[rojobuffalo]

We're sharing the planet with several intelligent species at this moment. Maybe a worthwhile distinction would be intelligence sufficient to dominant an entire planetary ecology; or sufficient to intentionally become multi-planetary.

[Swizec]

Dominate the planet is tricky too. Corvids for instance are almost as widespread as humans. They don't do greenland and the southern parts of south america.

But they happen to be less destructive to their environment than humans so maybe that disqualifies them from the "dominate" part?

That said, humans also don't quality for multi-planetary. I like that definition, though.

[rojobuffalo]

Good point about corvids. Ants are another example I was thinking about. They actually do engineer ecology on the scale of individual mounds by feeding and growing fungi that they eat. They are spread all over the Earth, and I think they have us beat in terms of biomass. Maybe there could be another definition for a weaker form of intelligence that covers those cases.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Ants are especially interesting. Each individual is very simple, you could probably create an accurate ant model with a (very big) finite state machine. Yet entire colonies are extremely complex. I suspect that it's analogous to human brain cells vs the entire brain. Each cell isn't intelligent alone, but the whole is.

[eric_h]

> That said, humans also don't quality for multi-planetary.

True, but we've definitely sent probes to other planets, and a few people did manage to walk on the moon, so we're certainly farther to the right on the multi-planetary spectrum than any other species on our planet.