Yes, there's no doubt many "ifs", but that period does seem to be a lost opportunity. However, it's also possible that there were percolations underneath, pushing forward that created the pressure for renaissances to break the intellectual stasis.Dubious wrote: ↑Sat Nov 24, 2018 10:15 amWho knows! Perhaps we'd already be extinct or in some way debilitated enough to have any further influence on the future. But it's an interesting speculation. Carl Sagan, I recall, mentioned something like it when he contemplated the idea that humans may already have landed on the moon by the time Dante wrote the Divine Comedy if the Ancient World would have been allowed to continue its intellectual momentum. I can imagine the possibility of that IF printing presss were available to make those societies more secular in its distribution of knowledge.
Actually, what I'm saying is completely orthodox. Consider that trilobites appeared ≈500m years ago and died out ≈250m years ago. Dinos first appeared ≈240m years ago and died out ≈60m years ago. It was ≈45m years ago that the first dominant giant mammals appeared.Dubious wrote: ↑Sat Nov 24, 2018 10:15 amThis sounds extremely farfetched! I've never heard of any biologist, paleontologist, anthropologist or evolutionist claim that intelligent life would once again assert itself if we go defunct. Frankly, it doesn't make sense because a new evolutionary period would have to commence. As you mention, it may not start with slime ponds and bacterial formations but its operation would still be so complex as not to follow it's previous course in creating intelligence. Evolution is subject to a lot of random events which influence the outcome that to presuppose the near certain appearance of intelligence a second time around is nearly impossible to fathom....which is not to say it absolutely can't happen, only that it has an extremely low probability of happening.Greta wrote: ↑Thu Nov 22, 2018 10:23 pmBTW, it is almost certain that another intelligent species would take our place if we died out, not just possible. It took just 60 million years for the shrewlike monotreme-like mammals that survived the dinos' asteroid and supervolcanoes to evolve to today's mammalian line. After each extinction, recovery is exponentially faster because the existing DNA (even in simple organisms) is more developed. I expect that, if we died out, rats would start the next line leading to intelligence, and they would be far more intelligent and robust than the protothera. Thus the next emergences would occur much more quickly again.
If mammals (incl. humans) go extinct soon, then why would you assume that life won't bounce back, and in yet more sophisticated forms? How is that far fetched? Yours is the speculative view, suggesting a new and novel variation in evolution. My speculation here is orthodox - observing patterns and using them to try to predict future events.
