Previous, Highly Intelligent Life On Earth - yay or nay?

I don't exactly what do you mean by intelligence, if any subject can be intelligent it's just to defend his right as human or as animal, but last time remember i said that who can prove that wa are alive , you eat ,walk and run and it's mean for you life,but if you want to analyse a cell you need a microscope or without this instrument this cell can not exist in your mind,it's the same thing with human over space,everybody think that we are alone ,i m sure not and i'm sure there is somewhere maybe curiuos people who need that instrument to say that human exist,because they are maybe more than giants ,but be sure it's just an hypothesis . I believe in god like everyone and my religion it's islam but i don't share the same philosophy with some muslim about that because i believe in religion only with true science,and in coran(holly bible for christians) there is a sentence,we can read that;god create things that nobody can knows)another example in vatican there a secret documents about intelligence but they keep secret,WHY i don't know, in texas(rosewell) a flying saucer falled down but they keeped secret about the matter ,the question is why all governements don't want to inform people about that,the same with Pyramids of egypt i'm sure tey have nothing to do with human civilisation an example till now nobody could explain with which kind of light they got to paint over the graves walls far and below pyramid since they did not used torch, i would like to talk more about,cause in the past it was my favourit subject.

Well ,if you can read English well ,virtual, check out this book.But I've kind of changed my mind a bit since i read it some years back.Maybe technology can get forgotten.Simple as that.

Steve Lea wrote:

Steve Campbell wrote: For once I aint gonna stick a flag in this one and start defending a position.

But there are several places on Earth where rocks have been found fused into glass....in a way that we have only ever observed at an H-bomb (being WAY hotter than yer bog standard A-bomb) epicentre.

When lightning strikes e.g quartzites they get fused to glass. Fossilised ones are called fulgarites and are quite common.

I like to play with this thought tho.

Given there is no surviving soft tissue, on what do we base our assertion that dinosaurs were morons? Mere brain cavity size? More than one species has proved to have had more than one brain, who can say how many some may have had in locations where it would not have left a good fossil clue? Who is to say their neuron density was the same as ours, or that they too only bothered their arses with 10% of their brain capacity.

I think they MAY have been smarter than we think, MAY have had a technology (we can barely find evidence of protohuman tech, from 1000 times as short a time ago) and they MAY have brought about their own mass extinction.

Don't think many people say they were morons - a lot of the recent fossil discoveries in China such as fossilised nesting sites show that many were social and gregarious and well ordered. Their extinction was at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (called K-T)65 million years back, many other species didnt survive through either so if they fucked up they fucked up for everybody else too! There is a rather large meteorite impact site at Chichxulub in the Yucatan peninsula which would have been a planet changing impact based on its size. At the same time on the other side of the world, The Deccan Traps, bit like your Antrim basalts only 100 times more lava, were spewing out so it would have been a real double whammy. Maybe some alien race fired a big iridium laden cannonball to wipe out the dinosaurs but the balance of probability is a meteor. There was probably one too in the Permian (250 million years ago) which wiped out a whole lot more than this one did. Next one should be interesting...

Stick around :D

Well IF they did wipe themselves out it's likely they'd take plenty out wth them. I mean when Jesus boy finally gets the message from his boss and pushes the button, there will be many species besides us going tits up. Of course contrary to the whining greenies, it will not matter one fuck to the Earth who'll be bowling along again with in the blink of a million year eye, sans us muppets.

To return to reality a little..... iLOVe watching guy argue.....

Meteorite flood Basalts Meteorite flood Basalts Meteorite flood Basalts Meteorite flood Basalts

And just think...OMG how up yourselves are you.... how upsettingly religious is this behaviour. Might it not just be conceivable that a great big fuck off wallop into the side of the planet... might JUST have had some techtonic knock on effects (say that after 15 pints).

Ronald Kirsch wrote: the dinosaurs were certainly one of the most successful forms of life on earth, having existed for far longer than we have, or probably will. i do doubt that they were any more intelligent than say their nearest living relatives the birds.

BUT WHY? we can have no possible clue as to their level of intelligence. FWIW, I tend to agree but still there is NO evidence beyond brain cavities.

virtualghali wrote:

I believe in god like everyone and my religion it's islam but i don't share the same philosophy with some muslim about that because i believe in religion only with true science

that's the way Islam USED to be all over.

