What species is dominating the Earth?

In the newly released movie "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" , people and monkeys have vied to dominate the Earth, after a mysterious virus caused the monkey to return. should be "super smart" , but push people to the brink of extinction.

Although monkey riding, reading and writing in English or hunting like Stone Age people seems fiction, but the idea of ​​another species or other life form dominating the Earth is not far from reality. . According to scientists, depending on how the dominance is defined, other organisms may have overwhelmed the people on our planet.

In the movie "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" , the mutant chimp named Caesar can speak in English.(Photo: Live Science)

Impossible hypothesis?

Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester (UK), said that with human presence, it is difficult for another super-smart species to evolve because "people are very good at eliminating competition" . Zalasiewicz, for example, over millions of years of evolution, modern humans defeated many primates and other human species, such as Denisovans and Neanderthals.

In addition, the film's hypothesis is not really true. Monkeys are less likely to occupy our place, since both gorillas and chimpanzees are now struggling to survive in the wild, with more than 100,000 gorillas and no more than 250,000 gorillas worldwide, according to World natural protection fund. No other wild primate species currently has a population exceeding 100,000.

Meanwhile, with about 7 billion people on Earth, even if 95% of human beings die slowly because of a mutant virus, the rest are still much more crowded than the total number of monkeys.

Potential candidates

Assuming that humans eventually kill themselves with hunger, epidemics, war or climate change, it could take millions of years for a new species to evolve intelligence and capabilities enough to Dominate the Earth. After all, intelligent creatures like humans evolved only once in nearly 3.5 billion years of life on our planet, according to Zalasiewicz.

If evolved to be able to use tools and further develop intelligence, pigs and mice are thought to be able to compete for dominance of Earth with humans.

The expert stressed that rats, a common pest, growing in almost every place on Earth, were very smart and highly socially structured. For millions of years, unusually large mice could become a super-intelligent species capable of ruling Earth. Pigs, animals with complex social structures and high levels of intelligence, can do the same if they evolve to gain the ability to use tools and continue to develop intelligence through the line. million years.

In fact, however, Zalasiewic said, the biggest threat to humans is not a natural evolutionary creature, but artificial entities .

Researchers recently revealed that a machine has passed the Turing test, showing that behavior can reach a human level. In the Turing test, if the interviewer cannot show the difference between responses between a machine and a human, then the machine is said to have shown a smart behavior. The futurist Ray Kurzweil has long speculated that the anomaly , a hypothetical moment when machine intelligence outperforms human intelligence, will occur around 2045.

The rulers dominate

At some level, humans are not dominating the Earth. According to Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University professor of human development, bacteria have defeated humans in many ways. Mr. Sternberg explained, in terms of quantity, bacteria far surpasses humanity. Most of our own weight is also bacteria. They reproduce faster and change faster. They existed long before humans appeared and will still be there after we die.

Bacteria are not the only rivals that can take over the human dominance of the world."Ants control the planet. They do it right under our feet , " said Mark W. Moffett, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Moffett, for example, has more ants on Earth than humans and their total weight or biomass is equal to or exceeds the biomass of all humans.

Army ants are among the most frightening "assassins" on the planet with the ability to eat large prey "boards" within minutes.(Photo: Animal planet)

Ants also use traditional military principles to launch war. For example, they rely on cements that "raid and stun them" , using overwhelming numbers of troops to crush the enemy in smaller numbers. Ants also eliminated the weakest and most affluent members of the community from the front, while retaining the "super soldiers" to protect the rear. This tactic has been proved extremely successful.

For example, each ant African army may not have to fear for its own life, because they always form crowded herds, up to millions and about 30.5 meters long. With tiny blade-like teeth, they can surround and devour a wire-tied cow or even a child who is being played alone, within minutes. This is the reason why women in equatorial Africa often hold their babies on their backs and do not let them play in cots alone.

And even though each ant is not so smart, they can still solve unusual problems by the mind of the whole herd. Moffett experts liken each ant to the equivalent of a nerve cell in the human brain, so when they come together, they can create a brilliant intelligent brain.