Dinos on the Moon
At the SETI conference last week I was surprised to hear NASA’s Chris McKay suggest we look for dinosaur relics on the moon. Dinos went suddenly extinct about 65M years ago, and the dino fossil record seems spotty enough that we could have missed a lineage that went from possum to human sized brains in the ~10M year period it took mammals. We could also have missed relics of a stone-tool phase that lasted only .2M years. But a dino lander left on the moon should stay visible a very long time.
Humans have apparently already dug up a substantial fraction of the richest near-surface Earth metal deposits. So a dino civilization that went much beyond our metal usage would have left a signature in reduced rich metal deposits. And since the metal doesn’t actually disappear, they would also have left "strange" metal-junkyard deposits. If modest efforts by geologists could exclude this possibility, that seems well worth the effort.
It would be very big and bad news to hear that metal-using dinos suddenly went extinct just when the other dinos did, and immediately after becoming big metal users. If so, either dinos destroyed themselves with far more power than we humans can now muster, or powerful aliens exterminated them.
From McKay’s 1996 paper "Time for intelligence on other planets":
It is now considered probable that the dinosaurs were not the lumbering clods of urban myth but that they were biochemically and behaviorally as sophisticated as present mammals. Evidence continues to point to parentling and social behavior that is on a par wit small mammals and birds. … [Considero] the small carnivorous dinosaur Stenonychosaurus, which stood about 120cm, weighed about 40 kg, and had [a brain size ratio] about equal to that of a possum or an octopus, and lived over 12 million years before the end of the dinosaurs. …
One might speculate that perhaps Stenonychosaurus or her progeny did build radio telescopes, but their civilization was destroyed by some internal or external catastrophe. Perhaps the lifetime of their civilization was so short compared with the resolution of the geological record (typically millions of years) that it is simply lost without a trace in the depths of time. It is difficult to say what evidence would survive of human civilization – if it was terminated now – after 65 million years of tectonic activity, erosion, and sea level change. It is interesting to note that there is one place where the record of human technology will be preserved for times much longer than 100 million years. … The Apollo landing sites on the Moon would bear mute testimony to technological humans.
I don't think mineral geology is as arbitrary and easily fooled as you think. For example, if dinos were responsible for current deposits, wouldn't they all be of vastly higher purity? And where are the aluminum deposits, why do we have to refine it from bauxite? Consider current dumps - aren't they bizarrely anomalously high purity sources of gold, copper, iron, alloys like steel, all mingled together in a fashion impossible to explain by existing mineralogy? For that matter, think about the locations of hypothetical dino civilization remains - just like us, they needed water, and just like us, water-based transportation would be the cheapest, so we'd see huge correlations of anomalous mineral deposits with past rivers/lakes/oceans. Which we don't.
Finally, here's a killer argument: where is the nuclear isotope signature? We have a good idea of what the natural world should look like in terms of radioactive elements and isotope ratios, based on first-principles from stars, which should be unaffected by any dino activity. Humanity has dumped all sorts of impossible elements and isotopes into the atmosphere and earth from its nuclear tests, power plants, medical nuclear tech, experiments, etc, which should be visible indefinitely (a bit like mass extinctions in the fossil record, hm...).
This objection makes about as much sense as the resolution to the Fermi Paradox that 'maybe all the aliens are all around us and the stars are just what their mega-engineering projects *look like to us*!' Except the stars are a massive waste of energy which serve no purpose, and the observed universe is precisely predicted by astrophysics models which include no equations for 'and then intelligent aliens colonized the universe and decided to rearrange the stars in exactly this manner'...
In 2001 the concept of dinosaur parts on the moon was proposed by maj. Doug Shull - http://tech.groups.yahoo.co...