I don’t know how I can explain the topic of this thread any better, but it’s clear I haven’t done well enough.
That is very cool!
This wasn’t your theme???:
Because once again, it’s been answered. Civilizations, but more importantly, the precursors to civilizations, leave the kind of artefact record you can’t miss. No record, no civilization. Only an extraterrestrial-facilitated non-terrestrial dinosaur civilization can’t be excluded.
My bad. Volcanic ash is pretty good at preserving things buried under the ash. Is it common to find dino fossils this way? This looks like a fairly isolated event.
This is a fairly spectacular misunderstanding itself. The similarity is that the entire argument lies in the gaps - that the total lack of evidence allows someone to make a positive argument for their side.
It doesn’t. All it allows is the statement that anything could have happened, especially the position “I happen to favor.” Amazing how it’s always the position “I happen to favor” that comes out of this argument.
Random You-tuber, but I like him. Doesn’t mean he knows what he is talking about…but you might be interested.
Was There An Advanced Civilization Before Humans? | Answers With Joe - YouTube
To be fair, I’d say it’s more along the lines of Russel’s Teapot.
Except in this case, we’ve sent enough probes to Jupiter that there is a damn good chance that we would’ve seen it by now.
We’ll never search everywhere, and it’s always possible that it’s there, if we just look a bit harder.
But, like arguing for the existence of Russel’s Teapot, it is trying to shift the burden of proof away from the person making unfalsifiable claims.
So what if there is a similarity in the “gap” part? That is why GotG persists at all: the gap part is legitimate. Scientists are always looking for gaps. What is not legitimate is advancing that your pet theory is the only possible solution to it. As best I can tell, the OP has not proposed this.
That is closer, but there is still a difference in that there is no plausible mechanism for a teapot to form, and no reason at all to believe that it should exist. Whereas on the other hand we do know that it’s possible for an advanced civilization to form, and reason to believe that some dinos were at least modestly intelligent.
It’s more like life outside of Earth. There is zero positive reason to believe that it exists. And in the places we’ve explored already, lots of reason to believe that it can’t, and so far haven’t found anything. But on the other hand, we’ve also only looked in the easy places, and we know it exists here.
We’ve scoured a lot more of Earth than the cosmos, so we can certainly put far tighter bounds on what a past civilization could look like as compared to extraterrestrial life. But there’s still plenty of room for possibilities.
Dinosaur hunters tend to look at areas where it is plausible that dinosaurs lived and that are accessible to dinosaur hunters today. That last little bit is important in the case of Antarctica: Seymour Island, for example, is well-studied, but about 98% of Antarctica is covered by ice sheets averaging a mile thick. Fossil hunting beneath the ice sheets is not a popular activity.
Meanwhile, large sections of Australia are not conducive to dinosaur hunting because rocks of the appropriate age aren’t at or near the surface: either they are deeply buried, or they are eroded away. All of Western Australia (a million square miles), e.g., has yielded exactly five non-avian dinosaur bones from four different specimens deposited over a period of a hundred million years:
- Two bones from a small agile theropod (a two-legged meat-eating dinosaur) named Ozraptor subotaii (Long & Molnar, 1998), found near Geraldton in the Colalura Sandstone (Middle Jurassic, c. 170 million years old)
- A vertebra (back bone) of an unidentifiable theropod, found near Kalbarri in the Birdrong Sandstone (Lower Cretaceous, c. 130 million years old)
- A partial humerus (upper arm bone) of an unknown theropod, found near Exmouth in the Miria Formation (Upper Cretaceous, c. 70 million years old)
- A single toe bone, likely belonging to a small theropod, found near Gingin in the Molecap Greensand (Upper Cretaceous, c. 90 million years old).
A gap of forty million years leaves room for a lot to have happened. These aren’t trivial gaps, and I think you overstate the extent to which we have been able to explore the areas where fossils might have been deposited.
That’s another good analogy, especially the line “But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.”
Sure there is, the advanced dinosaur civilization left it in orbit of Jupiter when they visited.
I could summarize by saying there is one spot in the geological record where there was a spike in ‘the C12 ratio’ which could indicate the burning of fossil fuels and would be how a future archeologist could find us. However, the spike occurred over hundreds of thousands of years instead of the 200 for us…so is most likely natural.
56 million years ago would likely be mammalian though, and not dinosaur.
