Creyeditor wrote: ↑19 Sep 2018 18:47
I just had an idea. What about very small bats? It seems that some species of bat are only a few centimeters large, if you check Wiki.
Also there's Homopus, the smallest tortoise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homopus_signatus
On the other end of the scale, ants could get as big as Carpenter Ants, or bigger. I just had a bout with some Carpenter Ants in my house. They're quite larger than the smaller black and brown and red ants. They're easier to kill, too
The largest ants are the Dinoponerans of South America, which see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinoponera
IMHO sentient insects might stick closer to breeding other insects for food or draft, or companionship.
Carboniferous… the time of mists
Interesting. Quite possibly b/c there was more oxygen (ozone?) in the atmosphere. Back then, paleo-ecologists have suggested that the level of oxygen in the atmosphere was higher, and thus much larger species of insect and arthropod (e.g. Meganeura, Arthropleura, etc) could have existed on land, and grown to much larger than modern sizes.
But then there's this, which I just found out about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate#Etymology
Wow. Always something new under the Sun!
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On another note, I do not think that a planet could support 30-some sentient species for long.
It's not impossible to contemplate that, throughout Earth's history, 30 very different species might have, at certain moments in the billions of years of prehistory, arisen, swelled into civilizations, and then perished as fossil Ozymandians, lost in the dusts of Time. They would never have seen, and possibly have found no evidence of one another at all.
On another other note, while it seems from fossil record that multiple rather intelligent hominins co-existed alongside Homo sapiens, it seems that we either hunted, slaughtered, or mated those other species (e.g. Neanderthals ) to extinction. SO it might seem that sentience breeds contempt, to some degree.