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Originally Posted by Undertoad
From a Darwinian perspective, humans are utterly unique. Just looking at outcomes: we are able to defeat all predators, adapt to all conditions, learn across multiple generations, artificially extend our lifetimes, etc. The list goes on.
This wild advantage is just enormous. We're the only species living on all continents. We managed all these things within a hundred thousand years of our existence. This is unique.
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It's only unique right here and now. The fossil record is shockingly spotty, when you really start looking at it. (I say this as someone who just walked through the Museum of Natural History yesterday...)
Everything we know about some of the most famous, "classic" dinosaur species is based on a total of three complete skeletons, worldwide. There are numerous species for which we have literally nothing but a single arm bone, or similar. Meanwhile, just this year we confirmed a new
hominid species we'd never known about before, which shifted our understanding of when various hominids moved across the continents by tens of thousands of years.
For all we know, a precocious species of dinosaur (or something else) industrialized in the last couple thousand years of their millions of years of existence, but as it turns out no dinosaur computers sank into a peat bog to be preserved. Even a plastic bottle takes just 450 years to decompose--a lot if you're the manager of a garbage dump in postmodern humanity, but a fucking eye blink compared to the
65 million years between us and a Tyrannosaurus. A billion years ago, Mars was a lush,
extremely habitable world. Could have been a whole, fully industrialized civilization there that died off and is now eroded to nothing. And there's nothing to say that, should we manage to kill ourselves off, some highly intelligent species of parrot, or dolphin, or octopus might not advance in our place and become "able to defeat all predators, adapt to all conditions," etc.
I'm with Flint. As individuals we're just bags of chemicals, and as a species we're not remotely unique.