Moontanman

Industry as we know it? Underwater octopus could develop technology based in biology instead of iron steel or fire.

Since we are deep into speculation land I like to speculate, let's imply the octopus as the creature and it's civilization as biological instead of technological, ie the octopus society commands biology much the same way we use technology. Since they live in shallow coastal seas have no hard body parts fossils are non existent so they do not leave behind anything we would recognise as technology. The octopus society could have been world wide and their impact would be as invisible in the fossil record as they are. Possibly the modern octopus is to them as chimps are to us. Any add ons to this sculpture?

I used to work with a guy who could be a stand in for a neanderthal, he had the pronounced eye ridges, sloping forehead, goofy grin, even an apparent occipital bun... I reminded him of it nearly every day... He is dead now, I miss him and his big grin, great guy.. Hmmm... it seems there is some consensus that Neanderthals were mostly carnivores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_behavior Oh come on, I know you guys wanted to hear it!

And then you surf...

You do make a point, several other species of humans did at one time exist, why were we successful and they are gone? Evolution does indeed favor organisms that are just good enough, all you have to do is be able to reproduce, no one on one battles with cave lions except in Conan novels... WOW! I'd like to see the flow chart on that conclusion... This is such bullshit, I live where i can drive to a large game lands area and see adult eastern diamondback rattlesnakes. I have caught enormous rattle snakes, well over six feet long, huge fangs, huge venom glands, and yet living after being bitten even without anti venom is more likely than not. Corals snakes are tiny in comparison and I am far more cautious with them than I am with the rattle snakes. Rattlesnakes can BTW control the amount of venom they inject and dry bites are not uncommon... A big venomous snake is always far more dangerous than it's babies, it's just an old wives tale... In the interest of full disclosure we do have a pygmy rattlesnake here that looks like a baby snake but packs a wallop in it's bite. It should also be said that you don't need to be superman to reproduce, a human smart enough to avoid all contact with those cave lions is more likely to survive than the guy who looks for trouble to impress the ladies... too kool four skool...

I'm an alien drone from Titan, damn it's hot here, don't you guys ever crank up the AC?

Nothing funnier than suspending the laws of physics...

Some birds have been found to cooperate in multi species group that guards against invasion from other birds new to the area of both species! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521143827.htm

Even some animals have a sense of fairness ingrained in them but your post pretty much sums it up, Do not think that if you had been born a long time ago you would have thought slavery was unethical, you might have not liked it, especially if you were a slave, but even slaves could be convinced of the ethics of holding slaves, ethics is fluid to your own experiences...

And what ,if anything, does that have to do with the price of eggs in china? Traces of carbon in rocks no matter how old is not evidence for a civilization... Quite a bit more evidence would be required to detect a civilization. Our own existence is a a couple million years tops and still very rare, another 500 million years and what traces would be found? Those swords and muskets would last far less than a few tens of thousands of years. In fact stone tools would outlast them by an order of magnitude at least... Think for instance of a stone blade found in a coal seam, who would find it? A miner or a person loading their furnace? It's already happened! A brass object, a bell I think, has been found entombed in coal.. what does this mean? I can think of a couple ways that bell ended up in coal. do you think a researcher who was given this bell would even consider it was made by a civilization in the carboniferous? This is a real problem, a civilization from that far back would have left precious few surviving artifacts and most researchers would assume they are not what they appear to be...

Can you tell me where your ethics came from?

Not my morning evidently, coffee is required for thinking, Unless you know of an objective ethics someplace we can only have ethics when we agree on what it is..

Not finding them would be the point and what we consider is a moot point. Humans subducted into the mantle would be difficult to find no matter how they were entered and they might consider burying their dead to be a last ditch effort in the total absence of wood to build a fire. Fossils are extremely rare objects, we have only a few bones of many species and burying something in the ground doesn't insure it will be a fossil. Think of a T-Rex, super predator! Vicious killer of even bigger herbivores, how many complete fossil skeletons would you think have been found? Thousands? Hundreds? Try dozens, maybe 4 dozen and most are just bit and pieces that if we hadn't found more complete skeletons we wouldn't even know what they were part of. The further back you go the worse the data gets. One super predator from the burgess shale was originally thought to be three different animals for many years. The fossil record is an amazing thing but horribly incomplete... We discovered a tiny shard of zircon on a very old very tiny rock, I'd take your bet. Actually yes, plate tectonics is a magic eraser, nearly all of Earth's surface has been "magically erased" at some point much of it many times.

I didn't say the ethics of the majority are ethical to everyone, nor did I claim to have any ethical view, but if you were raised in a society that told you your whole life it was ethical to kill everyone's first born then you would believe that to be ethical, you might personally object, it's unlikely if you were raised to believe it, but it would be considered ethical by your society. Their are societies even today that consider somethings to be ethical that we would probably not consider ethical.

Maybe, like humans, they would assume there were omnivores, hooves to not a plant eater make...

Yes in fact that is true, we are a social species and there are no objective ethics. We have to agree on what is ethical before we can have ethics. No, it's what society decides ethics is. If society decides it's ok to steal from people too stupid to protect their valuables then it's ethical in that society. If a society decides to kill everyone that society deems unfit to live then it's ethical from their point of view. Things like ethics and morals are what the majority say they are. Often such ideas change as people's knowledge and the application of empathy to that knowledge changes...

"Citation" please brain size is only loosely related to intelligence, some fish have brains bigger than humans in brain/body size. Considering so few animals get fossilized, something like one in 10,000, this number gets smaller the further back you go there could could many things in the past. Ooparts, while not generally taken seriously, do sometimes defy explanation. Over geologic time burying our dead would be moot and the desire to bury them could just be a human quirk. Unless of course we are many millions of years in the past of these hypothetical beings, plate tectonics will wipe out the traces of our existence. The time factor is paramount in this No, such things rust quite quickly over geologic time scales and being subducted into the mantel would erase them completely... I have heard it asserted that bronze statues would last the longest if not subducted. Can you imagine a future civilization coming across a centaur statue and trying to make sense of it?

It has to be wonky in some way, no reason what so ever for a gun not to fire. A gun requires no oxygen to fire. If he is asserting that as proof of something then he is simply proving he is bullshiting his audence...

Yeah I had that idea too, funny how great minds think alike...

I live in one of those port cities, my wife worked for a shipping company, it's a major concern and so far no way to really get a handle on the problem has been worked out...

You got that right!

Given the materials and the metalworking equipment I do not think it would be that difficult, doing it would kill me no doubt but I think it could be done. Given how a plutonium core killed a scientist who just allowed a neutron reflector to momentarily come into contact with the "demon core" I can see how much more complex plutonium might be to work with...