Not that I condone religion of any type (ANYone who tries to tell you exactly how to relate to your universe/God and that variation from that is wrong....is not to be trusted), but the ancient Muslim scholars did write more books than they burned....which is to be applauded.

Steve Campbell wrote:

Ronald Kirsch wrote: the dinosaurs were certainly one of the most successful forms of life on earth, having existed for far longer than we have, or probably will. i do doubt that they were any more intelligent than say their nearest living relatives the birds.

BUT WHY? we can have no possible clue as to their level of intelligence. FWIW, I tend to agree but still there is NO evidence beyond brain cavities.

Anyone mind if an Palaeontologist weighs in on this discussion?

I think the real question here, what makes Homo sapiens arrogant enough to think that our particular brand of sentient intelligence is an advantage to species survival?

The evidence of human history shows the opposite to be more likely - the evolution of a brain capable of this sort of inventiveness inherently uses it to destroy the ability for the environment to sustain future populations. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to use that brain to speed up your own extinction.

Consider life forms such as Brachiopods, Bryozoans and even Sharks....far longer persistent histories for these life forms in the fossil record than the over-exemplified Dinosauria , and certainly not renowned for their advanced problem-solving intelligence which we hold in such high esteem, which can be established easily by looking at living versions...just stick a Siduku puzzle in front of a Whit Pointer and see how it reacts... CTB

Dinosaurs constructed the pyramids for the Egyptians...then ate them :p

The dinosaurs then were destroyed by the Nazca people (who did those lines in the sand in Peru) :p :p

The Nazcas, in turn, were crushed by the alien race from Omicron Persei Eight :p :p :p

The aliens' dominance ended suddenly when they ran afoul of the neanderthals :p :p :p :p

The neanderthals? They pissed off the wrong Texas Ranger

CTB wrote:

Steve Campbell wrote:

Ronald Kirsch wrote: the dinosaurs were certainly one of the most successful forms of life on earth, having existed for far longer than we have, or probably will. i do doubt that they were any more intelligent than say their nearest living relatives the birds.

BUT WHY? we can have no possible clue as to their level of intelligence. FWIW, I tend to agree but still there is NO evidence beyond brain cavities.

Anyone mind if an Palaeontologist weighs in on this discussion?

I think the real question here, what makes Homo sapiens arrogant enough to think that our particular brand of sentient intelligence is an advantage to species survival?

The evidence of human history shows the opposite to be more likely - the evolution of a brain capable of this sort of inventiveness inherently uses it to destroy the ability for the environment to sustain future populations. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to use that brain to speed up your own extinction.

Consider life forms such as Brachiopods, Bryozoans and even Sharks....far longer persistent histories for these life forms in the fossil record than the over-exemplified Dinosauria , and certainly not renowned for their advanced problem-solving intelligence which we hold in such high esteem, which can be established easily by looking at living versions...just stick a Siduku puzzle in front of a Whit Pointer and see how it reacts... CTB

Wayne, that was more or less what i was implying. unless we as a species stop thinking selfishly at only our immediate self interest, and not what is actually good for the planet in the long term, we really don't stand much of a chance of being around as long as the dinosaurs. unfortunately the world as we have set it up, especially in terms of the predominant economic system does not really encourage this.

Yeah, no slaves building pyramids in Egypt. Nothing to do inbetween planting and harvest season. After all the Nile was predictable and God lived amongst the Egyptians in the form of the pharoh. Travel a few hundred miles East and life was miserable. Floods, wars, starvation. God does not care. When you die you sit in the dustbin. Such explains the misery Judiasm, Christianity and Islam has brought to Earth.

Ronald Kirsch wrote:

CTB wrote:

Steve Campbell wrote:

Ronald Kirsch wrote: the dinosaurs were certainly one of the most successful forms of life on earth, having existed for far longer than we have, or probably will. i do doubt that they were any more intelligent than say their nearest living relatives the birds.

BUT WHY? we can have no possible clue as to their level of intelligence. FWIW, I tend to agree but still there is NO evidence beyond brain cavities.

Anyone mind if an Palaeontologist weighs in on this discussion?

