If you like things like megafauna and paleontology, and comics, you may like this Dresden Codak page. The article made me think of it, anyway. I wonder…intelligence presumably requires a certain level of mass. Does this suggest that any relatively highly intelligent species will likely exterminate any other species large enough to evolve high intelligence? So, would all planets where life has evolved result in a single sentient species?‘homo sapiens growth rate and hunting ability almost always led to mass extinctions, with hunting ability being the most important of all parameters’. Big animals are particularly susceptible to extinction
Maybe. But maybe not for the reasons I originally thought. Thinking about it some more, we haven't exterminated gorillas, for example. But there are 7,000,000,000 humans and 100,000 gorillas. Evolution can't happen very fast with only 100k individuals. So, I'm still inclined to think any planet would result in one sapient species, but maybe not from hunting as much as simply virally overtaking a world.