Humor, Space, Technology and Society

A Pressing Question

33 Comments

Anyone want to take a WAG at it?

33 thoughts on “A Pressing Question”

    1. Yes, it was, not sure how much. But the question is premised on the notion that they didn’t die out, and became sapient, so it would be happening now, not then.

      1. Come off it, if they didn’t die out they’d have 65 million years of progress behind them by now, they’d’ve conquered the galaxy.

        1. So the trip to the Moon would cost about $22, assuming 65,000,000 PB (before present) dollars.

      2. Can we allow for the possibility of convergent evolution, assume that dino Neil Armstrong is roughly human-sized, and then SWAG that it would cost about as much as it cost to put human Neil there?

    2. The moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year. Assuming that rate has been constant for 65 million years, then back then the moon was about 1540 miles closer than it is now

        1. And I’ve just discovered another advantage them dinosaurs had, the length of the day was about 23 hours back then, so another 73km/hr faster at the equator, hell they could nearly have gotten up to orbital speed with a fast car.

  4. Another consideration: if it’s a carnivorous dinosaur, has it evolved to where a food pack would suffice, or would it still need to hunt live prey?

  6. I would say that large dinosaur could not have human type brain.
    Or human brain requires a lot energy and to have comparable brain in enormous creature would require larger brain which needs more oxygen
    and fuel delivered and pumping it up 20+ feet is adding numerous complications.
    So I would say in one gee world it seems a safe assumption is the head isn’t over 10 feet high [and I don’t want to imagine the brain being near the butt]. So if assume the dinosaur weights less than one ton, than it doesn’t add much to the cost. And Dinosaurs could have fine with idea of sending one dinosaur rather than 1 in orbit and 2 on the lunar surface- so same costs or cheaper. Plus they might not have deemed they needed the lunar buggy.

  7. I think you hit the nail on the head, Rand, when you asked “what size?”

    The dino that may have had the best chance to develop into an intelligent species could have been one of the velocoraptors. Their mass? About 1/2 human. Thus, sending one to the moon and back would be easier than sending a human.

    On the other hand, if we’re talking T-rex, which had a mass of around 5 tons, the problem becomes a weighty one. If we use human spaceflight as a model, we’re going to need that much mass just for the space suit, plus a large spacecraft. (Even something as relatively confining as Mercury would, on a T-rex scale, be shuttle-sized). You’re going to need heavy lift, plus multiple launches. Heck, the lunar lander alone would be enormous; Apollo’s weighed 33,000 pounds, to get two 150 pound mend to the surface. A T-rex weighs about 66 times a human, so you’d need, roughly, a lunar lander 33 times the mass of Apollo’s – so 544 tons. The Sea Dragon rocket design might have been able to get that much to LEO, so you’d need at least 4 Sea Dragon launches (One for a service module, one for a crew capsule, one for the TLI stage, and the 4th for the lunar lander) to make the mission viable.

    It’d still be more practical than using SLS to launch manned or unmanned missions to anywhere. 🙂

    1. Assuming you can somehow chop it into small enough bits and assemble it in orbit for free, that works out to about $6.5 Billion in launch costs assuming the Falcon Heavy and an awful lot of handwaving. Call it $10B?

  9. Very limited data seems to indicate cancer was rare-to-nonexistent in most dinosaur species, so maybe they’d be less hung-up about nuclear power than we are. If Neil is a TRex or (heaven help us) a sauropod, an Orion could look quite reasonable.

    By Orion, of course, I mean ol’ Boom Boom from the 50s with nuclear pulse propulsion, not the SLS-related travesty.

  11. Suppose they did. Dinosaurs were around for something like 160 million years. Suppose in the last 2 or 3 million years before the meteor hit and wiped them out that one species became sentient. Would we have any evidence of that 65 million years later? Certainly not on Earth; I doubt the pyramids will still exist after the next ice age.

    And if we were to find some evidence, say a lander on the moon, how would we be able to tell that it was built on Earth?

    1. That’s an interesting question – just how long would the signs of a civilization such as ours, be obvious, evident or detectable after it disappeared? I suspect the deep foundations of large structures would be protected well enough to survive millions of years, and some smaller things we produce – from gold for instance, will survive essentially forever if they were protected through being buried.

      1. Our use of nuclear energy would leave detectable trace for about a billion years.
        Cut diamonds and other gems would last for quite a while.
        And our habit of burying stuff- whether it’s trash or more durable stuff
        like nickel alloys, copper wires and pipes, and etc would like foundations tend to last a while.
        Other things like domesticate plants and animals would leave a trace in their descendents. And their fossils leaves and petrified wood.

