Allopatric speciation of fruit-flies seems to take but weeks, much less then squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods. How about us? How long will it take until we are no more alone… again ? since the fun times of Universe sharing with the Neanderthalians as the only other tool-making, walking and talking beings.
We might soon get a chance to figure it out, as some of us seem on their way to make it to Mars, after all. And chances are that if some eventually settle there, you’ll probably not get to see them every weekend. They will live their separate ways, their separate survival strategies, their separate sicknesses. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into… two separate species.
What will happen then? Will the martians communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding be so great that we’ll eventually loose all interest in each other?
In any case, this confrontation with such a similar otherness will lead us to re-evaluate all our values, and some of these to our greatest good. Rather than waiting for aliens to come, this is our chance to make some of our own.
BG
OTL