But animals only exist in the world. How would the world be today? Would there be advanced civilization?
I’d think eventually soon, only the powerful animals will survive (survival of the fittest) because animals do not have compassion for other animals. Then there will only one kind, and eventually will die out. However, there will be on Earth longer than humans, as with humans they potential to blow the world.
elusive mind, I ponder this issue often, in several forms.
From that perspective, it’s easy to see how futile the whole effort at organizing and caring for all the various types of human beings will be for anyone. It’s not a pleasant exercise.
These exercises are good for keeping the brain in shape, but I guess when the rubber meets the road, it’s time to set those fantasies aside and deal with the ordeal of survival and hope somebody smarter than I am will figure it out and I can read about it on the web or catch it on the news on TV.
Fun question, no doubt!
Welcome to SDMB, from someone about as new to it as you are.
Welcome to the boards, EL
Well, it would be a lot less crowded on the freeway, for one thing 
I guess the question you are asking is whether some other species would have developed technology by now, if humans had not. I see no reason to assume that that the route to technology can only be occupied by one species, only that ours happened to be the first that we know of, and that other species, particularly of primates or birds, may eventually follow the same route.
I think you are proceeding from a couple of incorrect assumptions here. Firstly, there are plenty of enormously ‘powerful’ species that have died out previously: what about all dinosaurs and, more recently, many large mammals?
Also one could argue that the most ‘successful’ creatures, in terms of adaptability and surviveability, would be insects or even simpler organisms. They will almost certainly outlive us as a species, and pretty much anything else.
I’ll leave the jokes about ‘blowing the world’ to someone else.
Sorry, welcome to the boards, EM. You should know I’m the worst proofreader ever.
**What if humans did not exist…? **
First of all, welcome to the Boreds er Boards… I only know that because other people said it. I am not part of the welcoming committee but do feel at home here.
Now, the non-existance of Humans is historical. Dinosaurs lived for 300 million years before lucy set paw on this planet. A few hundred million years have past before the even the dinosaurs came on the earth.
And judging by the way we are already tetering on the edge of self annihialiation in what is just a blink of the geological eye, it is entirely possible that the earth will again be rid of this pesky polluting good for nudnick human beings.
Humans are not the epitome of natural evolution. The ability to think and feel is highly overated. This tool creation thing is nifty but it gets out of control way too fast. We are physically weak, unstable, out of touch with our surroundings and with nature. We take but do not give back, and we hate anything we dont understand. Like the movie said, humans are a disease. It will come to a point when we have nearly sucked the life out of this planet and will need to carry our cancerous nature to other worlds.
However, I have every faith in this planet and I believe it will survive its human infection. We will make it very very sick.
Huh? I’m a bit distressed about the idea of anyone or anything ‘blowing the world’.:eek:
Look ** elusive mind**, people are animals. We aren’t something different.
You seem to be asking what would happen if Homo sapiens or some other hominid hadn’t evolved as we have. That’s impossible to answer. One way of deciding whether human level intelligence is inevitable is to look at South America and Australia. Both continents existed with mammal populations in isolation from the rest of the world. Neither showed any signs of evolving any sort of intelligent life. This was despite South America having resident primates. Before that various groups of non-mammalian animals existed for billion of years, and not one ever developed intelligence.
Based on this we have to conclude that our line are freaks. We are one atypical evolutionary experiment that has resulted from a series of specific climatic, biological and geological coincidences. So no, there’s not much chance that any other comparable intelligence would have evolved by this stage if our lineage had been shut down.
The rest of you post seems to be fundamentally wrong. Throughout the last few billions we now that it isn’t only the powerful that survive, in fact quite the opposite. Bacteria are the greatest survivors on the planet, but they aren’t in any way powerful. Amongst the true animals jellyfish and sponges are the greatest survivors, and I wouldn’t bet on either of them into a cage match against Royce Gracie.
Contrast this with the fate of the truly powerful animals of their eras. The jawless fish are all but extinct and survive only as scavengers and parasites. The dinosaurs have had to become titchy little birdies. The sabretooth cats have vanished and the whales have are recovering form the brink of extinction. It seems like the most powerful are the first to die.
