I guess that’s true of locust as well! The same larva becomes a swarming locust or a normal grasshopper.
What other ways (besides the ones humans used) could a specific species become dominant on a planet?
I think my example of “super-lignin” is quite analogous to your example
I question the entire premise. Fermi was wrong. There is no reason ever expect any species to leave its home system.
- This thread doesn’t mention leaving the home system
- That doesn’t make Fermi wrong. If there is no reason to expect any species to leave its home species, but there is also no reason not to expect that all species stay home, then Fermi’s paradox is still unexplained, you just added an extra filter that undoubtedly still isn’t a GREAT Filter.
Not directly (again, I have not been perfectly clear) but as a thought experiment triggered by the idea of Fermi’s Paradox, I am looking for plausible dominant species that would be uninterested in space travel. I have assumed that any species that succeeded in interplanetary travel would then be trying for FTL interstellar travel of some kind, and if it’s possible would eventually succeed. And if there were enough of those, over time at least one would eventually find us.
I guess if FTL interstellar travel is flat out impossible, that would be a different answer to Fermi’s paradox.
The first thing a species would need to dominate is hands. Idle hands to be exact. Humans evolved from species that had adopted upright posture to brachiate. But when we came down from the trees (or when the environment changed to having far fewer trees) we continued that posture unlike chimps and gorillas that started hand walking. Now other creatures have hands. Kangaroos do; many dinosaurs did and insects can grow as many limbs as they need. Insect mouths and antennae are just modified limbs. The exoskeleton on insects seems to put a severe limit on size, but that is just relative to us. I see no reason kangaroos could not develop a civilization and I really don’t understand why no dinosaur did. Especially since the age of dinos was at least twice as long as the age of mammals.
Dinosaurs probably just weren’t smart enough. Smarter than people used to think, but their brains weren’t as big as modern mammals or birds.
Now, if that impactor had missed Earth and the age of dinosaurs had continued? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they’d continued getting bigger brains and eventually evolved human-equivalent intelligence.
It raises the question: what circumstance or set of circumstances drives the evolution intelligence and more importantly of intelligence used cooperatively?
And yet we now know that Australopithecines and genus Homo were not the only early apes to at least dabble in bipedal locomotion. There were others that preceded them by millions of years that apparently came to nothing.