A hive mind? A hive mind implies a self-aware, or at least relatively intelligent power directing the members of this hypothetical hive. (most) Animals are most certainly not members of any such organization.
Animals think in terms of family. Lioness hunts to feed family, not lioness. Birds eat whatever the hell it is they eat and then regurgitate it for their young. If they were driven as individuals, they would act as individuals. The lioness would tell the lion to get off his lazy ass and get his own food.
Huge overgeneralization. The huge majority of animals are solitary, with many not even taking care of their own offspring. Humans, by the way, are also by their nature a social creature, and most apes (nearest human relatives) also tend to live in families and larger groups. The lioness doesn't say anything because she's a dumb machine made of flesh and her programming tells her that she should be doing the hunting, not because she's guided by a higher intelligence that also guides the other members of the family. WTF I can't believe you're seriously suggesting this...
*shrug* animals don't care about the survival of their species. They can't even grasp the concept of \"species\". All they care about is their own survival and the survival of their own direct descendants (a good example would be a lion who kills and eats the cubs of another lion who mated with the same lioness as he did, a common occurence in nature).
I think you're underminding the intelligence of animals. If an animal will respond when it's name is called, who's to say it can't become self-aware? In this case, who's to say they're different from us on any level other than shape and brain size?
Only very certain animals respond to the names we give to them, and then most of them were selectively bred by us to be that way. They are most certainly not self aware. They \"could one day\" become self aware, just like \"I could one day\" become a God, so start worshipping me you filthy heathen! (in case someone didn't get it, we dudge stuff by the way they are at present, not what they \"might\" and \"might not\" one day become. Imagine if people were imprisoned because \"one day\" they might become criminals!)
An industrial society such as ourself, with no food or energy shortages, can easily afford to burn/bury/dissect/send-into-space/whatever-energy-intensive-process-have-you the corpses. A carnivorous animal, however, is in constant struggle to get more food before it and its offspring starve to death. Thus, the animal would instinctively eat the dead flesh of any of its own kind. To that animal, it's meat - it doesn't care what kind of meat. Animals are NOT picky. You might want to think your arguments through in the future, this one was rediculously easy to turn onto itself Wink
That's the point. We can easily afford to waste stuff on absolutely nothing whatsoever (and we do this very, very often). Animals can't.
Not so fast, there. Animals are picky, there are very few who will eat anything you throw at them, and even fewer who will eat their own species.
Nonsense. Most animals would eat absolutely anything you throw at them provided it smells right, often even stuff they can't digest (just try overfeeding fish once). With the exception of domesticated animals which were trained to be that way by humans (ie. dogs not accepting food from strangers).
The way we treat the dead puts a monkey wrench in the gears of nature on a very fundamental level. In nature, we are born from the ground, live off it, and when we die we return to it. In human society this is not the case. If we keep launching our dead toward the sun like you suggest, then since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, all the matter that makes up the earth will eventually be taken up by human corpses.
I hope you're not serious O_o
1) We don't actually launch corpses into the sun, we bury them or cremate them - they return to the ground. The worms usually eat them. See? Nature at work.
2) Even if we did, do you have ANY idea how massive the Earth is? Millions of generations launched into the sun won't put a dent in Earth's mass. By then the human race will not exist as it is today (or at all).
3) Meteorites. There are plenty of micrometeorites impacting Earth's atmosphere every day, adding mass. Earth is not an entirely closed system, just close to closed.
Sure, we could spread out to the farthest reaches of the universe, but since right now we have no prospective planets to move to, and the speed of light limits how fast we can move to any such planets, we really are fighting a losing battle.
Nope. Like I said, colonization of space is not the only solution, by far. I don't really see any losing battle here. We already don't really need oil that much (we keep using it out of convenience, not out of neccessity), we can re-plant a crapload of trees very very fast, we don't really need most animals for our own survival (another species will quickly fill in the ecological niche of any extinct species, or we can repopulate it from genetic stocks), and the best part is that if any serious damage is going to be done to Earth at all, it's gonna be a looong time till then. By then, even more technologies will be developed, leading to even MORE potential solutions. We and Earth are not in any danger. Animals are still dumb robots. Wake up.
No animal forms societies large enough to do this on the scale you soggest. However, many (even most) animals are highly territorial and easily attack any of its own kind if it wanders too close. I don't see how doing the same thing but on a larger scale somehow constitutes as \"evil\".
you're right. war in itself isn't the problem, it's the reasons we go to war, and the side effects of war. We've turned cities into nuclear wastelands, green fields into cratered deserts because of war. If you sink a ship, the crew dies. However, how much other life dies as a result of all the oil in the fuel reserves? If we simply lined ourselves up and killed each other with our bare hands instead of chemicals and bombs, we'd be helping keep the population under control.
And we still survive *shrug*. Not only that, but we constantly explore any other option before commiting ourself to war. Oh how horrible we are to try and supress the agressive instincts we (and all other animals) are born with! Animals don't grasp any concept of \"diplomacy\", I assure you. The reasons we go to war, also, are often completely justiifed (just look at Iraq, how many millions more would have died under Saddam's regime...) And again I reffer you to ants.
