Thagrastay

As we know, reptiles do not stop growing.
Let us consider for a moment just how large thay might become if they were allowed to grow without the interference of predation or disease for let us say a millenia.
Furthermore, let us also, for the sake of this thread, pretend that humanity has the exact same mental facalties that we do today, and is able to achieve the same types of technological advances as we have. No- let us assume that for the sake of this thread, humanity has advanced just a bit beyond where we are now.
Genetic manipulation and animal husbandry being what it is, mankind would be able to breed large reptiles to use as a labor force much as we did the oxen or horse in our past, but we out- grew them as real labor, replacing them with machines.
Still, much as we breed cattle and horses and dogs and cats and llamas and sheep, it would be very easy to breed these reptiles and other animals to smaller and smaller versions.
Or, perhaps they started out small and bred them to be larger and larger much as we did the draft horses. But reptiles do not stop growing, so that is probably more the case, and what dinosaurs really were in this idea.
Saber-toothed cats may very well have been bred to be that way as pets or for zoos.
For the sake of this thread we are making 3 assumptions:
1. There was a world-wide catastrophe of some type
2. People and "dinosaurs" cohabitated
3. Homo sapiens were not the cave dwelling or stone age variety, but just as intelligent, if not more so than we and possibly more technologically advanced than we are now (not through the help of aliens, either)
Remember- we are playing with a new idea, here, so all you creationists and evolutionists rein in your venom and biases. This isn't a creation vs evolution thread. try thinking outside the box here. What are your thoughts?

We know that something became of the "dinosaurs" and there is historical evidences of earlier civilizations, though they are not nearly as reported as they could be.
A world wide catastrophe today would throw all of us back into the stone age and in one generation we would be back to cave drawings and animal skins and 5,ooo years from now they'd be re-inventing computers and debating the "Great Catastrophe Myth".
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this. Please refrain from the usual evolution/creation dialogue.

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filtherton

Interesting idea. Unfortunately, i think one can never be certain of what humanity was like before nature hit the reset button unless one was there. For all we know, some of our ancestors evolved, split off from the species of homo sapiens, invented space travel and got the hell off of this rock. Maybe they were assimilated by an alien race. Whothehellknows?

Ustwo

A technological civilization more advanced then now would leave more clues of its existence then skeletons and hand tools.

I'm not sure where you are going with this.

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filtherton

Naw, see, cause they're like, so advanced that, like, they could totally just erase any evidence of their existence. Yeah, totally, hombre.

That's the magical thing about untestable speculation such as this. :

It's untestable.

rsl12

Ustwo brought up my main point, but here's something else on your other point:

Reptiles/dinosaurs would make lousy labor animals for a number of reasons:

1. The big carnivorous dinosaurs would be ill suited to the task, just like tigers are not good at pushing the plow today.

2. Being cold-blooded, reptiles are not like a car that you can turn on and off. The conditions have to be *just right* for them to exert themselves for any extended period of time.

3. The mental capacity of your average dinosaur pales in comarison to a donkey. You couldn't train it to do anything. If you genetically mutate it so that it has a bigger brain, well then maybe something is possible, but I wonder if there's something about being cold-blooded that keeps reptiles from being really smart.

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John Henry

I'm having difficulty with your assumptions here

Assumption 1 is fine. Vague, but fine. There have been many.

Assumption 3 is workable. Far-fetched, but workable. As has been pointed out already, it's not quite comprehensively disprovable and so it's valid for a hypothesis.

Asssumption 2 is a big nono. Like BIG. I can't give you exact figures here, but I think we're talking about several million years of separation between the earliest known human remains and the latest known dinosaur remains.

Unless you can give us reliable sources on these 'earlier civilisations' that place them concurrently with the dinosaurs, I really can't see this idea working.

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tecoyah

Interesting exersize.

1: Yes there was a worldwide catastrophe, there have been many. Likely you are refering to the extinction event that ended the reign of dinosaurs.
Appx. 65,000,000 years ago, according to several different dating techniques, each verifying the others.

