DON’T underestimate ants, according to some scientists. In the next tens of millions of years, it is not impossible that his generation will replace the role of humans on earth.
The shape of the ant will be different from its present-day ancestors. In terms of intelligence, the next generation of ants, could be like humans.
This can be seen from the body structure and intelligence of ants in forming colonies, collaborating, and establishing communication between fellow ants.
Tens of millions of years ago, whales were just tiny creatures running frantically under the feet of the dinosaurs.
But, tens of millions of years later, the whale’s body had evolved into a giant, when the dinosaurs became extinct.
Likewise with a number of other animal species, although their size is still inferior to whales.
However, the evolution of these animals, whatever their form, is still inferior to humans as rulers and intelligent beings who are also dominant on this earth.
It’s just that, as reported by The ConversationJanuary 26, 2016, scientists predict that in the next 50 million years, humans will become extinct.
This extinction will occur before the sun expands into a red giant, then explodes and destroys all living things.
The question now is, in a post-apocalyptic future, what might happen to life if humans left the world?
Called to be extinct first, this is none other than because of human tendencies in exploiting nature.
The emergence of various viruses including Covid-19 is the answer to human greed to exploit nature so that nature is angry.
So, if we were given the opportunity to peer into the future on earth some 50 million years after our disappearance, what would we find?
Which animal or group of animals will ‘take over’ as the dominant species?
Will the humans of the earth be replaced by apes like in a fictional movie Planet of the Apes (Planet Kera)?
In this Hollywood film, astronauts who return to Earth have been trapped in time travel, then land on a future Earth.
When they landed, the role of humans on earth had been replaced by intelligent apes, and humans were hunted by these primates.
So, when humans go extinct, will the earth be dominated by dolphins, rats, water bears, cockroaches, pigs, or ants?
The question has inspired much popular speculation, and many authors have offered lists of candidate species.
For practical rather than philosophical reasons: today’s world has been dominated by bacteria, even though the nominal end of the age of microbes was about 1.2 billion years ago.
This is not because the bacteria stopped, or decreased in prevalence, but rather because of human myopia. This is also because humans tend to place more importance on the large multi-cellular organisms that came after them.
There is an undeniable degree of narcissism regarding the designation of humans as the dominant species and a strong tendency to bestow titles on their close relatives, the apes.
In the movie Planet of the Apeshumans’ closest primate relatives were able to develop speech and adopt human technology.
However, if we give apes the time and space to do so, non-human primates are unlikely to inherit human dominance on earth.
This is because apes tend to lead humans to extinction. Humans have become the only living hominid, whose conservation status is not threatened with extinction.
In fact, any extinction event that affects humans will probably be the most dangerous for organisms that share the same basic physiological needs as humans.
In fact, if humans succumb to a global pandemic that affects relatively few other mammals, the great apes are the species most at risk of contracting a new disease before wiping out humans from the earth.
As to whether primates, mammals, or other creatures would develop intelligence and society like humans, it also seems unlikely.
Of all the species that were arguably the dominant animals at some stage in Earth’s history, only humans possessed extraordinary intelligence, and manual dexterity.
Therefore, such traits are not a requirement to be dominant among animals, or traits that are highly likely to evolve.
Evolution does not support intelligence for its own sake.
However, it can happen if it leads to higher survival, and reproductive success.
Consequently it is a grave error to imagine that human successors are likely to be highly intelligent or social beings, or that they will be capable of speech, or proficient with human technology.
So, what can we safely speculate about the dominant species, some 50 million years after the human race went extinct?
The answer is both unsatisfactory and thrilling: while we’re pretty sure it’s not a talking chimpanzee, we don’t know what it looks like.
The world has witnessed a number of mass extinction events in the course of its history.
Life diversification after each event, is relatively rapid and ‘radiative adaptive’. New species produce new forms, including many unlike the ancestral lineages that gave birth to them after surviving previous extinctions.
The tiny shrew-like creatures that scurried under the feet of the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period looked very different from the cave bears, mastodons, and whales that descended from them during the age of mammals.
Likewise, reptiles survived the late Permian extinction about 250 million years ago, which killed 90 percent of marine species, and 70 percent of land species.
In Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the late Stephen J Gould argued that chance, or contingency, as he called it, played a large role during the major transitions of animal life.
There is room for debate about the relative importance of contingency in life history, which remains a controversial topic today.
However, Gould’s insight that humans can hardly imagine the success of modern lineages beyond future extinctions, is a demeaning reminder of the complexity of evolutionary transitions.
So while it’s possible, as many speculated, ants will take over the earth from humans, so we can only imagine what their dominant ant offspring will look like.***
Source: The Conversation, various sources
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