Let's talk about what cool new animals might exist after the eventual 6th mass extinction

[FullBusinessSuit]

Will we see a return to dinosaurs? Will mammals continue to regin supreme? Will human evolve again after a few million years allowing everything to start over with a fresh supply of oil?

 

Let's keep this post positive; doom and gloom free. What new and exciting things await after the Earth's 6th mass extinction?

Edited April 18, 2021 by FullBusinessSuit (see edit history)

[Im_CIA]

The universe will end when I(if) I die 

[BTGBullseye]

Silicon-based life forms. They won't remember us though.

[FoolOfWorms]

I personally dont think humans are able to die out since they have the survivability of roaches, but I do think intense mass extinction will cause divergent evolution due to an inability to maintain a society much larger than those of old tribes because of the collapse in the ecosystem preventing most kinds of farming. Like how ross described strife where technology will exist in small pockets around the world but we will mainly return to a stone or bronze age level of technology on the big scale. So what I think will happen is that the majority of humanity will return to scavenging while a very small number will be able to just barely get by with farming dying soil in very small pockets that will likely get raided over and over by people who dont know what they're doing to make food and will eventually become a lost art for all but the most isolated of places until the ecosystem regains its stability. The people of the very few surviving cities will have no reason to leave since the outside world is basically an inhospitable deathtrap full of raiders and no resources to tap into anymore without getting shot with arrows and having to send already thinly supplied rations far out into the wilderness to support overheating miners. This lack of resources and inability to expand will firmly keep them on earth until they either collapse anyways or until the earth heals, making them into basically the brotherhood of steel, a band of isolationists with future tech.

In these theoretical pockets of civilization humans will probably look the same, maybe lose their wisdom teeth or have freaky genetic difference like polydactaly for each city due to inbreeding and genetic isolation, while on the mainland people will begin to adapt fully to their environment, so people in Russia might start looking like the yeti from seasons greasons to survive the cold, since there are no more large animals to skin for hide, and maybe people in the vast deserts will grow smaller, thinner bodies, big ol' elf ears like a Fennec Fox, and darker skin to deal with the intense heat from the sun.

The plus side is even with the human speciation they'll all carry the same amount of human intelligence from before the extinction event since it will literally be the sole reason why humans would be able to survive the apocalypse, so we wont have to worry about getting any dumber from the experience, in fact it will probably be a tragic moment of learning for the entire genus at this point.

In the meantime crows might develop human level intelligence as well since they are also very survivable generalist and very smart themselves already, which is both a fun idea and terrifying since they will absolutely be unstoppable in war if we lose our tech advantage. Humanity at large will be subservient to our crow overlords.

Planet of the crows.

[FoolOfWorms]

I guess another thing I wanna add is that if you are interested in speculative biology, look up All Tomorrows by C. M. Kosemen, and maybe After Man by Dougal Dixon.
I dont like Dougal's Man After Man book as much as All Tomorrows because of some odd interpretations regarding human nature, but his After Man book is better since paleontology is his primary field, not sociology, even if the science in After Man is apparently a tad outdated, which is fair.

[DukeNukem 2417]

Trick question, the surviving species will just evolve into crabs. 

[rairii]

On 12/20/2021 at 6:02 PM, FoolOfWorms said:

I guess another thing I wanna add is that if you are interested in speculative biology, look up All Tomorrows by C. M. Kosemen, and maybe After Man by Dougal Dixon.
I dont like Dougal's Man After Man book as much as All Tomorrows because of some odd interpretations regarding human nature, but his After Man book is better since paleontology is his primary field, not sociology, even if the science in After Man is apparently a tad outdated, which is fair.

All Tomorrows is fascinating to me both as a work of speculative fiction and also for the fact that it managed to spawn kind of a microfandom 15 years later. Shit's got fanfictions written about it, animators with posthuman OCs, it's really fascinating and I love being a part of it.

 

Dixon's work I'm personally not a fan of, pretty much for reasons you've already highlighted. Man After Man doesn't work as a piece of speculative anthropology on account of feeling dated at best and ignorant at worst, and it doesn't work as a piece of fiction because it doesn't really feel like Dixon is trying to tell a particularly interesting story.

[Алексић Владица.]

On 12/21/2021 at 12:02 AM, FoolOfWorms said:

I guess another thing I wanna add is that if you are interested in speculative biology, look up All Tomorrows by C. M. Kosemen, and maybe After Man by Dougal Dixon.
I dont like Dougal's Man After Man book as much as All Tomorrows because of some odd interpretations regarding human nature, but his After Man book is better since paleontology is his primary field, not sociology, even if the science in After Man is apparently a tad outdated, which is fair.

On 10/7/2022 at 9:55 AM, rairii said:

All Tomorrows is fascinating to me both as a work of speculative fiction and also for the fact that it managed to spawn kind of a microfandom 15 years later. Shit's got fanfictions written about it, animators with posthuman OCs, it's really fascinating and I love being a part of it.

 

Dixon's work I'm personally not a fan of, pretty much for reasons you've already highlighted. Man After Man doesn't work as a piece of speculative anthropology on account of feeling dated at best and ignorant at worst, and it doesn't work as a piece of fiction because it doesn't really feel like Dixon is trying to tell a particularly interesting story.

Ic dislike All Tomorows for gobs of them develop back and do not lose high consciousness.