Paleontologists in Canada have made a new discovery concerning dinosaurs. They found a 75-million-year-old baby dinosaur skeleton belonging to the Gorgosaurus libratus species. What makes this finding so important is that its stomach contained the remains of two young Citipes elegans dinosaurs.
> how long it took our species to get where we're at.
Barely any? By our reckoning, anatomically modern humans are at most 500kY old, and in that time we managed to spread to the entire planet (and beyond) as a single species.
Dinosauria is an entire clade several levels up from mammalia relatively speaking (Aves — every single bird — is a taxonomic class within dinosauria).
Basal dinosaurs appeared about 20 million years after the P-T extinction event (251MYA), but they didn’t become the dominant life form until the T-J extinction event (201MYA) wiped out the dominant early archosaurs.
And they benefited from a supercontinental stage for their spread.
This planet harbored life for billions of years. Our modern civilization is few thousand years old, broadly speaking, we only industrialized two hundred years ago, and suddenly we have "limited time"?
I wonder if you realize the reason our time is limited is because we keep multiplying indiscriminately, thus destroying our entire habitat and exhausting our resources.
And your solution to multiplying indiscriminately is to multiply even more indiscriminately all over other planets.
I didn't word my comment as a question, but I'm genuinely curious what makes you say that with confidence. I don't think we understand all threats to our existence beyond geopolitics.
Your quote was the final thing I said, and everything I said before is what made me say that.
We're in a situation where we're a tumor growing on Earth. and we see our growth threatens Earth, so the solution is "we need to spread around so we can keep growing even more".
An alternative solution is to control our growth (which doesn't only concern biological reproduction but also economical). Which will give us practically infinite time.
Technically the notion that "we" (homo sapiens) can spread to other planets is nonsense. Whatever we spread to other planets, if anything, won't be human, one way or another. Because a human is bound to its environment.
On the other hand, bureaucracy is probably one of the reasons we have societies where there’s an entire class of people devoted to space research and exploration
Nit, dinosaurs did not rule the earth for 180MYA, they did for about 135 MYA from the Tr-J extinction event (which wiped out most of the old archosaurs) around 200MYA to the K-Pg extinction event around 65MYA. Maybe a bit more if you count the early Paleogene for avian dinosaurs on account of Gastornis.
