Great Uncle Dino

I'm glad someone is thinking beyond Drake's Equation and considering more aspects of the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. But there is something they don't seem to be considering (I wonder if they are). It may seem juvenile to bring up dinosaurs, but there, I just did. In considering the evolution of an intelligent life form, and the development of civilization, do they consider the role that dinosaurs played? When narrowing down the likelihood of a life form going through a similar process as Earth humans did, you have to recognize that the odds of the catastrophic event that killed the dinosaurs happening on these other planets at around the same time in the evolution of said sauropods would be very slim. So, on a planet similar enough to Earth, where similar events have taken place in the evolution of life, doesn't that suggest that something akin to dinosaurs would develop first? With the unlikely event of a catastrophic end mirroring that on Earth taken out of the equation, would dinosaurs still be ruling? Then we have to ask, if dinosaurs didn't happen first on these other planets, would mammals have developed the same way they did as minor players in the dinosaur world, which then got their shot at notoriety once the bird-lizards were killed off? Mammals developed under the rule of the prehistoric domination of the dinos. Would they have gotten to a point that they could survive (post-apocalyptic catastrophe) if they didn't have that head-start while someone else ruled the roost? If you consider dinosaurs as a necessary element of the development of civilization, you're cutting the odds way down.

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