Planet Earth without humans

[Lance Birk]

Bacteria.

They'll replace us soon enough.

[Article Accelerator]

davester wrote: If we were wiped out today, the bonobos (so called pygmy chimpanzees; aka pan paniscus) are probably the most intellectually advanced beings on earth other than ourselves, with emotional characteristics, language learning skills and tool-making and using skills similar to ho mo sapiens.

Similar? Hmm…I think that's stretching it, davester.

Beyond that, h o m o sapiens possesses certain characteristics that appear to be absolutely unique, e.g. time sense (both literal and existential), symbology and modelling, and music. None of those is a mere extension of "intelligence." We are also the only known species that cooks its food, a capability critical to efficient caloric intake and intensive exploitation of the environment. Without cooking, we likely could not have supported our brains and brain evolution.

[Chakravartin]

Opossums.

Their opposable thumbs are on their rear feet and their tails are totally prehensile - they can use them like grasping hands.

How cool is that?!

[mrlynn]

I have often wondered whether, had not the dinosaurs been wiped out c. 65 million years ago, they might have evolved into creatures with big-enough brains to be called human-like. Many walked on two legs, with small arms that could have developed opposable thumbs. Some of them may have had binocular vision, not unlike ours. It's interesting to speculate whether their non-mammalian brains might have developed very different kinds of symbology (language, music, art), etc, or for that matter, any at all.

/Mr Lynn

[Ombligo]

Elephants of course, they are already taking over the lower life forms even two to four years

[ka jowct]

Would it be a good thing for another "advanced" species similar as ours to evolve? We are far and away the most destructive species on the planet.

[davester]

Article Accelerator wrote:
Beyond that, h o m o sapiens possesses certain characteristics that appear to be absolutely unique, e.g. time sense (both literal and existential), symbology and modelling, and music. None of those is a mere extension of "intelligence." We are also the only known species that cooks its food, a capability critical to efficient caloric intake and intensive exploitation of the environment. Without cooking, we likely could not have supported our brains and brain evolution.

That's not clearly true. There is a lot of evidence that early hom o sapiens didn't do any of those things any better than modern bonobos. The appearance of homo sapiens in the fossil record does not appear to coincide with the huge intellectual leap that begat us civilization. That leap came fairly late in the reign of homo sapiens.

[davester]

mrlynn wrote:
I have often wondered whether, had not the dinosaurs been wiped out c. 65 million years ago, they might have evolved into creatures with big-enough brains to be called human-like. Many walked on two legs, with small arms that could have developed opposable thumbs. Some of them may have had binocular vision, not unlike ours. It's interesting to speculate whether their non-mammalian brains might have developed very different kinds of symbology (language, music, art), etc, or for that matter, any at all.

/Mr Lynn

The dinosaurs are still with us but with a different name...birds. Their arms became wings and they (mostly) took to the skies. Birds are evolved theropod dinosaurs (T.Rex was one too!).

[mrlynn]

davester wrote:
[quote=mrlynn]
I have often wondered whether, had not the dinosaurs been wiped out c. 65 million years ago, they might have evolved into creatures with big-enough brains to be called human-like. Many walked on two legs, with small arms that could have developed opposable thumbs. Some of them may have had binocular vision, not unlike ours. It's interesting to speculate whether their non-mammalian brains might have developed very different kinds of symbology (language, music, art), etc, or for that matter, any at all.

/Mr Lynn

The dinosaurs are still with us but with a different name...birds. Their arms became wings and they (mostly) took to the skies. Birds are evolved theropod dinosaurs (T.Rex was one too!).
True, of course. One look at the iridescent grackles at my bird feeder tells me what the fiercest dinos might have been like, only much larger. Still, if they larger ones had survived, and kept the mammals from filling their niches, I can imagine some evolving in a sentient direction.

/Mr Lynn

[eustacetilley]

Some claim that "Dinosaurs" did not go extinct; they evolved, as usual, or if one prefers, as planned.
They taste just like chicken.

Some math fun:
Say 7 Billion People on Earth, and each weighs 50Kg. (Note that the last billion are all under the age of ~14.)
That's ~350 Billion Kilograms, which seems like a lot. But it isn't really.
Put them all through a blender, and you have roughly 350 Billion liters of Human Soup.
That's roughly 350 Million cubic meters, or a cube ~700 meters per side.
Housing such a cube poses difficulties, leakage being one of the worst, but it is not insoluble, and there isn't any need really.
The Grand Canyon gets up to 1800 Meters deep, so just find a likely corner, and pour it all in. Once Gravity does its job, all that is left is a rather large pink stain in one corner.

The numbers are pretty big still, so let's just take Manhattan, which has a permanent population of around 1.6 Million. (This has been stable for decades.) New Yorkers can get fairly large, so let's bump up the weight to 70KG per Manhattanite.
~112 Million Kilos, ~112 Million Liters, ~112,000 Cubic Meters. A cube a bit less than 50 meters to a side.
The Empire State Building is around a Million cubic meters, so if one liquifies the population of Manhattan, and pours it into the Empire State Building, it would reach the 12th story, give or take a story or two.

These numbers don't take into account one critical factor- Shoes.

Assuming that half the World population is wearing shoes just before Liquefaction, that means that there will be around 7 billion shoes to deal with.
Just what does one do with that many shoes?

Eustace