The idea that animal’s show no compassion is just silly. Ever seen a herd of elephants trying to help the injured to stand? Ever watched a bitch trying to lick life back into a dead pup? Of course animal’s show compassion.
No, there wouldn’t be only one kind of animal surviving. Animals evolve to exploit niches. Even a truly powerful animal like a tiger or elephant can’t exploit all resources, nor can the eliminate the worms and mites that exploit their own bodies.
I’m still astounded that you have evidence of a human blowing the world.
If humans did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.
Ummm… didn’t happen before humans were on the scene, no real reason why it would happen that way if we’d simply never been here.
What would these large, powerful animals eat? - quite a lot, I imagine - Would they bother chasing after tiny beetles? If not, there would be at least big powerful animals and tiny beetles and so on. Nature tends to strike a balance because if a predator eats too much of its prey, it starves.
What Mangetout said…
Wolves don’t wipe out rabbits…because they’d starve. It isn’t compassion…nor is it enlightened self-interest…
It’s the very complicated interlocking natural cycles.
Basically, when the wolves get too numerous and start killing too many rabbits, food grows short, and the wolves end up dying in large numbers. The rabbits come right back. You get weird jagged “sine waves” of population boom and bust.
And, of course, this affects every other critter…and a lot of plants, too. Too many rabbits will rip up the undergrowth. Massive die-offs, on the other hand, provide good fertilizer. A really bad year for the wolves might be a good year for the buzzards…
Nature itself lacks compassion… The war between the lions and the hyenas is as ugly as any human feud…and has lasted a thousand times as long as humankind has been on two feet…
But nature is not entirely cruel: lambs gambol and ponies disport, and mama mammals nurse their little’uns with an emotion that, I think, most of us would recognize as true and honest love.
Trinopus
Exactly; the survival of prey is not dependent on compassion of predators, but their inability to catch them (and the prey’s ability to elude or make itself unpalatable).
One need only look back a few million years to see the world without humans. And then look back over the preceeding several hundred million years for variations on that theme.
Only animals already do exist. Human’s are no different, just more active in adapting their environment.
Possibly not, but would it matter? Humans think ‘advanced civilization’ is desirable and a very good thing, but that’s only because that’s what we’re good at. If you could ask any other animal they might think very differently.
And this is different from the current situation how? Seriously, there’s been no animal ever been as good as killing off others as humans. And we’re supposed to be the compassionate ones?
But no matter, there is no danger of the powerful animals being the only ones left standing. Natural history demonstrates that it’s the ‘powerful’ animals that are the most fragile when it comes to survival because they depend most on the stability of all the environment around them. The slightest change can have the greatest impact.
The ‘weak’, however, like insects, just keep on going…
Were any other animal to gain the intelligence of humans they are just as likely to make the same drastic mistakes. Humans don’t screw up because they’re unlike animals, but because they are animals, with the same primitive driving forces. We’ve just honed the art of making our mistakes on a much bigger scale.
Humans have been using tools for 2 million years, mammals have been dominant for 60 million years.
All things being equal, that would be a 1 in 30 chance of it happening again in the same timescale.
Humans have been living in cities (Jericho and bigger) for 10,000 years- this is about one chance in 6000…
even without considering the earlier history of life on earth, civilisation is a very rare occurrence, so is unlikely to occur
on any given earthlike planet at any given time.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
I saw a funny little short movie once about an alien ship monitoring life on earth. What they concluded was that cars and trucks were the highest form of life on earth and that these little parasites that crawl in and out of them were kind of interesting too 
Had humans never crossed the land bridge from Asia, I predict Christopher Columbus would have discovered a thriving civilization of canals, dams and hyrdo-electric facilities proudly built by Beaverus Sapiens.
Are Neanderthals considered as humans?
If they are not considered, that would make an interesting scenario- the world with a Neanderthal civilisation.
I expect they would have a labour intensive agricultural economy- these creatures were stronger than humans, so would perhaps have been able to cultivate more intractable land…
whether they would have moved on to living in cities and developing spaceflight and the internet is anyone’s guess.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Isn’t this obvious enough? Look back to that period of time after the Ice Age. Take out all the extinct animals. Throw in the animals we see today (minus Man and his personal effects). Yep, that’s pretty much it.