Sigh... what you're saying is that the possibility does not exist because of the lack of a fossil record, which is the exact opposite of what the poster in question is saying. Let me spell this out for you - we probably have less than a single percent of the biodiversity of any given period stored in the fossil record. Not only is there room for the lineages you are looking for, there is room for hundreds of thousands of them.

Also, on the issue of fantasies, I'm not saying that any such civilisation has existed. I am, however, saying that you most certainly can't rule out the possibility.

I respect Dawkins and all that guff, but he's really spawned a lot of self righteous authoritarians on the internet, a plague previously seen in the middle ages before it gave way to true scientific curiosity and open mindedness.

The argument in question is one of whether or not such a civilisation or civilisations could have existed, and we would know nothing about it. The answer is unarguably yes. Sznupi seems to feel that a lack of fossil record leading to homonid intelligence denies the possibility of such a happening, despite that the fossil record is in all likelihood less than one percent of all the biodiversity in any particular period in time.

I find when presented with a response which goes against the basic reality of a situation, the element of rationality has vacated the premises. Whether simply unable to comprehend what is being said, invested in the idea that our species' civilisation is the first, dogmatism, or simply into getting the last word, interest wanes.

Nope, I'm pointing out that the fossil record is unbelievably short of the big picture at any given point. Another poster explained it fairly well:

Consider dinosaur fossils. We've found maybe, what, 50 T-Rex fossils and not a single 100% complete skeleton. Admittedly, there are probably tons more of them to find out there, but that's not the point, even though scientists are looking, they haven't found them yet. How many T-Rex actually existed in the 15 million or so years they walked the earth. If there were never more than a million alive at one time, and they lived for 100 years, that's 150 billion of them, largely swept away by the planet over the years, and traces of civilization just don't fossilize as well as bones do.

Do you see what's being said? Its not only possible that entire lineages, many of them, are absent from the fossil record, its all but guaranteed.

Eh so where are they now? I think you may have misread the comment, the point was that a species might have even ended up a lot more advanced than us ten million years ago and get wiped out completely.

That was a reference to brain to body mass ratios.

I'm not ignoring it. Why are you ignoring that we have at best a tiny single digit percentage picture of all of the biodiversity at any given period? Although if you wanted to talk about graduated brain sizes, there might not have been much to distinguish mankind from many other kinds of animals even a million years ago. If mankind were to vanish today and some other species were to achieve our technological advancement in fifty million years, what evidence would remain for them to find?

So what's the cutoff point beyond which an extinction level event would leave some members of a species alive and able to rebuild? We certainly haven't reached it yet.

Nope, I mean really, what percentage of the total biodiversity of any given age does the fossil record represent? A few percent? If they had existed, we'd probably never know. What we do know is that the earth's history is peppered with mass extinctions of varying sizes and dubious origin, more than a few, almost as if some dominant life form rose and did pretty much what we've done.

Added to which nobody can really quantify what constitutes intelligence, or what might lead up to it, and how much of the brain is dedicated to problem solving, memory and the like as opposed to mechanical control.

Why not?

We have barely got the tiniest sliver of the biological diversity at any given point for the last hundreds of millions of years. There are enormous numbers of creatures we'll never know about. Couple that with burial practices, which usually don't lend themselves to fossilisation, and we would literally never know, unless they managed to land something on an asteroid or something, and even then its really unlikely that we'd find anything.

Geosynchronous orbit might be stable over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years, but millions or tens of millions? No. Even the moon is moving away from the earth. Anything further out would have long vanished into the shadows. As for fossil fuels, who says a civilisation needs to go through that stage at all? From wood burning steam to vegetable oil powered diesel is a natural step, even using ethanol, after that electric would be inevitable, assuming they wouldn't have just focused on that from the outset. Over geological time periods, even our mighty civilisation would leave basically nothing behind. There is absolutely no reason why a previous intelligent life form might not have existed and vanished at a high level of technological capability on earth.

Possibly you missed the point of his post...

Hear hear.

Neither I nor anyone I know has noticed anything like that.

Yup, Chrome is ass. Doesn't run half the scripts I need for work on various backends, and I get more complaints from customers about "broken websites" to do with that than anything else. It's turning rapidly into IE the second. Neither HD space nor processing power are a bottleneck these days, Chrome is a solution in search of a problem. Now if Google rolled out a real flash competitor I'd be sitting up and paying attention real quick.

Forget the rest, but we can do a straight swap for the women if you like.

As I said, "To paraphrase another poster". I know this is slashdot, but at least RTFP.

Wow, really? To paraphrase another poster:

If China's state run economy has proved one thing it's that the free-market unmanaged economies of the West will time and again fail to even comprehend the forces arrayed against them. Narrow minded "Market Based" thinking is exactly what got us into this single supplier problem and naively thinking it will get us out is well... naive.

Whatever you think the "free-market" will do to get us out of this mess, the Chinese economic mega-complex has already considered three moves in advance and is working to counter it. People don't seem to understand that China-Inc is essentially the world greatest ever hyper-corporation: millions of companies, thousands of major corporations, and hundreds of banks all working under one overall direction and policy. Just about every trick you'd expect a major-corporation to pull can and has been considered, strategised and implemented by the this acutely self aware market entity.

What's really going on here is that the Chinese Communist Party has developed(invented really) a state controlled, capitalism driven, centrally managed and wholly unified economy; and it's as powerful an apparatus as you'd expect. It's one of the biggest civil and economic developments in world history. And if you expect this electric dragon--a vast, powerful and above all self aware economy under the control of a central brain--to act like your traditionally lauded free market fungus-like economies--efficient, large or small, but hopelessly undirected and prone to bottom feeding-- you are mistaken from the very outset. The Communist Party does not wait for startups, demand, financiers, or any other "market forces" to act. They order entire economic sectors to be created, dismantled and transformed overnight. And it has made them one of the richest countries in the world.