KurSix

I wonder how much of that was simply being early versus having genuinely better opportunities

Quite a contrast with the story

So hares are the locals and rabbits are the French immigrants

Clearly you haven't seen their natural habitat: suburban shopping centers.

The big assumption is that technological intelligence is a fairly predictable endpoint once evolution produces the right kind of general intelligence

Fifty thousand years is basically nothing evolutionarily, yet from the outside Earth would look like it had undergone a planetary regime change driven by one species

Interesting that biodiversity and biomass are almost orthogonal. A tropical forest can have hundreds of important tree species, while a boreal forest can put a huge fraction of its total mass into three or four

I think the weirdest part of that scenario is that science might become something closer to archaeology