Topic: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - what will surpass humans? (Read 1739 times)

- there are flying ants.  And overall, ants seem to have alot more going for them then flies.

Besides, though rigon has noted his distaste for mosquitoes, personally, given their, um, respective lifestyles, I would rather see a mosquito flying away from my food than a fly.

I'm not sure what would be the next intelligent dominant species on Earth, if we destroy ourselves. The thing about man is that we've reached a point where if we destroy ourselves it's either going to be in such a way as to render the earth uninhabitable for more advanced species or we're going to wreck the planet first and that will result in our destruction (or, if it takes long enough, abandonment).  When we're gone, I expect that the insects will take over, but I don't see any sign that an intelligent race will rise out of them.

It will start off with the female mosquitoes (and no more eggs then), the males still being able to find food.  But, they don't live very long anyway (and will have less motivation to do so with the females gone............).

Unless they adapt - in some species apparently the females do not drink blood at all.

The mosquitoes died out due to lack of blood from humans and the larger animals. After awhile the flies and ants developed the instinct to save some of earths recourses to draw more food from outer space. They hide themselves long enough for their prey to become comfortable, then would attack small numbers of them while they slept, and hid again leaving the visitors in the dark of what was happening

lolololol that made me laugh.

As long as there's no mosquitos involved. Please add to the story of the alliance a crusade both species go on  to wipe out the mosquito population of the world. Flies in aerial formation divebombings on mosquitoes...ants diligently filling up the marshes with landfill to choke off the areas where mosquitoes can reproduce...

er cockroaches if it is really really bad and we 'glass the planet"

...we just sputter out and dribble down and die out...i bet on raccoons...I want to see a 'super race' of raccoons....



Searing
 

scavenger birds have the gift of flight and could prey on many things on the ground, same as flying insects. Of course the swarming number of cockroaches and ants are a mighty force, worms who can go under ground and feed on our rotting flesh. Many insects sacrifice themselves for the collective by nature, a big advantage, (except for the few libertarian insects who will be killed by the others). If they ever developed the consciousness to attack mankind we'd all be dead and an endless food source for them

overall flies and ants will end up the victors, they will form an alliance until some advance aliens discover our barren planet not realizing what awaits them as food for the ants and flies. More advanced species will come and have the same fate, until all intelligent life in the universe are consumed by the ants and flies

very interesting article, umair. However, the author has to make up his mind as to whether the supercomputer

"which knows just about everything,"
 
or

 has always been right in the past.

If the former, I'm a two-boxes guy, because the but if the latter, then a one box guy.


Yudkowsky is a moral utilitarian: He believes that that the greatest good for the greatest number of people is always ethically justified, even if a few people have to die or suffer along the way. He has explicitly argued that given the choice, it is preferable to torture a single person for 50 years than for a sufficient number of people (to be fair, a lot of people) to get dust specks in their eyes.

I don't know how many is "sufficient", but I can see a situation in which were enough people to get dust specks in their eyes, at least some people would die as a consequence, maybe it causes a car accident that kills an entire family, or some angry person lashes out at a child...to me, sufficient would be about 100,000 but yes, at that number, I'd consider that there were sufficient harm that would ensue by probability that it would justify the torture of that single person.

How could anyone think different?

I believe Agent Smith said that already

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

It is not hubris to think we can alter the earth, it is hubris to think we cannot. We already have, just not too badly yet.

The definitions associated with parasitism provide an apt analogy. There are "perfect" and "imperfect" parasites. Perfect parasites are well enough evolved to not kill the host, or better yet, not harm the host at all (commensalism) or provide the host some benefit (mutualism).   Imperfect parasites in some way impair the host, not always in a lethal way (e.g., HSV).  Evolutionarily young imperfect parasites will kill their host (e.g., Ebola).   
 
You know where this is going. Which are we?  I would settle for commensal.  If we are mutualistic we should be so without awareness. I think a fair assessment would be an imperfect parasite that doesn't (yet) kill the host with the potential to go either way.

