Dinosaur People

So there's these guys called uh... xeno-socio-something-ologists, I think.

And they try to figure out what alien civilizations would be like, y'know, like how they would evolve and stuff.

And in order to do that, they study the evolution of human civilization and technology and sociology and stuff like that, and they make a list of all the stuff that has to happen for intelligent life as we know it to show up.

And then they try to remove the things that were just dumb luck and shit like that, in order to try to get some kinda baseline for the evolution of technology and whatever.

Now, to a comic book guy and a scifi fan, we all know the main Bug in the Machine for Earth is that Dinosaurs got wiped out by a lucky meteor strike, and if it wasn't for that, monkeys wouldn't have taken over.

So there oughta be more than a few Dinosaur People out there.

But that ain't even on the list.

I guess that's "too far out there" heh.

Actually, none of the shit I think is important is on any of the lists, but that's okay, 'cause I've only been thinking about it for like thirty seconds, and half the shit I thought of was jokes about how having an opposeable thumb or a really long tongue and a flexible spine sorta frees an animal from the bonds of reproduction and societal orders like matriarchies and patriarchies and shit ahaha.

Y'know, dolphins may be smarter and more evolved than us, but they don't need opposeable thumbs to make tools and do farming and shit, 'cause they can swim sixty miles and hour and they can survive in arctic water and they already got superhuman senses and radar built-in and stuff.

All that junk comes standard with the Dolphin Package.

Which is probably what highly evolved aliens will be like.

Dolphins, y'know, with all sorts of awesome natural adaptions to their environment.

But that's boring, so we gotta think about creatures that are poorly adapted to their environment, who need to use their brains and opposeable thumbs to survive, 'cause that's all they got.

Those are the guys that build all the tools and cool spaceships and stuff.

The hairless apes are the ones that need to wear snowsuits.

Those are the guys we wanna meet, the Dinosaur People With No Teeth Who Run Really Slow So They Have To Plan Ahead.

I think you gotta start by thinking of all sorts of crippling weaknesses and poor adaptions to an envrionment, y'know, like not having fur, and start building an alien civilization from there.

'Cause otherwise a smart creature is just gonna swim around and enjoy itself like a dolphin and never build anything cool, y'know?

Its the "ugly people are the only ones that need to have a personality" theory of evolution heh.