> Although elephants are very intelligent, we're the smarter than them and outnumber them and all other animals by a large margin.

We are out-numbered by many orders of magnitude by a number of different animals:

Which life form dominates Earth? http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150211-whats-the-most-domin...

This strange, glowing fish is more abundant than rats, chickens, and humans combined https://www.businessinsider.com/bristlemouth-fish-is-the-mos...

Along With Humans, Who Else Is In The 7 Billion Club? https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141946751...

Yes I definitely see that point of view. Being smart is a special case of being adaptable, but many other organisms thrive by being well adapted in their niche.

On the other hand, Sapiens has a good quote about there being 2 (at least ?) orders of magnitude more domesticated dogs than wolves in the world. Ditto for pigs and wild hogs, or cattle and comparable wild herbivores.

It has many other pretty shocking statistics about large cats, elephants, etc. The world today is simply much more suited to a dog's way of being than a wolves'.

To put it more starkly, wolves will likely be extinct long before dogs are, because of their different relationship to humans.

But of course ants and other species don't compete for the same resources as humans, and are complementary many ways.

aurochs are extinct

I think anyone reading that would assume he meant large animals.

We are smarter, whatever that means. But not by that much. Our main differantor is technology. If you went back in time and looked at a feckless human tribe hunting it would not be that different than orcas, wolves or any other social mammal predator.

With hands to build tools that build machines and books to communicate. Basically dialing advantages of hunting in packs up in orders of magnitude over time.

Similarly, "the computer is a bicycle for the mind."

It probably wouldn't take a billion years. The last common ancestor of humans and orcas seems to have been about 95 million years ago.

For reference, a billion years ago, there were no animals or plants yet.

Given that, maybe there are a lot of species that really weren't too far off from human level intellligence, but we just got there first?

> It would be interesting/weird if the sea filled up with one large, intelligent animal that lived everywhere.

https://www.amazon.com/War-Newts-Karel-Capek/dp/0945774109/

Without fire, it's hard to imagine the virtuous cycle getting kick-started in the same way

Fire is important but, borrowing from Jared Diamond, I think agriculture/domestication is the defining technology that enables population density and growth. A steady food supply enables density, which leads to exchange of and competition in ideas. e.g. compare a city with 100,000 citizens vs. a hunter-gatherer society.

Fire is related to agriculture but maybe not essential. It could be some other kind of chemical reaction that occurs outside the body.

It's hard to imagine how descendants of orcas could create agriculture in the ocean, but not impossible. I mean humans have domesticated fish, shrimp, mollusks, etc. for farming. And probably some marine plants.

It does seem like shallow water is probably the best bet, but maybe that's my lack of imagination.

I agree agriculture is possible in some form. That's why I think the real blocker is combustion. Is there any other kind of chemical reaction that can generate energy that can be harnessed and that works underwater?