A bit of a twist on the classic ‘if you had to be an animal which one would it be?’ question.
Anyway Gaia has finally had enough of humanities shenanigans and decides to turn every human into an animal, but being surprisingly benign she gives everyone a choice of which species they become. A couple of stipulations is that no primates are allowed and only a few people get to be a top predator. Also people retain their intelligence and so do their offspring*, could we retain some sort of semblance of a modern technological society going or would it all fall apart quite quickly, would we even agree to function together as a team if we were all so different?
And of course in this scenario which species would you choose and why? Assume slots for species like tigers are already taken. It’s not entirely surprising that I’d choose to be a fox, as much as I like Arctic’s I’d probably go for a Red Fox, reasonably wide diet, about the middle of the food chain, physically quick and adaptable, with keen senses and an almost global environmental range. Plus they look nice, lovely fur coat, whiskers, moveable ears and best of all a long bushy tail, what’s not to like.
*yes I know, scenario kind of falls apart if everyone is as smart as their new species!
There would immediately be a huge amount of tension, because without language nobody at SDMB would be able to nitpick your OP by pointing out that humans are animals.
Or when you say we retain our intelligence, do we have language?
Human culture is as much the result of our uniquely dextrous and available hands as it is of our brains.
Almost all the technology up until post-modern times relies on our hands to work. Now, a touch interface would be usable with a canine nose, but somebody’s gotta do the soldering etc.
Vehicles etc. are designed to be operated by beings of human proportions. The intelli-animal world would need to modify everything to fit a wide variety of animal shapes. But how to do it, without the human hands?
I knew I should have written non-human animal! Oh well lets just pretend that I did.
And we’re as smart as humans but physically we’re 100% our new species otherwise, so no language other than whatever vocalisations we’re capable of. Of course that raises the question that could an intelligent animal modify their ‘speech’ to be more understandable and have a wider range?
Thanks Toxylon, this is the sort of thing I was considering!
An octopus has great dexterity, but being confined to the water is obviously a huge constraint. If primates are banned, I’m wondering whether octopuses with human-level intelligence could convert at least some human technology to run semi-submerged. It wouldn’t need to be entirely submerged, just the parts where the octopus technicians are operating would need to be flooded.
We’d need to get together and agree on the correct plural for ourselves before anything else.
For what it’s worth, even if we couldn’t get any human tech going and we were just reverting to living the way animals do now, octopus would be a prime choice for me, along with Spotted Hyena. Highly intelligent, resourceful, adaptable, they live interesting lives.
So I guess the big question is what is the most dexterous non-primate. Maybe elephant? Or octopus? Existing technology isn’t very well suited for either one though.
Some birds have just as great an oral range as humans, if not greater. They can certainly mimic human speech perfectly. So if we are all African Gray Parrots with human cognition under OP’s rules we don’t lose language at all?
And corvids have pretty good dexterity with tools held in their beaks. I don’t think that’s because their beaks are physically any more suited to tool use than parrots, it’s just because they are smart. So I think an African Gray Parrot with human cognition would be as dextrous as a corvid. I think we could do quite a bit with that. Not very strong though.
But we’re not all the same species, right? So African Gray Parrots with language in charge, giving out instructions and getting everyone else organized? The octopuses can at least handle offshore drilling platforms to keep the oil flowing and modified shipping for transportation. Elephants could handle timber (they could handle saws with their trunks) and probably quite a bit of agriculture, even without farm machinery.
Elephants like water, I can imagine some kind of setup where elephants work with octopuses, with the elephants handling moving big things around and the octopuses do the smaller manipulations. They might not be able to assemble an iPhone, but more basic construction and tech?
You seem to imply that “society” equals drilling for oil, running machines and having iPads. I doubt that animals societies would have any need for any of that. I also doubt that animals would find it useful to coöperate with each other: why would a cow help a cat help a racoon help a pig help a bird? Even if they found it useful (but what for?) they would not manage without a common language. And money: what is the current conversion rate between canine dollar and feline pound?
Margaret Thatcher would be right at last: there would not be such a thing as society.
If I had to choose which animal to become in a world without humans I guess a whale would be a good choice.
Those are all great choices and interesting if they could agree to help each other out like that. Of course we’d better hope there are enough people who choose those species, personally I wouldn’t be interested in any of them! Flight would be pretty neat to fair and I can see some sort of postal or messenger service being set up by post-human avians.
Well I did specify technological society to be fair, something that depicted by the Na’vi’s in the Avatar movies for example doesn’t personally appeal to me at all though others seem to really like it. Perhaps ‘society’ would fracture into smaller communities of the same or similar species would would compete and co-operate against others?
And whale is a good choice, and in this new world you would be left alone at least.
