San Onofre 5

Posted on June 20, 2003 in Photos Thinking

It’s been driven almost to the point of cliche. But how would we know the writing of a nonhuman civilization? Suppose the dinosaurs had evolved a species smart enough to incise meaning into tree bark or stone or some surface that doesn’t occur to us to use as paper? If they didn’t draw pictures, would it seem nothing more to us than wave lines in the sand like those pictured on the right? If an advanced species of dinosaur did invent writing and did mark up a surface that withstood the centuries of continental uplift, collapse, and drift, it would not surprise me to find out that some quarry workman had tossed it aside to make gravel or buried it in a slag heap. A god could tell me that.

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I’ve rechristened San Onofre as “Rainbow Beach”.

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