A few years ago, a decade or more, there was this HUGE forest fire in China. I've read that as a consequence of that fire weather patterns in the western hemisphere are being altered because there is no way to block the siberian and tundra wins going into to China.

If, in order to sustain our civilization, we must totally wreck the earth, as it seems we are doing slowly but steadily, in the long run, are we not in fact already on the path of the Ebola virus--reproducing till we kill the very host that sustains us?

well, aren't there species who have already changed the earth? Consider bees. What would the earth be like without their pollinization efforts? Do their efforts directly relate to the type of species that make up the flora of different continents, and, given that, the animals that will be able to survive in them?

On the parasite question, though, if we are to accept those three terms, I would have to put us in the latter. Consider what we have to do to the earth to make it work for us. What was the Dust Bowl caused by? The stripping of trees from California for development left the topsoil without any protection and it literally all blew away.

The idea that awareness and technology and "moral aptitude" are the height of advancement is a likeable one.  However, we have no data to go on but a sample of one.......one civilization in one species.  Who is to say that every time intelligence and technology evolve in our universe the species rarely lasts over a few thousand years longer? Maybe we don't want to know the stats...... if they exist.....and do stats exist if no one is aware of them?   OK that is another subject.

There are those among us who believe it is human hubris to think man can change the planet.  We certainly have the nuclear material to change the planet quickly.  What will become of all the waste we store, of all the waste entering the sea and accumulating in Japan and the north Pacific, of Chernobyl, of the future "releases"?

And here I thought that Orcas will surpass humans..

West of Eden:

In the parallel universe of this novel, Earth was not struck by an asteroid 65 million years before the present. Consequently, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which wiped out the dinosaurs and other reptiles never happened, leaving the way clear for an intelligent species to eventually evolve from mosasaurs, a family of Late Cretaceous marine lizards closely related to the modern monitor lizards. This relationship would mean that the intelligent species are not dinosaurs but lizard-people.

The lizard-people are known as the Yilanè, and are the dominant life form on most of the planet. However, during the evolutionary process, the species became non-viable on the two American continents, leaving them free of Yilanè for millions of years and opening an ecological niche for a top predator. A human-like species, the Tanu, evolved to fill the niche in North America, but are only found on that continent. Unlike humans, which evolved from African primates, the Tanu have evolved from a lineage of New World monkey. By the time the novel begins, the humanoids have reached a late stone age level of technology and culture, with a number of societies having developed farming skills.

The Yilanè, having had millions of years of civilization, have a very advanced society primarily based on a mastery of the biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, so much so that almost every tool and artifact they use is a modified lifeform. Their boats were originally squids, their submarines are enhanced ichthyosaurs (here called uruketos), and their guns are evolved monitor lizards which eject projectiles using pressurised gas.

The Yilanè are a matriarchal society. The females control all political, military, and scientific aspects of the culture and keep the males segregated. Males are primarily poets and artisans, and enjoy dull, pampered lifestyles. Repeated matings will kill males, so they are generally very wary of the females. The Yilanè language is incredibly complex, based on sounds, colour (The Yilanè are able to alter the skin colour on parts of their body, notably the hands, akin to Chameleons) and body movements, and a key factor in social status among females is how well the language is mastered. As their emotions are directly and immediately translated into the movement of their bodies, Yilanè cannot lie. In order to deceive others they may only restrict their movements or go into a state of immobility until the emotion or thought has passed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden

but doesn't that assume, that the next species hasn't already developed its own intelligence, but hasn't yet as a species gotten to the point where it can compete with humans? If ants already have a sentience of their own, might they not have already their own religion--hell, talk about fertility goddesses, theirs would outrank our own by a million levels. It's not necessarily that the next dominant species needs to come after humans, simply that they need to replace us as we die out. Your point about inventing anything is important--the drive for technology being a hallmark of an advanced species--but their world would assuredly be far different from ours, and we're not nearly at the level of nanotechnology that ants might developed to create and build their own world.

