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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

> Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?

A billion years is a very very long time. Humans and chimps diverged about 7-8 million years ago. Given no human competitors and a billion years there's no reason some other great apes or raccoons or something couldn't develop a space programme.

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Life has existed for billions of years before humans, why hasn’t it happened before us? Perhaps you’re right, and that’s equally interesting.

How do we know it hasn't? If some clever species of dinosaur ~100M years ago had a few thousand years of rapid progress like we've had -- before blowing themselves up... would we even be able to tell?

We'd have been able to see, for example, ice cores showing chemical changes in the atmosphere from industrialization. You can't carry out the same kind of massive activity that humans did without leaving some evidence. Even the Black Death was observable in ice cores on account of fewer humans burning wood.

Humanity has left many traces. An interesting example is a vast amount of chicken bones buried underground.

None of which are even close to even 100,000 years old, let alone a million or 100 million.

We have stone tools from a few million years ago. Modern things are much larger and numerous so would be much easier to find and last longer.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/2-6-...

We don’t know it hasn’t, but we have no evidence it has.

This is actually a somewhat active area of research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

The absence of detectable plutonium-244 (half-life of 81.3 million years) is one indication that we are ~probably the first civilization on Earth to discover nuclear fission.

One billion years ago there were no animals or plants and only barely multicellular organisms:

> And here’s another cool thing: a little over a billion years ago, life started experimenting with multicellularity. Imagine single cells deciding to team up and work together! A fossil discovered in Scotland, a tiny ball-shaped thing, is the oldest known example of a multicellular organism.

https://geoscience.blog/was-there-life-1-billion-years-ago/

I know OP was just kind of throwing out a big number but it's worth highlighting the orders of magnitude involved here. To put it in terms HN might grok more easily, if modern humans have existed for 300 kB we're talking about one gig.

It's funny looking at the theropod (e.g. T. Rex) family tree compared to ours. Bipedal animals whose forelimbs shrink and jaws grow. No way they're making tools.

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