In Defense of Reptilian Theory

May 7, 2023

Of all the billions of species that have existed on Earth, why are human beings the first to have developed a civilization and technology?

Here's a rough timeline of the history of Earth:

• 4.5 billion years ago - Formation of Earth
• 4 billion years ago - First Life
• 1.5 billion years ago - First Multicellular life
• 420 million years ago - First land animals
• 245 million years ago - Dinosaurs emerge
• 66 million years ago - Dinosaurs extinct
• 300 thousand years ago - Modern humans emerge

Let's assume you need land dwelling animals to build technology and civilization, so we can rule out the first ~4B years. Then it takes a while for life to evolve plants and bugs and other infrastructure to support larger creatures, until we get to dinosaurs 245M years ago up to their tragic extinction 66M years ago.

But dinosaurs were still around for 165M years. In contrast, homo sapiens are 300k years old, and all of recorded civilization is only 5k years old. If we give a conservative estimate that it takes 500k years for a species to become advanced or technological, that's still enough time for 330 civilizations to have developed in those 165M years. Why is it then, that in all that time, a bipedal, tool-using, intelligent species never evolved?

This seems to present us with a dilemma: if technology and civilization-building species evolve naturally, it seems likely that we are not the first on this planet and at least plausible that there may have been reptilians. If we are the first, then something truly unique must have happened in the last 500k years that allowed for an unprecedented leap forward in evolution.