From the Toba Incident to the Future, and Beyond!

Hi there! Time for another waffle, this time on various things...
on the development of humanity, and of various caldera...

We'll be talking about humanity, from Olduvai to now...
and we'll wonder about that 'ancestors paradox' that Sagan and others have observed (well, we'll keep it to the back of the mind) and we'll talk about the origins of sentience, or at least the path to sentience.

At the time of writing, I know of no civilisation that has existed which is older than ~40 000 years, and that is primarily First Nations people. Next, there are the Indus Valley civilisations and the Gobekli Tepe civilisation, then various shorter lived civilisations...
If you know of any, even tentative, evidence for civilisations that have been around in between Olduvai Gorge till now,
or civilisations which are older than 70 000 years old, please share them with me = )








I suspect that humanity became set on the path to better intelligence as a result of the Toba Incident;
a time of great volcanic activity around the world (as evidenced by the many caldera), and a period of great extinction and bottlenecking.
I also suggest that it would therefore be logical to look for signs in similar lifeforms (not only mammals) that were present at that time and similiarly underwent such a 'close shave', for signs of sentience; there are only a few hundred examples... so we should in the next few thousand years or so, see the signs of emerging intelligence.

As a result of this Toba Incident period, it is theorised elsewhere that the human population dropped down to around 15 000 individuals; this is where mitochondrial eve comes from... or all our common ancestors.

Sagan wrote about studying for Oannes, perhaps as signs of extraterrestrial contacts of the past recorded within metanarratives (EPrime as a dialect and concept hadn't been invented yet; nor had existentialism, post-structuralism etc...).
I would contend that perhaps the Toba Incident is also such an event; what if all life had been extinguished, and extraterrestrial passers by happened to, as an act of kindness, fix that for us? (they simply hit the redo/undo button).

When you see things such as the mantidfly, it can be easy to give into such wishful thinking...
(the mantidfly, as weird as it looks, is a type of phenotype-mimic/biomimic, heh).

I also am a proponent of the explanation for Uluru as being either a volcanic plug, or the remnants of a self-launched projectile: the remains of a super-volcanic explosion or collision with earth from our history (and some geotechnical people I've met over the years have seriously suggested such hypothesis, in addition to the more conventional plate tectonics theories).
The projectile either didn't have enough force to reach escape velocity, or its orbit decayed and it collided with the earth.

There is not sufficient evidence in the form of rings to explain this, but perhaps that is due to erosion?
Perhaps also, if Uluru is a projectile from another part of the earths landsurface or crust, perhaps the mineralogical analysis would agree with particular sites? There are a few candidate sites with potential, from which Uluru could have formed.

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To another perspective,
We've been around since the Olduvai Period, and only recently begun to achieve sentience.
This, as a fraction of the time that the Earth has been around, is a small fraction;
could other lifeforms have evolved here in the past, and potentially have then left the planet?
(ST:Voy explores this with a dinosaur race that lives on the other side of the galaxy).

I think its a possibility; a remote one,
but given that plate tectonics does periodically clear the historic accretion record... not one I can entirely discount.

This has implications for the Drake Equation: if planets can produce more than one sentient species in a given timeframe, and those species can then go on to live outside the habitable zone/differentiate and adapt to different environments... many more communicative civilisations might be possible to exist in the universe (this only makes the Fermi Paradox harder to explain).

The Drake Equation also doesn't consider different modes of communication, just signal emitting ones (both radio and spectra-altering or mass-altering ones).
Nor does the Drake Equation look for alternate types of lifeforms (its a very Earth-centric approach with anthropocentric biases).
So, I'm confident that there must be a large number of other sentient lifeforms out there in the cosmos...

As I've said in the past, and many others must have already thought,
if we extend the principles of natural selection...
if you take life from this planet elsewhere in the universe, and it survives and adapts...
then adaptation will lead to differentiation, and eventually you'll get aliens that way!
How cool is that?

So,
I'm keen to hear your thoughts,
and I would conclude with the thoughts that, from a human security perspective...
if Dr. White's Warp Drive project concludes we can't send manned warp space flight,
or more likely,
that civilisation collapses and splinters within the next 100 years or so,
and if we can't send a Von Neumann probe...
perhaps we'll consider 'seeding' asteroids and comets with resilient genetically engineered lifeforms, or sending out such samples at least in all directions from the Earth,
and trying to do the same thing for other planets/suitable locations within our own solar system (sending stuff there to serve as 'life backups').

This way, even if the only yet known source of sentience and all known life
decides it wants to wipe itself out, it can go for it! if it wants to make that stupid and terribly wasteful decision! = )

What do you think?
Should this be a top scientific project? Project Resilience...