Dreadnoughtus Schrani and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

I first heard about Dreadnoughtus Schrani, the dinosaur that has broken the scale of relative dinosaur sizes, the dinosaur that makes Brontosaurus look like a Babysaurus, the dinosaur that is about the same size as a Boeing 747 and as heavy as a whole  pack of elephants, a few days ago so I was worried that maybe I’m a bit late to the party, blogging after all the good blogging’s been done, but then I read the article and realized that this thing actually got dug up in 2005 and it’s just hitting the media now, so I don’t feel so bad.

Dreadnoughtus

They just keep finding new stuff.  When I was a kid, everybody know the names of seven or eight species of dinosaurs and, as far as we knew, that’s all there were.  My kids watch a show now called T-Rex Express and there’s an ABC song with dinosaurs for every letter of the alphabet, and there are plenty to spare.

Of course, the dinosaurs all were wiped out 65 million years ago, at least 63 million years before any  animals vaguely resembling human beings came into existence, by a huge meteor.  Without that meteor, mammals would not have come to dominate the earth, and human beings would never have evolved.

Which brings me to my theory du jour.  Of all the possible survival mechanisms which species have developed to get along in this savage world of predator and prey – the swiftness and stealth of the big cats, the ability to blend in of the chameleon, the toxins of the snakes, the vicious smell of the skunks, the social organization of bees and wolves, the quick birth rate of rabbits or sheep, or, in fact, the intelligence of humans, perhaps the one to naturally arise first is size.

Perhaps it is natural for nature to follow that as the easiest course, just as water always flows along the path of the least resistance.   Perhaps single celled creatures became double celled creatures, and quadricelled, and octocelled, and so on, long before any of the more exotic mutations happened.

Perhaps this is the way of evolution throughout the universe.  Perhaps we need to add one more element to Drake’s famous equation, and let (m)  equal those planets where a meteor has destroyed that planet’s giant creatures, and maybe (m) is really rare.  Perhaps, of all the billions of planets out there capable of supporting life, 90% are dominated by very large,  dumb creatures who are millions of years of evolution away from developing space travel, and always will be.

It would mean that intelligent extraterrestrial life is seriously rare, and that would explain why we haven’t made contact yet.  On the other hand, it means when human beings eventually arrive on other, inhabitable worlds, many millenia in the future, they will be inhabited by dinosaurs.  Dangerous environments, but meat and nutrient rich.