Just you wait till I finish my graphic novel about them! It is only a matter of three or four years. Really.
I predict that we will be replaced by magpies. Corvids in general are very intelligent, but crows will let their assholiness get in their war, ravens just do not give a shit and jays are not quite smart enough. Magpies are just the right balance. And pretty to boot.
Mammals supplanted the dinosaurs, it would be a nice irony if the dinosaurs outlast us at the end.
Someone should ask one of those AI graphics programs to draw up a portrait of one.
In the unlikely event that we don’t render ourselves extinct long, long before then, we should be so incredibly evolved that it won’t matter.
Forget humans. Think about 250,000,000 years of computer evolution.
I don’t know what else, but this yes, the ants.
Might not be intelligent like a human is (maybe a collective intelligence?) but they are certainly among the more successful creatures at present.
I always thought Gödel, Escher, Bach’s Aunt Hillary (a collective sentient in the form of an ant hill) a fascinating idea for an intelligence.
The desert last time:
Coastal areas were livable, interior had an average temperature of 40 C.
This article reads like a high school student’s science project, that his mom helped him on.
Most of Scientific American in the internet era reads like that. The SA of my youth would be embarrassed to see the trash they sell now.
Naturally, there is a Wikipedia page on the subject. I like the name Pangaea Proxima better than Pangaea Ultima.
The Wiki page says that the Indian Ocean is expected to become encircled by land, and cut off from the world ocean.
South America is predicted to be wrapped around the southern tip of Africa and Antarctica, completely enclosing the Medi-Pangaean Sea, which will become a supertoxic inland sea that begins to poison the surrounding oceans, lands and atmosphere, leading to another great extinction event.
I am curious as to why they expect it to become “supertoxic”. The Great Salt Lake, the Dead Sea, and the Aral Sea don’t seem to be particularly hazardous.
Those lakes do not capture about a quarter sverdrup of drainage, as would the enclosed Indian Ocean. And the Southern Ocean would at that point be cut off, leading to hugely non-trivial climate effects that would probably “help” it get especially nasty.