Brings up an interesting though experiment for another thread: if humans were wiped out during one of our early population bottlenecks, what animal would be the apex species on earth today?
When the Martians come along, we’ll make great pets.
Domestic cats. Maybe not today, but soon. They have the numbers, the intellectual potential, and the bad-ass attitude. They just need to grow a little larger. Actually, domestic cats are only semi-domesticated.
I guess there are different short term and long term questions here.
In the short term, without too much evolutionary change? But then what do you mean by “apex species”? The apex predator is never numerous. By number of organisms or by biomass you are usually going down the food chain unless you have a species as comprehensively dominant as humans.
In the longer term, what species could evolve to come to dominate the Earth like humans have done? Obviously species like chimps could fairly quickly evolve into something virtually identical to humans, but that’s not very interesting. Maybe raccoons? They are cooperative, seem to have opportunistic flexible intelligence, manual dexterity. Octopuses have the intelligence and dexterity, but they are not cooperative.
Didn’t we have a thread about this recently? Maybe it was another thread that drifted into this area, because I can’t find it easily.
I’m pretty sure it was thread drift. Possibly from one of the “Extinction-level event” or similar threads? Or the “how long would human engineering survive if we all vanished” threads.
Or wait, there was this one, I think that’s the one you’re recalling. No drift, as such, but the OP was a bit different in phrasing. And this one last year did drift there