I think the real question here, what makes Homo sapiens arrogant enough to think that our particular brand of sentient intelligence is an advantage to species survival?

The evidence of human history shows the opposite to be more likely - the evolution of a brain capable of this sort of inventiveness inherently uses it to destroy the ability for the environment to sustain future populations. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to use that brain to speed up your own extinction.

Consider life forms such as Brachiopods, Bryozoans and even Sharks....far longer persistent histories for these life forms in the fossil record than the over-exemplified Dinosauria , and certainly not renowned for their advanced problem-solving intelligence which we hold in such high esteem, which can be established easily by looking at living versions...just stick a Siduku puzzle in front of a Whit Pointer and see how it reacts... CTB

Wayne, that was more or less what i was implying. unless we as a species stop thinking selfishly at only our immediate self interest, and not what is actually good for the planet in the long term, we really don't stand much of a chance of being around as long as the dinosaurs. unfortunately the world as we have set it up, especially in terms of the predominant economic system does not really encourage this.

Bang on the money, Ronette.

Although it's probably worth noting that humans are not capable of causing "the end of the world" as the doom merchants describe it, it's just affecting the environment enough to endanger our own population.

So-called damaging factors like increased UV are recognised mutagenic facors which obviously no help to humans as a species, but the upside is that these mutagenic factors are in fact evolution's little helpers, speeding along the birth of new species to fill in the voids we'll leave. Sobering, if nothing else.

CTB

ronette? should i be scanning that other baby pic of mine. the one from the front?

Just being a wag, Ron - no offence intended! CTB

CTB wrote: Just being a wag, Ron - no offence intended! CTB

good you wouldn't want me to drag out a baby photo proving my maleness, would you? :D

Steve Campbell wrote:

Steve Lea wrote:

Steve Campbell wrote: ...

Stick around :D

Well IF they did wipe themselves out it's likely they'd take plenty out wth them. I mean when Jesus boy finally gets the message from his boss and pushes the button, there will be many species besides us going tits up. Of course contrary to the whining greenies, it will not matter one fuck to the Earth who'll be bowling along again with in the blink of a million year eye, sans us muppets.

To return to reality a little..... iLOVe watching guy argue.....

Meteorite flood Basalts Meteorite flood Basalts Meteorite flood Basalts Meteorite flood Basalts

And just think...OMG how up yourselves are you.... how upsettingly religious is this behaviour. Might it not just be conceivable that a great big fuck off wallop into the side of the planet... might JUST have had some techtonic knock on effects (say that after 15 pints).

Well I didnt really catch you returning to reality there..

There are not too many people who argue meteorite vs flood basalts anymore. Flood basalts are caused by mantle hotspots rising up from the asthenosphere and drive most plate tectonic events. If you'd been sitting in your house 52 million years ago there'd have been one under your arse and its the reason you're not waving to Bjork or those nice people in Labrador and Greenland as your neighbours.If it wasn't for a hotspot there would be none of those nice Hawaiaan shirts someone keeps talking about or the Maldives, Seychelles or Canaries, all your holiday places. Not much of your Nescafe coming out of Brazil either and no Red Sea, something else you could blame divisions there on.

Chicxulub they reckon was about 6 miles in diameter only so not big in the scheme of things. The crater is about 110 miles in diameter though, gives an idea of how fast it was travelling. Most of its energy would have been taken up via plastic deformation in the mantle and lower crust so while the earth's surface would have been put into permanent darkness with all the dust and what have you, planetary tectonics would have been largely unaffected. The iridium rich layer that is just about everywhere round the world where rocks of this age are preserved sits a fair way up the Deccan basalt pile - that means 'run for your lives' was being screamed in dinosaurish long before they all said 'what the fuck was that?'.

Maybe those fifteen pints you talk about should come after you finish posting, you're sounding more like Tony Wilson every day!

I didn't kniw they had dated the iridium layer within the deccan basalts, kinda scuppers my theory, but anyway, it certainly was NOT an either OR scenario, which was my point.

As a slight aside..... regarding Aliens, impacts and poor TV scifi.....

The idea of a ship crashing here is so appealing to the tinfoil hat brigade. In fact I have heard all sorts of folks say that the "roswell ship" (ahem) was not headed here but simply bumped into us.

