“Humans have gone farther than other species’ in understanding and manipulating the world; matter, energy, the laws of physics, etc. While many other intelligent species have learned how to use tools and manipulate their environment to complete basic tasks such as feeding/surviving/mating, humans have learned to break matter down to its basic elements to create things not made from nature. Humans are also the only species that play God and use more resources than we need, as far as I’m aware. I think a lot of this speaks to our intelligence. If we’re simply defining intelligence as the capacity to learn, reason and solve problems, it’s clear that humans are the most intelligent species, which is why we’ve pretty much dominated the planet. Although, we have created as many problems as we’ve solved. But I think consciousness is a different story. I don’t think we know enough about consciousness to say that humans are the only conscious species. There’s the long withstanding argument that believing humans to be the only “conscious” species is egotistical. This gets into the whole “what is consciousness” debate, which is a different tangent, but the question of whether consciousness is what separates humans from other lifeforms can’t be answered until we understand more about it.”