At 4:21 PM +1000 9/27/02, Mark Harvey wrote:
This raises an even more interesting question. What if a
civilization such as ours existed tens of millions of years ago and
we are not aware of it? I am not suggesting human beings were
present 10's of millions of years ago, but perhaps an earlier super
species.
[clipped]
I addressed this in a science fiction short story, "Extinction
Theory" published in the March 1989 issue of Analog Science Fiction,
postulating that the evolution of intelligent dinosaurs was the real
cause of the mass extinction at the KT boundary. (For those of you
historically inclined, that was before the Chicxulub crater was
discovered, and it was written before the September 1988 Snowbird
conference on global catastrophes and mass extinctions.)
One important thing to remember is that the history of advanced human
civilization is quite short on a geologic time scale, and most
artifacts are less durable than the stone tools that would be found
over a much longer interval of time. -- Jeff Hecht