        It seems only way to disappear would be if the advanced civilization was not global, and so something like vast region could disappear in various way, but if it’s it like human civilization it seems one would various pieces of it somewhere on Earth.

        1. Where I live, I’m 2600 feet above sea level. 150 thousand years ago – an eye blink in geological time – this was the bottom of the Alberta Sea. Glaciation scraped all the topsoil off some areas (like Drumheller, where huge numbers of dinosaurs have been found).

          I’m not so sure there would be any trace of us at all 65 million years hence, other than landers on the moon and spent rocket stages orbiting the sun.

          1. –Where I live, I’m 2600 feet above sea level. 150 thousand years ago – an eye blink in geological time – this was the bottom of the Alberta Sea. Glaciation scraped all the topsoil off some areas (like Drumheller, where huge numbers of dinosaurs have been found).–

            A key point is some of the areas.
            150,000 years ago it was during a glacial period. After that there was the last interglacial period known as Eemian. Wiki:
            “the interglacial period which began about 130,000 years ago and ended about 115,000 years ago”
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian
            And our current interglacial, Holocene, wiki: “The Holocene /ˈhɒlɵsiːn/ is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene (at 11,700 calendar years BP) and continues to the present”.
            So for couple tens of thousands in periods of 100,000 years, Canada’s interior is vaguely habitable- or most of the time, not.
            And one has this lower elevation due to massive glaciers adding enormous weight to the continent. And during Eemian
            the continent would be springing back just as they are currently spring back. So 150K it would be compressed, then sprung back, then compressed, and now is springing back:
            “Quaternary glaciation, also known as the Pleistocene glaciation or the current ice age, refers to a series of glacial events separated by interglacial events during the Quaternary period from 2.58 Ma (million years ago) to present.[1] During this period, ice sheets expanded, notably from out of Antarctica and Greenland, and fluctuating ice sheets occurred elsewhere (for example, the Laurentide ice sheet). The major effects of the ice age are erosion and deposition of material over large parts of the continents, modification of river systems, creation of millions of lakes, changes in sea level, development of pluvial lakes far from the ice margins, isostatic adjustment of the crust”
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
            So, the “isostatic adjustment of the crust”.
            And going to have a lot of this is Canada and Northern Europe.
            But in more habitable regions on Earth one doesn’t have huge glacial masses chewing up large regions. Though you do have land masses colliding and ripping and apart when dealing time periods of tens of millions of years. But things get buried- coal deposit, or younger peat deposits and preserved. Or when a volcano buries a town. Or 1.5 million year old footprints of when early humanoids walked thru area with volcanic ash on the ground:
            http://www.livescience.com/5344-shoe-fits-1-5-million-year-human-footprints.html

        2. I think there was a show called something like “After Man” or “After Humans,” which showed how the earth could go back to nature. It was a little creepy, though, because one had the sense that its producers were looking forward to it.

  12. The After Humans series is on youtube.com. Should be easy to find them. My favorite item was the length of time for which the remnants of the USS Missouri would continue to exist. Tens of thousands of years.

    I have some doubts about the accuracy of some of their claims though. Fossilization happens to even skin and feathers and leaves under the right circumstances. The will be fossil pop-tops and coke bottles a billion years from now. There will probably be a record of our time here right up to when the sun swallows the planet… assuming we haven’t moved it to the Milky Way Galaxy Central Museum by then, which I suspect we will have done.

    But yes, they were a bit creepy. I kept thinking of the Unabomber when I watched them.

  13. Oh, and a note to the guy above who didn’t think birds count as dinosaurs. Sorry, wrong. Comparing that with a minor off shoot of mammals like the hominid apes, is comparing canoes with aircraft carriers. A truer comparison would be that after the next asteroid there are members of the Class Mammalia / Clade Mammaliaformes still extant. Likewise birds are Class Aves / Clade Theropoda.

    I just love watching those little dinosaurs sitting on the power lines and wonder it they are waiting for that second asteroid to take it all back from us upstart Mammalia.

    1. ” Likewise birds are Class Aves / Clade Theropoda”
      And what class and clade are dinosaurs?

      I don’t dispute that birds are descended from dinosaurs, just that they can be claimed to be dinosaurs, there are actually significant taxonomic differences between dinosaurs and birds.

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