Next time you pass a church in your car, honk if you’ve been groped by a clergyman.

Signs of Life. Who Lies Sleeping?

Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999

Mr Wild and Mr Wilkins hint that not only will the signs of intelligent life not be recognised after 65 million years but they have not been. The implication is that, if the dinosaurs—which dominated the earth for twice the time that mammals have—quickly developed a technological civilisation, as humanity has, then we would not recognise it today. The consequences of this idea have been considered in Who Lies Sleeping? The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man, M Magee, AskWhy! Publications, Frome, 1993.

We retain a Victorian arrogance that we are the pinnacle of God’s achievement, made in His image. Yet it is not impossible that the rocks are warning us that our arrogance is our destruction. God has been here before. That equally arrogant creatures have already destroyed themselves and the world about them. Though it might not be likely, when dinosaurs were recognised not to be cold-blooded, it became conceivable. That is why we are corresponding about it.

Our technological constructions are fragile. Plate tectonics and entropy will destroy virtually everthing we have built in 65 million years. Theirs would have been the same. Even if some artefacts of ceramics or precious metals did survive, would we recognise them? If we found a fossil sparking plug would we identify it as that or would we be reasonable and categorise it as mislocated or a natural curiosity? The clearest signs of their existence, judging from our own experience, would be the mass extinction of species (Mr Wild) and the presence of a layer of heavy metal pollutants (Mr Wilkins).

Speculation about dinosaurs is interesting but we know what we are doing to our own environment yet blithely do nothing about it but talk. I believe humanity is fundamentally flawed. As Tinbergen suggested we have features that were once valuable to survival but, because of the speed of human evolution, have become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological man that they now threaten us. Selfishness, for example, might once have had survival value but now contradicts self-regard by being destructive. We ignore the mass in favour of self though self is of the mass and will die with it. Coddled in our unnatural environment, selfishness has become obsessive. Scientists are cleverer and more analytical than the average man yet are equally selfish. All are somebody’s paid servant and most do what their masters require of them though it be wrong—protecting their comforts at the expense of their grandchildren’s.

Selfishness is just one element of a syndrome which is our dinosaur heritage. We need to identify it. And who can do it other than scientists?

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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