Life As We Don't Know It (Part 5)

R.E.M. once sang about the end of the world as we know it; and as it turns out, they felt fine. I did, too, at least until just recently. As of late I've been hearing a lot about the possibility that our civilization is not the first to flourish on Earth. In fact, I've even heard the idea tossed around that humans may not have been the first animal on this little ball of dirt and water to develop advanced intelligence. Could that really be true?

Of course we've all heard the stories about the lost civilization of Atlantis; and there's always been speculation that the pyramids could not have been built by the Egyptians of the time. These are very interesting, and I will touch on them a bit. But today I'd like to talk primarily about something proposed in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin"—an idea that is far more "out there" than either the story of Atlantis or alien-constructed pyramids. The proposition in question is that dinosaurs evolved spacefaring technology and some of them escaped Earth at the time of the K/T Boundary Event—the comet impact that killed off the terrible lizards 65 million years ago.(1) It's an outlandish idea known to the reptilian scientists in the episode as the Distant Origin Theory, and it goes something like this...

THE BIG GOODBYE
The rumbling was like none ever felt before. Even the eruption of the greatest volcanoes had never caused such commotion. Gazek scanned the horizon, and then his eyes were drawn to the sky. His cold blood grew even colder when he saw the sun begin to dim. The scientists had warned that one day this would happen, but few believed them.

Until the comet was detected three months earlier, that is. Gazek's race had first ventured off the planet a little more than 200 years ago, and as they