Speculative Evolution: Alternate Sapient Beings

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kinkajous are adorable

In 1929 they even had their own song and dance!

^^^hit parade for sure. the vocalist had the same name as a gunslinger's belt ["sam browne"]

Sapient anteaters would be fascinating. They would probably see us humans as barbaric and gross, since we chew up our food with toothy mouths. They would probably ask us questions like "How does it feel to swallow something so large?" or "Doesn't it feel odd to have teeth? Don't you bite your tongue constantly?" They probably wouldn't be impressed by our tiny little tongues though.

Then again, any type of anteater, sapient or not, would have difficulty speaking.

Imagine! The bluebottle that knows to go out the way it came in...through the window that's just ever so slightly open.

It would be interesting to see a world with two sapient species at the same time. But unless they had similar levels of technology one could dominate the other.

not just tech, but also mental powers/physical powers.

If flies were sapient, they would likely build human-sized mech suits and then use them to attack us.

Humungous mechs don't work for us humans because the square/cube law makes them impractical. If flies were sapient, they could built humungous mechs. They would be humungous from the fly's perspective at least.

Of course, insect engineers would likely run into the problem of quantum tunneling before our engineers.

Overall, I'm glad that this thread turned out so well. Evolutionary speculation is important. It helps people to understand evolution more.

Evolution is only partially random. Natural selection and sexual selection are not random. Mutation is random. It can be influenced by quantum chance events.

Therefore, the intelligent beings throughout the multiverse are all different from one another, but they all possess appendages for toolmaking.

But...if the techs were humongous from a fly's perspective, would that not be a case of gross overestimation on its part, rendering its species' dastardly plan to attack us as delusional and ultimately futile? However, I think they have a few gazillion species higher up on their food chain to contend with and so their techs might be better applied there. Hmm, but that puts our ecosystem at risk, doesn't it? So they may inadvertently attack us by undermining the order of things...

Perhaps sapience is the most overestimated of concepts and it's actually the so-called non-sapient entities that are the true highly evolved beings...

All sapient beings eventually start destroying their planet. Hopefully, we learn how to stop eventually.

Perhaps all sapient species learn this lesson eventually … or perhaps intelligence is ultimately a lethal mutation. We'll have to just wait and see.

Perhaps reincarnation then is a modality that is less about karma (or the past and present) and more about recalibration (the present and future)...and that's how we learn to eventually stop before - to quote a Cree saying - the last river is poisoned and we realise we can't eat our money (and other such endgamers).

Yes, we'll just have to wait (and die, and be reborn) and see...

^^^I like that idea

What about sapient large dinosaurs? What kind of technology would they produce?

How would they even build technology? What would they use for grasping? They didn't even have opposable digits.

Human sized dinosaurs evolving into SapioSuarus is easy to imagine. They were already upright and bidedal. And they retained the ancestral five digit amphibian hand of the common ancestor of all land vertabrates (as opposed to ditching that for specialized forelimbs like hooves). So one could imagine them evolving opposable thumbs, brains, and then manipulating objects, and then acquiriing fire and technology. Indeed if that asteroid hadn't wiped the dinos out that may well be what would have happened. After sixty million years a race of smart dinosaurs would be chatting to each other right now on a world wide web system.