Who will “capture” the Earth after the Apocalypse?

If human civilization suddenly disappears from the face of the earth, what species will become dominant on the planet? Luc Bussier, a scientist from the University of Stirling, tried to answer this question.

There is a non-zero probability that people, having destroyed themselves, will erase all life from the face of the Earth. But there is another scenario when a person disappears, and other creatures do not. What will our planet look like in many, many millions of years, in an era when a man has already caught a trace on it?

Many scientists offer their candidates for the role of the future “crown of nature”: monkeys, dolphins, rats, slow moving fish, ants. According to Luc Bussier, these are unlikely to be relatively developed and large creatures, like the same primates. And it is certainly unlikely that after civilization of people on Earth, a chimpanzee civilization will reign – almost like in the movie “Planet of the Apes”. The scientist believes that if people die, then monkeys will do it before. In general, now man is the only primate who is not endangered.

In general, one should not think that those qualities that have helped a person to become the dominant species on the planet are necessary for all species. At different times, the “kings of animals” turned out to be completely different classes of living beings – like dinosaurs, for example, hundreds of millions of years ago. And if we were observers in that era, we probably would never have thought that small mammals that scurry about under the feet of lizards will become the ancestors of elephants and whales.

It is almost impossible to make a forecast of the development of living nature for such a long period of time, first of all because it is impossible to determine the changes that this or that species that we have chosen to play as “dominant” will undergo evolution. So maybe this species will be ants – but we cannot predict what hybrid of a beetle, a spider and a crab they can turn into. Only one thing can be said with confidence: no matter who disappears from our planet, the bacteria will clearly make it last.