this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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[–] sxan@midwest.social 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

How much power do I have?

If I could divert the asteroid that resulted in the K-T event, that'd drastically change history. It may not have stopped dinosaurs from eventually going extinct, but it'd have given them 33 million more years more to evolve, and would certainly have affected mammalian evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe, raptors would have gotten smart enough.

Ooh! Take back a lot of ravens. They're almost smart enough already. Heck, I wonder if taking ravens back even earlier would be enough for them to evolve into something dominant. Problem is, they're not particularly social, and I think that's been our greatest advantage.

Or: introduce modern octopus to ancient oceans.

Stopping the K-T event is my favorite, though. It would absolutely have changed how life on Earth has evolved since.

30M years between extinction events is about all you get, though.

[–] Burninator05@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Those are great ideas but miss thr mark on the second part. They all require a lot of work and we're lazy.

[–] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)
[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Corvids, in general, but ravens seem to be the most intelligent of the bunch.

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Crows are really communal though so might be a better bet for human like intelligence in the long run. Magpies too, not because they'd help but because they are both intelligent and total jerks so even the eventual crow people wouldn't get to be happy thus maximizing the chaos.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 12 hours ago

That's a really good point; social animals will get farther.

Crows, then.