2 and 3:In order for homo sapien and the dinosaurs to live in the same time frame, humans would need to have been in their current state between 120,000,000 to 65,000,000 years ago. Current fossil evidence indicates that few mammals of any kind existed in this time frame, let alone an advanced species.

If we were to accept the hypothesis as stated, a few questions would arise.

1) why would we breed an animal that is quite capable of consuming an entire family in one sitting. Two foot long teeth, or 12 inch claws, would likely serve little purpose in a domesticated animal?
2) why would we breed the vast quantity of ocean dwelling creatures, unless we were an aquatic species at this time?
3) why would there be no fossil evidence whatsoever of a human species during this time period?
4) why would there be theoretical evidence of a human cycle of physical change, that spans several million years,and only after a multi million year vacancy?

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Lebell

There is "thinking out-side the box" and then there is WAGs (wild-ass guesses).

Unfortunately this is the latter, not the former.

We might as well be talking about Zenu.

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Thagrastay

Thank you, Lebell. your input was wonderful.
You may go.

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tecoyah

And yet, you wonder why?

I think I will leave this thread as well.

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Lebell

I think it needs to be stated clearly that any member is free to post in any thread so long as they are respectful and follow forum rules.

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rsl12

perhaps this belongs in 'tilted paranoia'?

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Mantus

Thagrastay, really, this idea is all one big assumption, we have nothing to anchor it as a possibility in our current model of history.


I would just like to correct rsl12,

Dinosaurs were most certainly not cold blooded. There is absolutely no way in hell that an animal of that size could sustain it’s metabolism and bodily functions though direct sunlight and/or the local climate. There were also many smaller species appeared to be very fast and agile which would also require allot more energy input then a cold-blooded animal would have. Further more paleontologists now believe that birds are the closest genetic relatives of dinosaurs (terrible lizards), which are warm blooded.

Ustwo

True, odds are dinos were at least partialy warm blooded.

There is skeletal and preditor/prey ratio evidence for this, but its not really important in this thread.

I'm not sure what IS important in this threaad, but I know whats not

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Thagrastay

Is this not the philosophy forum?
I asked you to ;leave your evolutionary theories at the door and think outside the box.
Lebell and WAGs aside, let's try to conceive a littel about possibilities, here.
There ARE evidences oif previous civilizations and it is a matter of philosophy-
Was Atlantis or Lemuria a real possibility? is that a better question, then?

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Lebell

Ok ok,

Mea Culpa.

You've convinced me to "think outside the box".



Here is what I think we should seriously investigate:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Story of Xenu

Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.

Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.

Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).


These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.

The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).

After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.

As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xemu is still alive today.



link

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tecoyah

I do so love scientology.....it reminds me of those pesky dinosaurs my ancestors had to control in order to harvest food.

Hows this.....

In the year 2,009,194,255 B.c. there came upon the earth a creature of immence intellect. So powerful were the thought capabilities of this bieng, it could form matter into its own creations. In an attempt to create toothpaste, it made a single celled creature that tasted rather sweet, but was bothersome to make each night at bedtime.
Thus Angolasimarostis, as this creature decided to be called, allowed the sweet tasting toothpaste creatures to self replicate.Several hundred million years later all its teeth fell out and the toothpaste creatures were no longer needed, but Angolsimrostis forgot to destroy them, and moved to venus(much warmer climate).
As many millions of years passed the little toothpaste creatures became larger and more complex, until one day they became self aware and formed into colonies. These colonies are still in existance in the form of silly putty, which as we all know can take any form, and is even capable of copying the cartoons from the sunday paper.

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rsl12

tecoyah, that is fabulous!!