LOL Too much star trek.

In Star Trek a shuttlecraft travelling at full impulse (quoted as 0.6C (200,000 kilometers a second give or take) in technical manuals....yes I am a reformed trekker...I saw B5, openned my eyes my mind and my heart to JMS and was reborne :D ), twats into a planet..... there is a cloud of smoke and dust and the crew fall out, shaken but uninjured. Of course in the real universe..... 50-100 tons of metal travelling at 0.6C would what? vapourise a continent? punch straight through us? blast a chunk off us and send us into a buggered orbit.

I aint worked the numbers out in detail (why bother when one of them is an assumed mass anyway), but it's SCARY loads of energy (how the ship GOT that energy, answers on a postcard please[1].

Can I point out, that my smart dinosaurs theory is just a daft idea I cooked up, because it IS actually quite hard to soundly disprove..... much like the teapot in orbit round the sun, or God, tho all are equally doolally.

CTB, BTW as someone with a clue..... I was right in my assertion that we base our knowlege of dinosaur brains on the cavities in fossils and that no actual soft tissue has ever been found?

PS Steve, I am aware the Earth is flexible and spongey, but the techtonic systems are also very much chaotic (again in terms of senseitive dependence), the recent work on Earthquake prediction by the study of earthquake "storms" suggests tho, that while there are interactions, they are, at least on a regional scale more deterministic than chaotic.

[1]reminds me of a lecture I watched one night on the makeup of the interstellar gas medium..... the guy pops up this pic of a galaxy and says "this is our galaxy, we're about here" and indicated an area with a laser pen. And just as he was about to lauch into his next bit... he paused,looked at the students and said "If you're good I'll tell you how we got the picture"....only about half of them got what he meant, which worried me until I discovered it was open to the general public :D )

FARK!!!

Just wrote a bloody essay discussing dino brains as a reply to you, Steve...and it's vanished coz I took too long .

I need a beer to recompose myself, but I'll reply later.

Bastard internet.

CTB

CTB wrote: FARK!!!

Just wrote a bloody essay discussing dino brains as a reply to you, Steve...and it's vanished coz I took too long .

I need a beer to recompose myself, but I'll reply later.

Bastard internet.

CTB

it has happend to me too, well not on that subject. write it in word. save it then paste it into a post. this sort of thing seems to happen when one spends some time in writing a long message.

btw what's the weather like down there. is it raining? can you send some of that wet stff up here if it is?

The ultimate NOOL frustration.

There used to be a time-out function built into the reply page for this very reason.

All I do is select, right-click and copy any lengthy response just before hitting submit. Saves the angst.

:\pimp3:

there are a few options short of facing ms-turd..... you can either just do control-A contrl-C befre you hit submit, which will keep it in the clipboard and if a blank comes up just hit control v and submit again.

OR use Opera which doesn't clear forms when you hit the back button :D

[orange]depthcharge[/orange] wrote: The ultimate NOOL frustration.

There used to be a time-out function built into the reply page for this very reason.

All I do is select, right-click and copy any lengthy response just before hitting submit. Saves the angst.

:\pimp3:

Thanks. This would've been handy information AN HOUR AGO!

Ron, it's not really raining very much down here - it's just spattering a little now and then, humid as buggery. Redrafted reply incoming! CTB

Before I was so rudely interrupted…

Yeah Steve, you were right...to a degree. Elucidating soft tissue such as brain from fossil bones is a grey area (no pun intended). There have certainly been cases of Dinosaur brain casts that tell us a fair amount about the animal’s life (for example this poor bastard), but there’s no way of knowing how intelligent they were, and there most likely never will be. Palaeontology is, after all, a study steeped in theory and conjecture – and absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Evidence of behaviour as a result of brain function is a bit more promising: it’s fairly widely accepted that some dinosaurs (like the sauropods) would have exhibited herd behaviour, for example, which is something modern reptiles don’t do ... so this at least sets a precedent for dinos doing something with their brains that has no modern analogue in contemporary reptiles (Mammalian herd behaviour arose independently tens of millions of years later).

