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Tim Tyler's avatar

Re: "will diversity continue to increase, or at least not greatly decrease, into the distant future?"

The total amount of genetic information is likely to increase - since the number of unexplored niches is large, and living systems will develop systems that exploit them.

Will there be lots of creatures - or one big one with many manifestations? It is hard to say for sure - except at small scales, where there will *probably* still be something *like* bacteria - which will still necessarily be capable of independent reproduction and so probably evolution.

So - based on the idea of the existence of many small independent creatures, and the existence of very many unexplored niches for them, it seems as though diversity is likely to continue to increase in the long term - though maybe it depends somewhat on exactly how "diversity" is defined and measure.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Uniformity is unstable.

We could have had GreenGrassRabbitFoxes as the sole species on the planet that hunted each other and also performed photosynthesis. Sometimes they used their pointy teeth to rend and gnash flesh, and sometimes they just grazed on the outcropping of photosynthesizing fur. It didn't happen.

I pity a world created by human imagination. How droll it would be. The universe contains vastly more computational power, and it's selective process is far more creative.

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