’t know.

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Optimal-Firefighter9 t1_j0yrj2h wrote

There are a lot of scientific reasons that we do know roughly how smart dinosaurs are, and the answer is the smartest dinosaurs were about as smart as the dumbest modern day birds.

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CalligrapherDizzy201 t1_j0yroy3 wrote

That we think we know. We don’t actually. We can only guess.

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Optimal-Firefighter9 t1_j0yxvdu wrote

That's not how science works. "We don't know anything," is some serious r/im14andthisisdeep material.

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CalligrapherDizzy201 t1_j0yziy0 wrote

So feel free to share some of these scientific reasons that dinosaurs at best were as smart as the dumbest birds of today. I’ll eagerly wait.

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Optimal-Firefighter9 t1_j11a1vc wrote

That falls under the heading of "common knowledge". We learn about it in grade school.

You're the one making the entirely unsupported claim that dinosaurs were an intelligent civilization.

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CalligrapherDizzy201 t1_j11bnhl wrote

I didn’t claim that. I claimed we don’t know whether or not they were intelligent and we don’t. How could we? We weren’t there.

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