I wonder how much of that was simply being early versus having genuinely better opportunities

Quite a contrast with the story

Lobster was once considered only fit for prisoners and poor people (due to being a bottom feeder).

So hares are the locals and rabbits are the French immigrants

Hares were also introduced.

The mountain hare (Lepus timidus) is native to England. Brown hare (Lepus europaeus) was introduced.

Interesting that biodiversity and biomass are almost orthogonal. A tropical forest can have hundreds of important tree species, while a boreal forest can put a huge fraction of its total mass into three or four

Clearly you haven't seen their natural habitat: suburban shopping centers.

Fifty thousand years is basically nothing evolutionarily, yet from the outside Earth would look like it had undergone a planetary regime change driven by one species

The big assumption is that technological intelligence is a fairly predictable endpoint once evolution produces the right kind of general intelligence

I think the weirdest part of that scenario is that science might become something closer to archaeology

The term you are looking for is hermeneutics.

Love it! I am now a Software Hermanuticist

Hmmmm. Yeah plausible.

I'm not sure the scarce resource will be people capable of understanding the AI's work. It may be institutions willing to tolerate the cost of understanding it

HBM isn't dramatically better in every dimension. You get huge bandwidth and good energy efficiency per bit transferred, but not necessarily a meaningful latency improvement and capacity expansion becomes tied to the package