r/Showerthoughts • u/Intelligent-Bottle22 • May 19 '26
Musing Dinosaurs had all of the necessary materials to go to the moon.
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u/Calcularius May 19 '26
There is a Star Trek Voyager episode where something like that happens.
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u/psycholepzy May 19 '26
Heresy against doctrine!
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u/Vergenbuurg May 19 '26
I can only imagine the low-level Starfleet clerk that has to sort through all of Voyager's logs...
"Gaseous anomalies, made contact with another humanoid race, catalogued the spread of a supernova, discovered the evolved offshoots of dinosaurs that originated on Earth, Harry Kim was denied another promo-- WHAT THE HELL?!"
"...ok, that's it, change of pace. Stations logs from Deep Space Nine... first up, Chancellor Gowron re-entered into THE KHITOMER ACCORDS?!"
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u/GoblinGreenThumb May 19 '26
Lower decks is without a doubt the best trek of the last decade. And everything you wrote would be perfect dialogue for the show
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u/Freshness518 May 19 '26
I would give up 3 of the live action series in a heart beat to get Lower Decks back.
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u/GayFesh May 19 '26
"huh, apparently sisko recorded and deleted a log right after the romulans declared war on the dominion. did he just accidentally press record?"
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u/Vergenbuurg May 19 '26
Speak to Steve in decryption. He's a whiz at recovering accidentally-deleted logs.
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u/RubberChickenFarm May 19 '26
Steve is about to have a transporter accident.
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u/malthar76 May 19 '26
Steve - change out of your yellows and put on a red uniform for this away mission.
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u/Nightmare601 May 19 '26
In the pale moonlight is one of best DS9 episodes.
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u/Silenceisgrey May 19 '26
I'd argue it's the greatest episode of star trek ever put to the screen. No fancy space ship fights, no pew pew laser, just an exploration of the depths one man was willing to go to protect his country and those he loves, and the deals he makes with the devil along the way.
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u/Arthurmol May 19 '26
So you do not know the difference between soft and hard deletes? All logs are soft delete (flagged as not accessible) but hard deletes requires admiral privileges (source: i made it up..., but it is based on how our systems are run, I asked Uber to delete my user account, but some other apps user their system for delivery, so from time to time I have to go and ask again, because I start to get back "you are inactive here are some coupons" )
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u/RetPala May 19 '26
"A Lieutenant impregnated THE WHAT"
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u/Vergenbuurg May 19 '26
My apologies, but whatever you're referencing escapes me at the moment. I'm sure it's probably something blindingly obvious, but I'm a bit dense sometimes.
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u/Shendare May 19 '26
Guessing it's a reference to the lizard babies that Paris and Janeway had on the devolution planet.
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u/GoblinGreenThumb May 19 '26
How tf do I not remember that
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u/CaptainNuge May 19 '26
Season 3, episode 23. Distant Origin.
If you don't remember it, it's fresh new Star Trek! Result!
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u/bikari May 19 '26
I don't remember a lot of Voyager, but I really remember the Tuvix episode. Such an interesting moral dilemma!
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u/CaptainNuge May 19 '26
This is a universe where there were... three instances of transporter cloning? I think?
Just Thomas-Riker Tuvix. You beam him, with two confinement beams etc etc, onto one transporter pad. You keep the other one in the buffer, so that version never rematerialises. You do the unmerging-Tuvix-murder procedure on THAT guy, and then you beam Neelix into space after rematerialising Tuvok.
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May 19 '26
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u/CaptainNuge May 19 '26
They had to fit on a spaceship, and that spaceship had to fit on a sound stage.
Nah but really, in canon, all lifeforms gravitate towards being human shaped because an ancient progenitor race thought that bilateral symmetry and upright walking was super rad. Also in canon, Earth has barely any dilithium on it (if any) so the evidence you're after might be the lack of the magical super-energy space crystals. The dinosaurs used them all to fly to the Delta Quadrant.
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u/JRyds May 19 '26
I bet these dinosaurs lived in the Cretaceous period in Antarctica, where it was temperate. When the icecaps melt we'll discover vast cities, monuments and technology from the dinosapiens.
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u/murrayhenson May 19 '26
Some Star Trek episodes require more suspension of belief than others. :)
Distant Origin is a fun episode because of the callbacks to earlier episodes, along with the bizarre idea that intelligent life evolved and left Earth tens of millions of years before humans. I love it, though, specifically because it is weird and, of course, because the Voth have such a hierarchical, rigid, dogmatic civilisation despite being very technologically advanced.
