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gwern's avatar

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'...

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BookDragon's avatar

In 2001 the concept of dinosaur parts on the moon was proposed by maj. Doug Shull - http://tech.groups.yahoo.co...

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