(October 10, 2019 at 8:10 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(October 10, 2019 at 9:47 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Every species of Homo before HSS is gone, so we are likely to follow.
Except discovery over the last 20 years suggest a case can be made that there never were any other species of homo.
The homo genus continuously existed a single specie with multiple interbreeding populations. The selection amongst the different populations, the interbreeding, and genetic drift caused the range of phenotypes to change over time
So populations of homo may have come and gone, but no specie went extinct.
(October 10, 2019 at 9:26 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: I think the odds are against us, but there's some hope. I would certainly love to have a way to see how it all turns out.
That's far too optimistic.
We will never successfully rid ourselves of ourselves.
H. erectus was pretty clearly another Homo species. Others are not so clear and, like you said, there was extensive interbreeding.
Mammal species tend to last a couple of million years and then either go extinct or evolve into another species. For humans, the next thousand years or so will be critical: we have the technology to destroy ourselves in multiple ways. The question is whether we will manage to not press the relevant buttons while instituting other protective policies. We have too much of a tendency towards massively destructive wars to be very complacent about our chances, though.
If we manage to get through the next thousand years (which is not all that long in historical terms), it is likely that we will have a good population off planet. This carries other dangers, though. The population fragmentation is just the type that would initiate a speciation event with new species on each planet. This won't happen quickly, but over the next 10-50,000 years would likely produce several different species.
At that point, the question of whether we will get out of the solar system becomes ore relevant. Given the distances, times, and resources involved, I am very skeptical of this step and, if we manage, that would lead to an even bigger speciation event.
In sum, if some of our descendants manage to survive to a million years from now, I am not at all convinced we would consider them to be human. When we bump up to, say, 100 million years, I am convinced that none would be. That is still LONG before the sun goes red giant on us.
Remember that the dinosaurs were only 65 million years ago.
