Of Ants and Dinosaurs
by Liu Ci Xin · first published 2020
5mentions
3recommended by
4HN commenters
2020–2024first – last mentioned
60% recommend20% neutral20% critical
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…There is so much cosmic space that exists between any two historical artifacts. There's definitely room for a multitude of completely unpreserved civilizations. On-the-nose reading that comes to mind, Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin... very anomalous book / quick entertaining read...
on “Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humans on Earth?” ↗Cixin Liu's latest book "Of Ants and Dinosaurs" explores this topic in a very entertaining way: https://headofzeus.com/books/9781789546095
on “Silurian Hypothesis: Were There Civilizations on Earth Before Humans? (2018)” ↗…crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations. In that light, some similar stories I've found are... - Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) - Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author) - The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math) - Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff) The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff…
on “Permutation City (1994)” ↗> Weaving the Web by Tim BL > Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin > The Unix O'Reilly Guide All quick entertaining reads. All written by software engineers. All utterly useless for managing state in your React apps.
on “Ask HN: Reading material on how to be a better software engineer?” ↗And in Cixin Liu’s short story "Devourer" they even come back to earth for a last visit... Of course, this has a back-story/history, see "Of Ants and Dinosaurs".
on “The Silurian Hypothesis” ↗