Can’t be that advanced if they’re still drinking tea. Maybe there’s a coffee pot in orbit.
I see I joined in the ‘off the rails stage’ instead of the serious stage 
A translation of the Russell Teapot analogy to the intent of this thread is the question “what’s the biggest teapot that we couldn’t have detected yet?”. No one is making a claim about teapots, the topic is a consideration of our teapot-finding skills.
Russell’s Teapot is in solar orbit between Earth and Mars, so you have to count all the Mars missions too. However, my understanding is that most space probes cruise with their cameras and most other instruments turned off. Unless they’re going sort of near a known asteroid, in which case they’ll take a few polaroids* of that.
But even if all those missions had their cameras going and the images were all carefully scrutinized carefully for any advanced orbital crockery, it’s unlikely they’d have seen the hypothetical Teapot. The main reason being that teapots are fairly small, so they’d only spot them and be able to identify them as a teapot if they were within a rather short distance of the camera. Combine that with “space is big” (insert Adams’ quote about chemists here) and there’s tons of orbits that the Teapot could be in and not have been spotted.
*Intentional obsolete terminology; kids, ask your grandparents.
Neither is the stance that we cannot know anything until we know everything. We set conditions for knowing what we know - and tangible evidence is top of the list.
To date there is NO evidence for a dinosaur civilisation nor even hints of one being feasible. Observed natural behaviours - simple tool use [birds using twigs to get grubs out], large structures [ beaver dams, wombat burrows] and mass aggregations [every herd animal everywhere] are not civilisation. Neither are complex animal-plant-ecosystem relationships [every David Attenborough documentary since the dawn of time].
The people who study civilisation in human history [archaeologists and anthropologists] are very wary of the term, and are extremely conscious of the assumptions loaded into the concept. Its not about cities, but patterned and communicated behaviours that extend across generations and harnessing collective energy and work to unrelated outcomes. Can that be done without leaving a trace? By definition, no.
Fossils themselves are scarce in global terms, but the deposits from those periods are not and there would be many millions of people who interact with Mesozoic deposits in quarries and mines every day. The natural processes that create these deposits are well understood, anomalies are noted and studied. Can traces of something so anomalous be hidden in this context? Only, as I said before, if the dinosaurs constructed their civilisation using only marshmallows and vape smoke.
What percentage of the Mesozoic-era deposits that were laid down still exist (haven’t been eroded away or catastrophically altered by later volcanism, etc.), are close enough to the surface to be accessible in quarries or mines, and have actually been accessed?
Next, what is the minimal percentage of the Mesozoic deposits laid down that would necessarily contain evidence of any civilization that might have existed? The Mesozoic Era, for example, lasted 190 million years or so; a civilization that lasted a million years, for example, would not be in 99+% of Mesozoic rocks because they were deposited in the “wrong” part of the Mesozoic (and a civilization need not be global either, so a million-year civilization that never spread beyond its continent of origin wouldn’t leave a trace even in many/most of the deposits from the “right” time frame).
Even in the right time and place, not every deposit will have evidence. Consider that in densely-populated areas, you can’t dig without finding artifacts or evidence of humans, but in places that didn’t support large populations, you can dig a lot without finding anything. For example, North American Indians certainly had “patterned and communicated behaviours that extend across generations and harnessing collective energy and work to unrelated outcomes,” but certain kinds of landforms (stream banks and rock overhangs, e.g.) are a lot more likely to yield evidence of human settlement than locations far from water sources or shelter. What kinds of landforms would show evidence of dinosaur civilization, and what percentage of existing Mesozoic deposits are the products of those landforms?
All excellent questions and qualifications. The point is that, to date, whatever fraction of a fraction of the possible deposits that could contain evidence have not done so, or [more correctly] made themselves apparent. There’s all sorts of taphonomic considerations that would apply, as you suggest. Palaeosols seem to be a particular fancy for geologists and palaeontologists, so probably get attention where accessible, and I would expect to be the most logical place to retain evidence without subsequent transformation. Has this attention covered every time and place within the Mesozoic? Probably not by a long shot, but a relevant question would be what are the necessary preconditions for complex behaviour, and where would they occur in the 5? 10? 20? million years beforehand.
Common? No. Isolated? Also no.
And that’s just dinosaurs, there are also fossils preserved like that from before and after the dinosaur period.