Do you ever sit and idly wonder what, if any, creature would evolve to fill the role and niche humans fill today?
Ants? Termites? Octopus? Maybe it will be a joint venture between two different animals such as crows or ravens and wolves.
Would it have to be an animal? Could it be plant life instead, with a rich complex system of roots and fungi for communication? Granted that does leave the problem of tools and technology.
Who would you submit for consideration to be the successor to the human race for “intelligent life on Earth”?
Crows have been shown to be exceptionally intelligent.
robots
I don’t think even the closest analog to humans, chimpanzees, could ever attain anything close to what humans did. They would have to evolve a sophisticated oral or written language, but they don’t have the vocal or manual dexterity required.
I’ve worked closely with bottlenose dolphins, and they are pretty smart, but I can’t see them ever taking the place of humans.
I don’t think there is any creature currently on planet Earth that could evolve and take over for humans if we all suddenly disappeared, and I consider that a good thing.
When humans do become extinct it will be because they were weeded out. Why would another species emulate a failed model?
Anyway, cats already rule over humans.
Because they didn’t know?
Besides, the lessons of the past have no bearing on the present, in the minds of those living in the present. History does repeat itself because no one studies it with enough seriousness to matter.
There’s not necessarily any reason anything would. The Earth got along just fine for most of its history without any organism filling the “niche” of “intelligent advanced tool-maker”.
Yes, either this, or we will engineer ourselves into something post-human. Instead of waiting for random gene mutations that confer adaptive benefits, we’ll create our own genetic adaptations. Technology changes much more quickly than natural evolution.
This is one of the arguments that I think may explain why we haven’t yet encountered technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. Life may be very common in the universe, but intelligent, technologically capable life may be a very rare anomoly. Insects are extremely well adapted to their environment, but are not about to start building little cars and TVs and iPads anytime soon. (And let’s hope they don’t develop tech, since they far outnumber us!)
Did you mean those quotemarks around “niche” to be scare quotes? I want to expand upon that. Ever since we became tool makers, I daresay we stopped occupying any niche at all in our environment. Our population has just expanded and expanded without limit. It hasn’t yet settled into any kind of stable configuration an ecologist would define as a “niche.”
The scare-quotes are because ecological niches don’t even exist, until and unless there’s some organism to fill them. The niche of advanced tool-makers does exist now, because we’re here to fill it, but before we came along, that niche didn’t exist.
It’s bad enough having non-tech ants invade my kitchen as it is. I don’t want them using tiny bulldozers and trucks to drive off with my fried chicken and pies.
I believe the dominant post-humanity intelligence will be AI, when the robots realize we’re just an annoyance.
Or, house-cats. They got the numbers and intelligence. They’re already pretty dexterous with their front paws. Give them a few million years to evolve without human interference and they’ll be building rocket ships, looking for extra-terrestrial mice.
Or squirrels. They have extremely dexterous front paws, they’re amazing acrobatic jumpers, and are wicked smart. If you haven’t seen this video before, it’s kind of long at 20 minutes but well worth the watch. If you don’t have much time, the first couple minutes alone, where they defeat several so-called squirrel-proof bird feeders, is amazing. Watch our future squirrel overlords in action:
How would an aquatic species learn how to make and use fire?
I’m trying to think of an answer to that, but, I cannot.
The species would have to evolve to a non-aquatic form, or would have to develop some other form of technology not requiring the use of fire. I can imagine such technology exists, but not the form of it, or how it came to be developed, so, I dunno.
I’m in the ‘not sure if an intelligent species would necessarily occur or is a niche that would be filled’ camp but as for aquatic species, a lot of SF posits species starting from the biotechnology end (selective breeding at first and then more subtle genetic manipulation and organic tech and onward), then moving onto fire and such once the available technology hits a high enough level of sophistication to allow them to do things outside water.
It’s worth noting that humans (as well as apes, monkeys, and a whole lot of other animals) probably evolved out of a squirrel-like rodent.
I saw a “documentary” around 2000 that tried to imagine which paths evolution might take in the future.
I was impressed by a sequence on terrestrial octopuses gracefully swinging from branch to branch in a forest. That made sense in a way. Some octopuses can already crawl on land for short distances and they are reportedly quite intelligent.
The series was highly speculative of course, and cleary presented as such, but it was based on facts and sound scientific reasoning if I remember correctly.
So remember
when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life
somewhere up in space
'Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
Neither did our ancestors; who were the chimpanzee’s ancestors also.
I suspect it might be one or more of the birds, if indeed it’s anybody; but ‘they can’t evolve x because they don’t already have it’ doesn’t strike me as a convincing argument. If it were true, there wouldn’t be any evolution, and we wouldn’t be here discussing the subject.
Forever is a long time, but on Earth, from what we’ve seen, it’s doubtful that a non primate would fill the niche of humanity when humanity ceases to be. At least in the realm of organic intelligence that originates on this planet.