Sharks: Sharks.
Anteaters are more likely than weasels
wow this is fascinating, thanks for sharing!
Echo location ant eaters
Even the gods fear the fungal network.
There’s a phenomenal documentary series called The Future Is Wild that speculates on this question.
https://youtube.com/@thefutureiswildofficial
https://www.thefutureiswild.com/
It has 3 parts, projecting to 5, 100 and 200 million years into the future.
The main theme is that niches determine attributes. So when an opportunity opens up, one species will evolve to fill that niche. For instance sea birds evolve into whales. Octopodes evolve into primates.
I loved this as a kid. It was one of a handful of really influential pieces of media from my childhood.
I’m actually surprised octopus haven’t evolved more than they already have. I suppose they would have to evolve skeletons to be able to survive on land so that’s probably what’s holding them back.
Beatles. Beatles everywhere. Bowl cuts will go crazy.
Hot take: the fungi will take over all existing animal and plant life, and create a whole biosphere of fungi. Fungi crustaceans, fungi mammals, fungi plants, fungi amphibians, fungi reptiles, fungi birds.
The fungi humans would have achieved world peace, because there’s no genders to create inequalities, and with spores flying everywhere, unwanted infidelity and physical differences are so common that anger and jealousy makes no sense.
“shan’t” is a great word
Everything in the system evolves into a cloud of dust and gas about 27 million years from now.
That’s… that’s very soon. What do you know‽
All the fish are dead, of course.
Fish already don’t exist
I knew exactly which videos those were before clicking on the links
You are thinking of birds.
Fish are three of the categories listed in the meme.
What three?
Fish, fish, and fish.
Mammals, amphibians/reptiles, and birds
Raccoon also seems to be a pretty popular mammal convergance. Or generally small climbing quadruped with a varied diet and at least semi-functional hands.
Evolution by Stephen Baxter (Wikipedia) was an interesting read.
Note: Baxter can be dry at times but i always enjoy the worlds he creates.I respect the hell out of Baxter, he’s a hard sci-fi artist. However, he’s so unrelentingly bleak I had to quit reading his stuff.
Can you share where you felt that way? Been a while since I’ve read him.
The midpoint to the end of Evolution, humans basically devolve and ultimately go extinct.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything by him as well.
I remember another book where artifically created people inside a dwarf star were dying due to solar harvesting, IIRC. I remember it being depressing but fascinating. Don’t remember how it ends.
Yeah, very fair. I guess i quite like the bleakness. I love dark and gritty stories.
He’s an incredible author, I’d put him up there with Alastair Reynolds. I just can’t handle it.
Everything becomes crab on long enough timeline, Daniel-san. Be the lobster! Shell on. Shell off. Sift the floor.
We seemed to have it all hammered out. Love me some Cambrian explosion, wild shit! It was like the 1910-1920s for the industrial age. “Throw it at the wall and see what sticks!”
I had a dream a couple weeks ago where I was reading some news about penguins developing a language to talk to each other. And in the dream I was wondering if we as humans were in any way hindering the penguins’ capacity to evolve into a sentient species - then realized they were already so close to us. They have arms and legs, can use tools, talk with a structured language and everything - what kept them being labeled as plain animals if they did all that?
In the afternoon I suddenly remembered the dream and for a split second was kinda agreeing with my dream’s argument, until I realized the penguins in the dream were closer to Animal Crossing characters than to actually penguins.
We’ll just have to see what spots get opened up by lack of biodiversity to know for sure. There won’t be new crabs and weasels if there aren’t enough prey for them.
