RE: Do you think we could/will ever have two dominant[prime] species?
November 21, 2015 at 8:28 am
I can think of two plausible ways for separate dominant species to evolve out of humanity:
1. Genetic engineering - humans begin to implement high degree of genetic menipulation and eugenics until a population sufficiently altered as to represent one or more new species arises. This could happen relatively quickly on a scale of decades or centuries at most. Whether humans will eradicate them, they will eradicate humans, they will eradicate each other, or some will coexist either peacefully or precariously, is hard to say. But I give high likelihood it will happen within a few centuries.
2. Interstellar fragmentation - humans begin to use generation ships to colonize extrasolar planetary systems, but no practical near light speed or super luminal travel is developed for very long time, hundreds or thousands of centuries. In this case, intense selection pressure of surviving in drastically different chemical and physical environments on different planets, combined with high degree of population isolation caused by limits on time and scale of space travel, will lead to rapid outward and genetic changes in the separated population and speciation within a few hundred or thousand centuries.
1. Genetic engineering - humans begin to implement high degree of genetic menipulation and eugenics until a population sufficiently altered as to represent one or more new species arises. This could happen relatively quickly on a scale of decades or centuries at most. Whether humans will eradicate them, they will eradicate humans, they will eradicate each other, or some will coexist either peacefully or precariously, is hard to say. But I give high likelihood it will happen within a few centuries.
2. Interstellar fragmentation - humans begin to use generation ships to colonize extrasolar planetary systems, but no practical near light speed or super luminal travel is developed for very long time, hundreds or thousands of centuries. In this case, intense selection pressure of surviving in drastically different chemical and physical environments on different planets, combined with high degree of population isolation caused by limits on time and scale of space travel, will lead to rapid outward and genetic changes in the separated population and speciation within a few hundred or thousand centuries.