It’s also a great reminder that those in power will often abuse their power in order to retain their power.
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u/sambadaemon May 19 '26
Google tells me it takes between 10 and 60 million years for petroleum to form, so wouldn't there have already been deposits before dinosaurs went extinct? They were around for over 85 million years themselves.
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u/Crying_Reaper May 19 '26
I was kinda hoping to see something about the Voth in Discovery honestly. They could have been an awesome antagonist for a season or two. See the long term impacts of Voyager on the Voth centuries later as a break away faction tries to make a move to take Earth back. Maybe show they completely avoided the burn by using something other than dilithium to power their ships.
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u/praecipula May 19 '26
We have all the necessary materials to leave the solar system.
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u/JaydedXoX May 19 '26
Someone barely has the necessary materials to leave the shower.
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u/IronCreeper1 May 19 '26
I barely have the necessary will to leave bed in the morning
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u/pablo1107 May 19 '26
Hope your ok with whatever you're dealing with. It will get better.
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u/Greychomp May 19 '26
Unfortunately for most this is a common case of laziness that has no cure yet.
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u/king_noobie May 19 '26
Same.
Maybe if we combine our will, one of us could possibly get out of bed on time nomorrow
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u/R0nos May 19 '26
We did
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u/vpsj May 19 '26
We haven't(yet). It would take at least 30,000 years for the Voyager probes to get out of the Oort Cloud.
They haven't even reached there yet. That will take about 300 years to hit the inner Oort cloud edge
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u/archpawn May 19 '26
We have plenty of times, depending on how exactly you define the "solar system".
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u/vpsj May 19 '26
I'd say as long as it keeps encountering sizeable objects that are gravitationally bound to Sol and are orbiting it, it's still inside the Solar System
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May 19 '26
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May 19 '26
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u/Wermine May 19 '26
I'd guess it's because we keep redefining what solar system is.
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u/archpawn May 19 '26
It means there's no single standard definition of the "solar system", and also people like reporting that it left and they'll do it whenever it's arguably true.
The title text talks about this:
So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.
Some of those are made up as a joke, but others aren't. Explain xkcd has details. It "passed through" some more than once because we're not sure exactly where those boundaries are and there's multiple estimates.
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u/LaughingBeer May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
The vast majority of astrophysicist consider the "solar system" to mean within the heliosphere and according to them voyagers are in inter-stellar space. It's their field of expertise, so I'm not going to contradict them.
Edit: Just want to say I hope that didn't come across as dickish, because that's not how I meant it :)
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u/OTTER887 May 19 '26
I am doubtful of how much further space travel will go.
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u/JTribs17 May 19 '26
same. I don’t think that humanities lifespan will allow us to go too crazy with space exploration. I do think they will get Mars missions up and going within this century and possibly the next 15-20 years if all goes well, and I think we will be able to make it to Titan (Saturn’s moon) before humanity perishes but I think that’s as far as we go.
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u/redrockz98 May 19 '26
Not as humans, no. We can’t cyro freeze people and wake them back up.
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u/praecipula May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Voyagers launched in 1977 and have been beyond the heliopause for several years now. There are people who were alive in 1977 who are alive today. So, yes, we can send humans beyond the solar system within one human lifetime.
(as a side note, I tried to keep the top comment pithy, but I'm defining "the solar system" as the radiative solar system, that is, the distance that the Sun's radiation reaches, as defined by the "heliopause" - the boundary shock where the Sun's radiation gives way to the interstellar medium, because this is a clearer definition than the gravitational solar system.)
Can we get them back? Nope. But regardless, yes, we could have a human outside of our solar system if we really wanted to. ¯\(ツ)/¯ just an interesting thing to muse on.
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u/BaabyBlue_- May 19 '26
I'll take one for the team. Just pack enough snacks and download 60 years of tv shows
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u/PolarBailey_ May 19 '26
the difference is voyager doesn't need food, water, etc. all those things have mass and the amount needed for someone from 1977 to still be alive today solely on what they bring initially is something we haven't figured out yet.
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u/DeusExHircus May 19 '26
Theoretically we likely have all the material required to travel across the galaxy (Bussard ramjet, time dilation, etc.) but we don't have the practical knowledge or science yet. It's about as good as the dinosaurs were
The dinosaurs didn't know what the moon was or that it was a place they could go. For all we know there are places we can go that we haven't discovered yet
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u/cndynn96 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
It’s not proven but Dinosaurs might have made it to the moon, not alive but as fossils.
