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What is the most successful animal on earth? I don't know, but I do know that the dinosaurs where on earth for about a hundred and sixty five million years. The dinosaurs will be more successful than we are if we kill ourselves off in under a hundred and sixty five million years.
Then people will say things like well we are more technologically advanced than any other species on earth. Under that metric sure that would be true, but we will fail at many more metrics than we are successful in.
Concepts like success, advancement and progress are human ideas and while we can use them the rest of the universe does not care one bit about them. It only exists in the brains of people. I'm having trouble concisely defining what I want to talk about here. If you understand what I am getting at, kindly explain it to me.
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Humans have not been around for a very long time, but we have accomplished a lot, and the life of the average human individual today is arguably higher quality than that of any member of any species at any point in the Earth's history prior to emergence of humans. I believe that this is a stronger evidence of success than the raw lifespan of the species.
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Well, "success" at what? "success" is the accomplishment of an aim. What is the "aim" we are talking about? Dinosaurs were succesful at surviving for a long time, as you said. Here the aim is "to survive for a long time".
So when you ask "what is the most successful species?" my reply is "successful at what?".
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"Then people will say things like well we are more technologically advanced than any other species on earth. Under that metric sure that would be true, but we will fail at many more metrics than we are successful in."
Therefore I agree with this statement. Unless you specify what the aim is, you cannot decide on what species is the most "succesful".
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"Concepts like success, advancement and progress are human ideas and while we can use them the rest of the universe does not care one bit about them."
Well, why do we have to care about the fact that the universe does not care about them? It is fine to have abstract ideas as long as they are defined properly. I think you meant to say that it is a mistake to associate "success" with "advancement or progress in technology". If so, I agree with you.
A lot of people just say that humans are the most succesful species because they are the ones who made the most advancements. But these people, without realizing, accept the "aim" as "making advancements". If we have another aim, humans can even turn out to be the least succesful species.
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At any rate, success is a topic we need to more clearly define. As other have asked: "successful at what?"
If you're leaving it open-ended, then the correct assumption would be to assume overall success in literally all possible matters of the universe. This is something we can't answer at all given that no one is omniscient, and there are far more possible topics we know nothing about than topics we do know about.
The Lexico dictionary as offered by Oxford University defines success as "The accomplishment of an aim or purpose."[1]
Hence your question is rather open-ended. There are possibly an infinite possible aims humans and dinosaurs or anyone for that matter, have. We don't know all of them, so it is literally impossible for us to say someone or some species is more successful than another.
Additionally, as an absurdist, I'd argue there is no intrinsic purpose to human life, even though we are seeking one. If there is no purpose to our life, one could argue there's no such thing as success or failure. Of course, we could limit it to a person's "aim", but that's still subjective. What if one person's aim is different from another's? My aim in my life is to be satisfied with the effort I'm giving to accomplish the goals I have. I currently am satisfied with the effort I'm giving. So, by my standard, I'm extremely successful. But if someone else thinks my aims in my life should be different, then they would likely not view me with the same amount of success I view myself as having.
Sources:
[1] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/success
-Albert Camus, Notebook IV
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