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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 7766174" data-attributes="member: 10738">Of course not. I don't know such information any more than you could assert otherwise. We can safely say that we have yet to find any evidence of prior sentient beings on Earth....and yes, we are also aware that it is possible something sentient arose ten or a hundred million years ago and failed the Pass Go evolutionary test for any number of reasons. It does not disprove my point that the only certainty we have is that we're the ones who showed up and are asking this question right now, and we are self evidently real. We can't realistically hypothesize prior sentient beings with any accuracy on Earth any more than we could do so for life on other planets; the main difference is that Earth is finite in scope, we can study its geologic and biologic history, and we have two centuries of paleontology to help us out in this regard. Everything about everywhere else is conjecture.Occam's Razor is a very simple deductive tool in scientific reasoning. I don't think you and I are disagreeing on anything, other than that I think it's prudent to assume there have been no true sentient species prior to modern upright-walking, tool using hominids without some evidence, and you seem to be taking the stance that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Which is fine, but not really a useful contribution to the conversation from a scientific perspective.</blockquote>