The Chicxulub asteroid impact violently ejected terrestrial rocks, some potentially containing ancient dinosaur fossils, into space.
Computer models have confirmed that Earth debris travels to the moon, suggesting remnants of the dinosaur era may be embedded in it’s surface
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u/xiiicrowns May 19 '26
Next time I'm up there I know what to look for
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u/HugCollector May 19 '26
Arby's?
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u/RookieGreen May 19 '26
God I hope not. There’s a Panera Bread there that really can’t handle any competition right now.
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u/Arctelis May 19 '26
The real problem with lunar restaurants is that they just don’t have any atmosphere.
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u/patchinthebox May 19 '26
Oh man that's gonna blow some people's minds when we discover trilobite fossils on the moon.
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u/Aussie18-1998 May 19 '26
That would cause a hell of a debate, wouldnt it? Is this fossil of a living thing actually native to the moon or is it a result of remarkable circumstance that led to it being ejected after the impact.
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u/Anana_hiss May 19 '26
Not really I think, it would be easily proven to come from Earth from the type of sediments constituting the fossil.
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u/adamantcondition May 19 '26
If there's anything I know about people, it's that they will always align with leading scientific theories based on the best research and evidence available
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u/949goingoff May 19 '26
How do we know they didn’t make it while alive, too?
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u/cndynn96 May 19 '26
They should take a chicken with them on upcoming Artemis missions
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u/DigitalMindShadow May 19 '26
"Oh yeah, I remember last time we made it up here." - that chicken, probably
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u/Jtroutm May 19 '26
Think about all the materials that we have but have yet to figure out how to use.
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u/Intelligent-Bottle22 May 19 '26
This is what I was getting at, mainly. It really is mind blowing!
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u/asds455123456789 May 19 '26
This is why we must branch out, advance technology at a rapid pace! think about all the positives/ inventions that could come just around the corner!
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u/ReverseMermaids May 19 '26
We are too busy going backward at the moment.
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u/Intelligent-Bottle22 May 20 '26
Yea, we are too busy debating whether or not vaccines cause autism!
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u/ReverseMermaids May 20 '26
As it turns out, given the number of brilliant, neurodivergent people working in the sciences, autism causes vaccines.
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u/AlpineGrok May 19 '26
Instead they decided to focus on social welfare and equity programs. Look where it got them, dumb communosaurs.
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u/Harbinger2001 May 19 '26
65 million years is so long ago that there could have been intelligent tool using dinosaurs at the hunter gatherer level and we’d never know because the chance of evidence being preserved is so low.
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u/MozeeToby May 19 '26
There are very few things even present humanity would leave behind that would be convincing 65 million years down the road. A handful of unusual chemicals on trace amounts, a few radioisotopes that shouldn't occur naturally. Occams razor would prob point us to natural explanations even then.
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u/jasoba May 19 '26
You would see really old mines. So hunter gatherers sure is possible but (I think) all the different sorts of mines would leave a geological "scar"
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u/Bramse-TFK May 19 '26
There are some things we could do with current technology, but it would take ages and worldwide cooperation, so effectively impossible.
A very strong candidate for lasting 100 million years that is technically achievable would be some sort of massive geological glyph on the moon. We could use massive numbers of 1-5MT nuclear detonations on the moon. Its a one way trip, not much more difficult than landing a rover except the payload is bigger. We have the infrastructure and technology available to make this happen, but there isn't any real reason to set all that money on fire. Plus nuking the moon sounds stupid.. because it is.
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u/BandedLutz May 20 '26
There are very few things even present humanity would leave behind that would be convincing 65 million years down the road. A handful of unusual chemicals on trace amounts, a few radioisotopes that shouldn't occur naturally. Occams razor would prob point us to natural explanations even then.
Paleontologist here. What are you even talking about?!
We humans have so thoroughly littered practically every depositional environment on earth with massives amounts of evidence of humanity (trash can even be found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench).
Certain metals, glass, plastics, etc. are all much more resistant than the organic remains of organisms and will/are making their way into the sedimentary record (and even for man-made objects that break down over time, they're more than capable of leaving an imprint).
If soft bodied organisms half a billion years ago can be preserved to this day, certainly some of the trillions of tons of trash human has created will be preserved as well.
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u/AnswersQuestioned May 19 '26
How many mass extinguishing mega asteroids were there? 4, more? There could’ve been all kinds of amazing civilisations over the last 200m years we wouldn’t have any clue about. We could be the most basic one lol
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u/anaIconda69 May 19 '26
They'd leave all sorts of stuff behind on the near side of the moon.