BUT: even if dinos were hyper-intelligent (we do have to stick with dinosaurs as the example here, to my chagrin – there are other fossil animals!!!) such as the Dromaeosaurs like Utahraptor, etc., they were somewhat short-strawed in the anatomy stakes – if their brains were advanced enough to solve problems, they couldn’t really do much with their brain power without an opposable thumb, for example. Frustrating for the poor tykes.

One last thing – we know so little about how the human brain functions, that it seems a bit premature to extrapolate on other species – there are so many potential vessels of research wandering around clearly not using their brains…

That was the essence of what I was going to say, Steve...but I’m a bit drunk now, so it reads like friggin' Keats to me...

CTB

makes total sense to me.

Seek prfessional help :D

"...So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth."

:\pimp3:

[orange]depthcharge[/orange] wrote: "...So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth."

:\pimp3:

Was it that unintelligable? Sorry - I so rarely get to discuss this sort of thing, especially on NOOL!

Kudos for the Python quote though, Beardy

CTB

fine piece of python wisdom it is too :D

CTB wrote:

[orange]depthcharge[/orange] wrote: The ultimate NOOL frustration.

There used to be a time-out function built into the reply page for this very reason.

All I do is select, right-click and copy any lengthy response just before hitting submit. Saves the angst.

:\pimp3:

Thanks. This would've been handy information AN HOUR AGO!

Ron, it's not really raining very much down here - it's just spattering a little now and then, humid as buggery. Redrafted reply incoming! CTB

i spoke to my brother about an hour ago. apparently they had a few good storms down at phillip island.

edit just starting to drizzle here. an i can hear thunder, who know we may get something yet.

Steve Campbell wrote: I didn't kniw they had dated the iridium layer within the deccan basalts, kinda scuppers my theory, but anyway, it certainly was NOT an either OR scenario, which was my point.

In Star Trek a shuttlecraft travelling at full impulse (quoted as 0.6C (200,000 kilometers a second give or take) in technical manuals....yes I am a reformed trekker...I saw B5, openned my eyes my mind and my heart to JMS and was reborne :D ), twats into a planet..... there is a cloud of smoke and dust and the crew fall out, shaken but uninjured. Of course in the real universe..... 50-100 tons of metal travelling at 0.6C would what? vapourise a continent? punch straight through us? blast a chunk off us and send us into a buggered orbit.

I aint worked the numbers out in detail (why bother when one of them is an assumed mass anyway), but it's SCARY loads of energy (how the ship GOT that energy, answers on a postcard please[1].

PS Steve, I am aware the Earth is flexible and spongey, but the techtonic systems are also very much chaotic (again in terms of senseitive dependence), the recent work on Earthquake prediction by the study of earthquake "storms" suggests tho, that while there are interactions, they are, at least on a regional scale more deterministic than chaotic.

Well I'm not a geophysicist, but the system of ridges, subduction zones and transforms that make up the boundaries of the tectonic plates are pretty well known. Serious earthquakes occur only where one plate is going under another, like the Pakistan scenario and the Asian tsunami, or where two plates are sliding past each other like that next big mother thats going to hit California one day. These are regional structures so regionally you know where they will happen, its the when that is so hard. Think one of the USGS's big jobs is to try and do this but its a hiding to nothing. To two jostling plates an earthquake is no big deal in the scheme of things but to us it is. The earth is a dynamic system and we're just trundling around in the skin on top of the creme brulee. I'd have to look deterministic up in the dictionary but most earth science conundrums are simplified by the law of uniformitarianism which says the present is the key to the past.

Steve Lea wrote: The earth is a dynamic system and we're just trundling around in the skin on top of the creme brulee.

Another analogy like that and you'll have the key to CTB's heart.

:\pimp3:

[orange]depthcharge[/orange] wrote:

Steve Lea wrote: The earth is a dynamic system and we're just trundling around in the skin on top of the creme brulee.

Another analogy like that and you'll have the key to CTB's heart.

:\pimp3:

gaia?

Ronald Kirsch wrote:

[orange]depthcharge[/orange] wrote:

Steve Lea wrote: The earth is a dynamic system and we're just trundling around in the skin on top of the creme brulee.

Another analogy like that and you'll have the key to CTB's heart.

:\pimp3:

gaia?

gaia or gaga, one of the two!

The earth will look after itself, not us..