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Q&A

How quickly could a population of humans evolve into a different species?

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I was thinking of a sci-fi story where a large population of human beings (let's say anywhere between hundreds and millions) live on a planet with robot guardians. But after a certain amount of time living in isolation from the rest of humanity, their genetic code changes enough that their DNA is no longer marked as homo sapiens by the computers. The machines turn on them, having been programmed to protect their human wards from potential "alien species."

How many years would the human colony have to be on the planet for that twist to be plausible?

Side question: If I made the planet more radioactive, could I plausibly speed up the evolutionary process in a way that wouldn't horribly scar the actual people? If not, is there another way to speed up the process while keeping the community as close to human as possible?

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/26501. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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