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u/AnswersQuestioned May 19 '26
Doesn’t that face get blasted by meteors too though? It’s certainly got enough craters
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u/anaIconda69 May 19 '26
Eh you're probably right. And I forgot about micrometeorites that would erode anything anyway
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u/Worf65 May 19 '26
Dinosaurs progressing to spaceflight, leaving the earth and journeying across the stars? Heresy! Doctrine says they always lived in the delta quadrant.
But this is definitely an interesting idea. Its entirely possible a previous intelligent life form evolved here and either left or went extinct and we could have missed it. Though a global civilization like our own likely would have been visible in the fossils all over the world. But a more regional isolated civilization probably could have slipped by.
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u/Trick421 May 19 '26
When I open my eyes to this theory, what I see appalls me. I see my race fleeing your wretched planet, a group of pathetic refugees, crawling and scratching their way across the galaxy, stumbling into this domain. I see a race with no birthright, no legacy. That is unacceptable!
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u/Chalupa_Dad May 19 '26
And they would have gotten there if it wasn't for Earl Sinclair...
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u/GirthyDave1 May 19 '26
Yeah, and gravity hadn’t even been discovered yet so all they had to do was hold their breath and jump.
Lazy dinosaurs.
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May 19 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Cold_Childhood_1060 May 19 '26
The stegosaurus was more ancient to the T-Rex than the T-Rex is to us. I'm willing to bet there were fossils around during the time of the T-Rex.
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u/ilikesports3 May 19 '26
Thanks for exploding my mind. Now I won’t be able to sleep for hours.
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u/Scaaaary_Ghost May 19 '26 edited May 21 '26
Dinosaurs existed from 245 million years ago to 66 million years ago. So the time since the (non-avian) dinosaurs went extinct is only about 1/4 the length of time that those dinosaurs existed.
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u/myinternets May 19 '26
It's a good thing the dinosaurs didn't have the Internet or we'd have 200 million years of prehistoric butthole pictures to sort through.
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u/ryegye24 May 19 '26
Sharks predate the rings of Saturn
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u/ilikesports3 May 19 '26
Yeah but did they have frickin laser beans attached to their frickin heads?
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u/Wermine May 19 '26
It's kinda same vibe as "Cleopatra was closer to iphone than the building of the pyramid of Giza".
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u/Intelligent-Bottle22 May 19 '26
Fossil fuels aren’t made from dinosaurs. They mostly come from ancient plants, algae, and microscopic marine organisms that existed long before dinosaurs.
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u/logosloki May 19 '26
half right. it is true that fossil fuels aren't made of dinosaur but 70% of all oil reserves are Mesozoic in origin, with 20% coming from the Cenozoic (the current era) and only 10% coming from the Paleozoic (from the Cambrian to the Permian). the Cretaceous is responsible for an estimated 40% of all oil produced ever and the Jurassic just beats out the Cenozoic, which is wild when the Jurassic is more than 10 million years shorter than the Cenozoic.
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u/joelfarris May 19 '26
Sshh! We're pretending that diesel fuel is made from dinosaur tails, so the Scots don't think that their peat moss farms are so important that they power the single malt industry and also the trucking industry!
Which may or may not be somewhat of the same thing, but under no circumstances can this be disclosed.
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u/cwx149 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
That's a great point actually anything plastic or petroleum based probably wouldn't have been around
Edit:well actually idk dinosaurs were around a long time there could have already been oil from earlier dinosaurs.
The t rex lived closer to you and me than it did to stegosaurus so it's not like there wasn't enough time for there to be some oil
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u/PritongKandule May 19 '26
From the Petroleum Wikipedia article:
Petroleum is a fossil fuel formed over millions of years from anaerobic decay of organic materials from buried prehistoric organisms, particularly plankton and algae.
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u/Cogswobble May 19 '26
“Fossil” fuels don’t come from dinosaurs or fossils at all. They come from compressed plant matter that existed before bacteria that eat decaying plant matter evolved.
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u/GamingWithBilly May 19 '26
If they just jumped at the same time as the asteroid hit, they would have met the launch requirements
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May 19 '26
Not necessary. That asteroid is definitely launching debris at escape velocity, though probably not with the "debris" alive.
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u/Ap0kal1ps3 May 20 '26
Dinosaurs had the world's first nuclear reactor. That's not even a bit. It's true.
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u/philip_laureano May 19 '26
Isn't it that they had all the necessary raw materials? Not the refined or processed materials required for spaceflight?