I thought about this after I posted it, surely there would be no issue with a post-human fox having babies with another post-human fox for example? It would probably seem perfectly natural in that situation. Of course they’d probably be viable with natural foxes and then you have the whole ethical considerations mentioned above, is it still bestiality if you’re both the same species? Then again there’s a good argument that if you’re intelligent but your partner isn’t then the consent argument comes up.
Hhhhhmmmm interesting but awkward subject. And no before anyone asks I’m not attracted to animals and bestiality is icky-bad and no good.
Even assuming that we get over that (we probably would, if there were no alternatives), it’d make it a lot harder, just by the numbers. Right now, I have over three billion potential partners to choose from, or half a million if I restrict myself to a small geographic area. With those numbers, I can be very picky indeed, and still find a partner who meets my standards. But how many of those are going to choose the same species as me? Hopefully those already in relationships would get the opportunity to confer with each other before choosing, so they could choose the same species, but what of the next generation? Some unlucky souls might find themselves the only member of their species within travel range. This is a topic that never seems to be explored, in furry fiction.
Another issue: Right now, there are about a half a million elephants in the world. Let’s say one person in a hundred chooses “elephant” (probably an underestimate): That’d be an increase in the world’s elephant population by two orders of magnitude. Now, the world’s carrying capacity for elephants is almost certainly greater than the current value, but is it two orders of magnitude greater? Elephants need to eat a LOT, and all that food has to come from somewhere. In fact, this is an issue for lots of animals: Any herbivore larger than a human will need to eat more than a human, and the obligate carnivores like cats might need a larger total food base even if they’re smaller than humans. We have a hard enough time feeding eight billion humans; how are we going to feed eight billion horses and giraffes and lynxes and so on?
Boy, we have racism problems now with really minor physical variations. Imagine if we were all different species!
But going with the happy, all working together scenario, i want to be some kind of flying animal. Maybe a European bat that’s immune to white nose fungus, or a parrot or corvid. I’d probably go with a raven. They are social, can fly long distances, have keen senses, and are dextrous enough that i wouldn’t go nuts missing what i used to be able to do with my hands.
Given human cognition’s well-known long-standing attitude to other homo sapiens with different skin color, eye shape, etc., I predict the experiment ends in about 2 weeks with the various post-human species slaughtering each other mostly for fun and partly for access the spoils of homo sapiens’ pre-existing civilization.
We’ve had previous conversations about things like “What if Neanderthals had survived as a similar-but-different species of intelligent human?” The consensus in general was that the premise is impossible. Two intelligent species cannot exist on one planet if one of them is us. Either we slaughter and/or absorb them genetically or they do the same to us. Which is what really happened 40K-300K years ago. We decisively won and they are now a small part of each of us.
A different version of the OP’s question that might also be interesting is the idea of intelligence up to human reasoning and self-awareness levels but developing in very different species in various niches, and more or less simultaneously. And not necessarily with human cussedness. IOW, same idea as the OP, but don’t import human behaviors. And / or don’t make the scenario flow from post- 21st Century humanity; rather instead the scenario flows from a world that never had humans.
So now we’ve got equally smart and social e.g., birds, octopuses, smallish canine predators, and elephants. As each species develops cooperative societies layered on their individual intelligence and individual skill accumulation, and as they grow in number so their niches begin to intersect / collide, what next?
Which suddenly reminds me of all the logic puzzles abut ferrying a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage across a river. But the boat is Earth and there is no farmer. There will be blood.
Raccoon’s another candidate. They’re notorious for being able to get open things humans wanted shut to keep them out.
If we get the lifespan of the creature chosen, elephant’s the best of those choices; but they’re too large to fit into any of our old infrastructure. Octopus and raccoon are both really short lived, by human standards. – am I the first one to think of this issue?
– oh, the parrots! They’re long lived, they’ve got some dexterity in feet and beaks, and they can talk. And we’d be able to fly.
Even if you’re right that species wouldn’t cooperate (and there’s a whole lot of interspecies cooperation that goes on at current levels of intelligence), that wouldn’t mean no society; it would mean a lot of different societies.
If we had the sensoriums of the species we chose, probably a lot of us would want to mate with others of our species. Most might only do so with the enhanced-intelligence versions, of course.
My guess is that we’d have about the same level of problems. Bigots will pick whatever characteristic they can to bigot about, whatever its size.
I thought about that. But i wanted to fly, and most flying creatures have reasonable long lives. I rejected most species of American bat because they are currently victim to a horrible plague.
I picked raven over parrot because ravens fly so much better. And i think they are more dextrous, although I’m not certain. But speech is huge, and maybe I’d be happier as an African gray parrot.
An essential element of human progress - one that effectively separates us from all other species* - is the control of fire. This is going to be a serious problem for a marine species’ technological advancement, no matter how intelligent.
*This is apparently not quite strictly true: It appears that certain birds have occasionally been seen carrying burning sticks (from naturally caused fires) and dropping them in brush, to create fires that stir up insects.