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Thagrastay

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tecoyah

I guess I can't actually reply directly to you....as you requested I do not. So I will just type into the wind.
If I was female and actually cared whether I was ladylike or not, I might have taken some offense to your remarks, but honestly I just find you so very entertaining, it is difficult to ignore.
You began this thread as an attempt to create discussion on a subject that cannot help but create ridicule from anyone even remotely familiar with the history of our world.
Lebell simply brought into the discussion another religion(scientology), which has a direct bearing on the theory of human/dinosaur interaction. And in my opinion, each is equally credible. I apologize to you if my attempt at humor upset you....lighten up.

Oh , and if you really want lebell and I to ignore you, please dont slam us both on another thread ten minutes before requesting it.

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Ustwo

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Lebell

Thagrastay,

You can't have it both ways.

What I posted is exactly what scientologists believe, yet apparently it isn't what you wanted.

Yet it has no more supporting evidence than some of what you've postulated.

So either you allow scientific discussion to support or disprove your theories or you don't.

But if you decide you don't want to allow that, then don't be surprised when things like Xenu or Raleans (sp?) are brought into the mix.

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Mantus

Thagrastay,

I know you wanted this to be a "what if" kind of discussion. But this “what if” is so out there that it cannot belong in this reality. It's a “what if” in another reality kind of idea. Certainly the Xenu post had no relevance to your original post but it certainly allowed you to experience just how we saw your original idea.

But hey, no big deal, I am not dissing your post, I am just saying that we cant really discuss it in the context of logical possibility.

asaris

Lebell -- Raelians

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"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

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Lebell

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Yakk

If you want a decent civilization-before-ours write-up, check out "Illuminatus!" trilogy or "Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan.

The first one is a 'plausible' story based in a world where Atlantis was the cradle of human civilization. It gets wierd.

The second one is more serious, and is well worth reading. Avoiding spoilers, the story starts when they find a 50,000+ year old human mummy in an orange space suit on the moon. One of my favourate books.

As for the original topic, well, it is basically Fantasy. Nothing much different than assuming Dragons ruled the world in 700 AD.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

tecoyah

I have been debating a revival of this thread, mostly because it was so much fun. And as the originator has aparently gone by the wayside (no not the forum) I have been compeled to answer the "better question", as it could prove quite entertaining.


Was Atlantis a real possibity?

Most likely Atlantis was a real place, although the level of civilization is certainly in question. If indeed there was a place as advanced as some believe this was, that was completely destroyed by one natural disaster or another. What a loss to humankind. Just think where we would be now if we had a 2500 year head start on technological evolution. Damn we would be living in another star system, and then maybe domesticating and genetically manipulating all the dinosaurs we wanted.

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HammerHand

How was Atlantis most likely a real place? Where is the proof of an Atlantis?

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asaris

Most myths have a basis in fact, so it's reasonable to think that there was something like a 'real' Atlantis. However, how much it was like the mythical Atlantis is certainly open to question.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

saut

Ah yes, the Illuminatus! Trilogy has an *interesting* interpretation of Atlantean existence and civilization.

Hail Gruad!

kalashnikov

I have no freaking idea what this post is supposed to mean. Is this a "ooh, this would be an entertaining book" or "this is a possible theory for what actually happened in history"?

As a book, whatever, go for it.

But as a theory for what happened, not quite.
A) As a few other people pointed out, dinos died (well, except for birds, and yeah, they sure as hell did come from dinosaurs - whether you want to call them such is up to you) 65 million years ago, homo sapiens began a couple million years ago. A bit of lag time.
B) Dinos were most definately warm blooded. Bone structure of warm vs cold blooded animals is completely different, and dino bones match those of warm blooded animals.
There has been a lot of research on dino growth rate, and not only do they reach a maximum size, but they do not grow at a steady rate (again, like w.b. and not c.b.) and they grow very quickly, far faster than cold blooded animals would.

A warm blooded dinosaur might be a good work animal, if it fit the requirements for being domesticated (read "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond)

This thread is just weird. I dont know what to say. There is no evidence for most of what you are saying.

it is 2 in the morning, maybe i can't think outside the box quite enough.

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