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u/Fafnir13 May 19 '26
They had millions of years to make those. Humans did it in a fraction of the time.
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u/philip_laureano May 19 '26
We did it because our ancestors no longer had to worry about being eaten by dinosaurs. And I'm no evolution expert but I'm pretty sure that the dinosaurs didn't have the selection pressure to become more intelligent and form their own civilisation. They never even reached a stone age, unlike our own ancestors
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u/OOOH_WHATS_THIS May 19 '26
I think there's an implication in this shower thought that there is a possibility that there could have been at least stone age adaptations of dinosaurs and the evidence has been lost to time because even the short end of "65 million years" is an almost unimaginable amount of time.
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u/Techno_Core May 19 '26
Well... yeah, they lived on Earth. Anything living on Earth has all the necessary materials. Hamsters have all the materials. The materials aren't the barrier to getting to the moon.
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u/eurekadabra May 19 '26
I just realized I made the same observation as you, but I picked ferrets. Interesting we both went for small, furry animals.
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u/Sohgin May 19 '26
You make an interesting point and so I have to ask the question, why is our government hiding the proof of space hamsters?
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u/UnfortunateButTrue May 19 '26
Just like everyone on earth today has all the material to go to the moon...
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u/TrippnThroughTime May 19 '26
That’s like saying lizards have all the necessary materials too. Just because the resources are there, doesn’t mean we know how to use them
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u/jensalik May 19 '26
That's nice and all but did you know amoebae had all the necessary materials to invent nuclear fusion? Thus suckers are still around and didn't manage to do it... Lazy bastards.
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u/unfinishedtoast3 May 19 '26
This is false.
They didn't have synthetic graphite composites, which don't occur naturally.
They also didn't have Kevlar or Nomex, which means they wouldn't have been able to survive the trip to space or back.
They also didn't have liquid methane, which doesn't occur on earth naturally. Extremely important for fuel, and has to be kept extremely cold.
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u/NoUniverseExists May 19 '26
Humans didn't have those either. As we did, dinossaurs could have managed to produce them.
And for the record: all things are natural.
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u/happy2harris May 19 '26
But they had all of the materials with which to make them. As in, all the elements in the periodic table. So a pretty empty statement, but it’s shower thoughts.
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u/TheDoomi May 19 '26
I liked this provocative thought once where radio hosts were talking bs about environmentalism. They argued why we ever stopped using garbage sites or why should we recycle? Like cmon, everything comes from the nature so just throw it in there! Everything IS nature!
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u/Intelligent-Bottle22 May 19 '26
The raw ingredients to make synthetic graphite composites existed. Space suits can be made by things besides Kevlar or Nomex. And Apollo didn't use liquid methane.
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u/GrouchyResearcher392 May 19 '26
They didn’t have opposable thumbs, so the making would be hard
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u/Munnin41 May 19 '26
How do you know? Maybe they did and everything got destroyed over 65 million years
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u/JaydedXoX May 19 '26
They probably didn’t have silicon transistors either. Def not the etching machine to make the 16 Bit 1 MHz ROM.
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u/SeaCounter9516 May 19 '26
But did they or did they not have the material needed to synthesize those things?
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u/Hollowsong May 19 '26
Not necessarily.
The higher oxygen levels, their size, lack of specific edible plants... you have a highly combustible environment with low nutritional efficiency and body mass that doesn't allow adequate stepping stones toward the scientific breakthroughs required to get there.
It's also hard to establish a lab for research when you have a T-Rex trying to eat you.
On my computer desk, I theoretically have enough material to build a small fusion reactor. I just don't have the means to rip protons out of their nucleus to change the atomic structure.
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u/LordTalesin May 19 '26
Well, I don't think they had Oil, because they became the oil. Oil is considered necessary for a lot of processes and materials to go to the moon like we did. Perhaps there is a different way to do it, but I don't know enough to say how they would do so.
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u/nifty-necromancer May 19 '26
Humans have all the necessary materials to glimpse ẗ̷͚͚́̐h̴̛̺̎e̴̩̓ ̷̲͗̈́B̶͓̓͌u̴̫̎l̸̻̄k̶͎̾
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u/SneeKeeFahk May 19 '26
Except the hadn't died and turned into oil over millions of years yet. Aside from the tiny fuel problem though, yea.
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u/FlightConscious9572 May 19 '26
Technically not true!
they were missing some material in the brain area
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u/ShowerSentinel May 19 '26
/u/Intelligent-Bottle22 has flaired this post as a musing.
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