Have you ever wondered if a different animal would evolve to have human-level intelligence, long after humans have passed away from this planet? We don't know about you, but we always like to imagine raccoons in that role. Maybe 70 million years from now, a family of masked fuzzballs will be gathering in front of Mt. Rushmore, building a fire with their opposable thumbs and wondering about what creatures carved that mountain. But wait, would Mt. Rushmore even survive that long? And what if we're the raccoons? In other words, if a technologically advanced species dominated the planet around the time of the dinosaurs, would we even have any record of their existence? And if not, then how do we know that didn't happen?
