That old psudoscience story about a vast vanished ancient civilization that lived on early earth and left little evidence that they existed.

But they were ants. They live 200 million years ago and left for space and we find out about them when they return in their space habitats to check on the old home planet and see how things are going.

@futurebird I once ran a short-lived TTRPG campaign set in the Cretaceous, where the players were members of a sapient dinosaur species that had learned to make tools of wood, stone and obsidian - and bits of other dinosaurs. I based them on Troodon (because 1. those had unusually large brains for dinosaurs, and 2. they were omnivorous). Unfortunately, the setting was hard for me (at the time at least) to come up with good stories for.

I figured that an undiscovered dinosaur culture could make sense if they never made it to metalworking, and never reached a very large population.

@datarama

How much harder would tools and technology be for us to recognize if they were made on an ant-size scale?

No one would look at a tiny flake of flint and think "yes something intelligent worked that into a point"

Also ants would use a lot of bio-tech. Their spaceships would be based on massive pupae.

@futurebird @datarama

Do you think these ants would be intelligent individually, or only as a collective?

@Phosphenes @datarama

I think it would be like what you find in ants today. The individuals are very intelligent as far as insects go, and make a wide range of complex choices, learn, and adapt their environments.

The colony intelligence is like an overlay. The individuals might seem simple, but together they would casually and incrementally do astounding things without totally understanding what they were doing.

So... "both."

@futurebird @Phosphenes Individual bees are *shockingly* intelligent. They need to be, really - they need to communicate as complex things to each other as ants do, but they can't leave chemical trails (obviously) so they need a more complex system of "talking" to each other and good memory.

Ants' "collective intelligence" can accomplish more things than bees', though, precisely because they can coordinate rapidly in ways that bees can't.

@datarama @Phosphenes

I tend to think that one of the reasons you see intelligence develop across living things is for group coordination.