So, has anyone ever read Harry Harrison's "Eden" series? One of my favorites. Eden's books open on the assumption that the meteor which is claimed as the killer of the sauroids never hit. Thousands of years after that time, as simians are just reaching sentience, and the Ice Ages are starting, man, expanding southward on the American continent, meets up with another intelligent species, the cold-blooded lizardlike Yilané, who are expanding westward, and founding a new city of their own, Alpeasak, under their fiercesome Eistaa Vainté. (Eistaa means She Who Walks Straight--meaning anyone in her path who doesn't get out of it dies!)

Really just a superb series, but even just reading the first, West of Eden, which is where all the meat on the Yilané in terms of culture, technology, cities, leadership etc., is located is fun enough in its own right.


Anyway, the end of the series is foreordained, from Sea-Girt Ilkhamanets off the west coast of Africa, the Yilané cam see the snows cresting Kilimanjaro...simply by our knowledge that a new Ice-Age is coming, but, that brings me to  point above.

The key to the end of the human/Yilané struggle is in fact that ice-ages do come, and the Yilané, being cold-blooded, cannot survive, cannot maintain their civilization.

But what if the Yilané survive, weak, paltry, brought down from their once great might as a few scattered efenburus survive to pass on the genes and diluted forms of their culture and their organic, as opposed to human mineral, technologies. (efenburus are schools, think minnow, of young Yilané, who are born of eggs on land, but, like the turtles and other amphibious species, go into the ocean to grow. For an intelligent species, that development and growth would be more than just physical, for the Yilané efenburus represent their social form for developing young, and the members of an efenburu hold the same sort of loyalties to each other that children of kibbutzim hold).

And of course, even as the ice-ages brought the Yilané low, what would bring them back again?

lol. Global warming of course. So, combining all three--the idea about the struggle between two species, in this case one with at least a form of punctuated equilibrium--Harry Harrison's own wonderful world which remains one of my favorites, and global warming, we have the next chapter of the Eden series--"Eden Reborn", in which the Yilané, now waxing strong once again, start struggling with the humans in the remains of now flooded coastal cities to establish their own cities.

Oh, trust me, I already have the first chapter written: folks on this board are hardly enough to keep my overly fertile imagination satisfied. I even have a little theological twist to it as the Yilané are split, theologically, between their adherence to organic technologies, and the desire of some to adapt to new, mineral, technologies like the human. But between SK's knowledge of marine life, and my imagination, it's a blockbuster on par with my historical epic, "Nike!" (for another thread!)

The second intelligent species on a planet doesn't get to evolve naturally. In fact, no matter how many intelligent species evolve......they would all be burdened with the society of the first.  They don't get to evolve their own religion because we will spoon feed them ours when they are susceptible. Then again they would want to develop their own since there is no special place in ours for them. They don't get to invent anything, everything they could possibly need would have been invented by us.  It would be a very very very long time before they would be treated as equals.  Possibly never among humans who still believe in a god who created us in "his" image.

I think I have a few screenplays here.  A punctuated development of a secondary species accelerates and surpasses the first evolved, creating a battle for dominance and a world that changes rapidly to suit the new dominant. A second screenplay is one where humans grapple with some of the questions above as a second species becomes fully sentient like equality, the truth of our own religion, etc.

As an aside, just saw the movie this week....did not enjoy it.  Kinda bummed about that since I enjoy sci fi and the reviews are very good.  In five words:  it is a dude flick.

or eating the competition ....like pigs. 

Its fun to ponder.

If we can keep elephants and whales alive they have a chance.  We are so impatient.  It took us about 6 million years to get from approximately where they are today.  If we get wise enough to save some of these intelligent creatures in the long run (assuming we can save ourselves....big assumption), we will accelerate their evolution and affect it in ways that otherwise would not have occurred if they were first.