\"The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.\" --Journey to the Ants, page 59. Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson
*sigh* the beauty of this quote...
Natural resources... and who exactly needs those natural resources? I'm talking about the oil, coal, metals etc. Why is it so admirable that there are huge untouched natural resources? Who NEEDS them? The animals? Gaia? Roll Eyes
Exactly, Gaiea doesn't need any of those. Actually when I was talking about natural resources I was referring to how the earth was covered with forests, which were in turn teeming with diverse species. Uncivilized earth was the strongest, most abundant ecosystem ever.
The strongest ever... well, I suppose you're right, it did have a strong competition from ecosystems of other planets, and it... oh wait! Earth is the only planet that HAS an ecosystem! But that aside, Earth didn't have skyscrapers before humans. There.
Nope. We can label any society which keeps a steady population growth \"evil\". That's most of the middle and far east. Oh, and Africa. The west has a stagnant population growth (which some liberal idiots for some reason confuse with cultural stagnation, but let's not get into that), that means it's good.
And yet every year we produce more and more food. Where is this food going? Why, to the growing cultures who have exceeded the population limits of their territories, of course.
The food is going to the ones who can afford to buy it. If the poor poor third world countries want some of that food, why won't they get off their lazy butts for a change, kick out the dictators, elect good leaders, and get a capitalistic economy going so they can afford all the food they WANT? But noooo going into civil wars over whose religious sect is superior sounds like a so much better idea...
I don't understand why some people expect food to magically fall from the sky for them without expecting to do any real effort... seriously, want some food? Don't sell your agricultural products to others if you have food shortages. And distribute them among the population properly. And STOP YOUR POPULATION GROWTH. Seriously, I don't see at all why the west owes ANYTHING to those backwards nations.
Also, there are plenty of solutions to overpopulation that do not involve any of the things you mentioned. Space colonization, tight birth control, cloning of animal and plant tissue, and that's merely off the top of my head.
Maybe it's just me, but none of those sound very appealing to me. Space colonization? I'd rather die than live in a cold metal shell floating around space. I'd never get to walk in the woods, and I'd be drinking my own recycled piss and sweat.
*shrug* fine, live on Earth while others, who preffer the beautiful view out of the window than some funny-smelling \"woods\", rain, biting insects and murderous gravity, will live in space.
Tight birth control? Let some authoritarian government decide who gets to have children and who doesn't? Let someone deny me the most basic of all natural rights, a right that all life from microbes to humans enjoy: the right to reproduce?
Suuuure because it is common knowledge that ONLY authoritarian governments have laws and regulations But I'd rather cope with a 2 children only limitat (like the one in effect today in China) than with a global population boom.
Cloning of animal and plant tissue? We still will hit a population maximum, and so this only solves the problem of feeding our huge civilization. This also renders all animal and plant life useless to us, which would spell the end of genetic diversity, the end of evolution, and sooner or later the end of humanity.
...You lost me here. HOW does cloning plants and animals magically stops diversion and evolution? We will have multiple genetic stocks which we will randomly pair-up for cloning... viola, diversity.
Yep. I bet the still-alive but paralyzed rat that feels itself being slowly crushed in the snake's stomache doesn't really care whether the snake is hungry or not.
This isn't torture, this is eating. The still-living microbes in my stomach don't seem to mind that they're being slowly acid-burned to death.
But it's an inhumane feeding. Those inhumane snakes, quick, somebody put them in isolation and feed them only bonzo! Ahem, anyway, I don't see what you're getting at.
Is he capable of distinguishing himself as a separate identity from his surroundings? I could now go on about Freud and stuff, but I'd rather keep the discussion as simple as possible. Suffice to say that self-awarness is simply a full awarness of the existence of oneself as a separate entity. That's at least how I would define it.
I don't see how locomotion is possible without a sense of \"self\" as you're defining it here. Keep trying.
Ever seen a programmed robot on wheels?
And read some Freud, my friend. Specifically, about the Ego, Super Ego, and Id. Self awarness is NOT something trivial.
Also, the animals don't seem to care about killing either humans or each other. I don't know why we should go out of our skin to help them.
If you care about genetic diversity and the future of life, you should care about animals as much as humans. It's only a matter of time before a virus or a change in environment kills off the human race, and if we want intelligent life to ever grace this planet again, we should prepare for such an eventuality.
Nonsense. First of all, it's not our bussiness if intelligent life will ever appear here or not. It IS, however, our business to exploit the ONLY advantage we were given by evolution over any other animals, and that's intelligence and self awareness. We do that by pushing the technological limits further and further, and that requires a significant industrial base. The animals are suffering? Tough shit, they better take up arms against us or turn around and bend over. We are the only species to ever reach self awarness and with the potential to unlock the mysteries of the universe, and we're NOT going to blow this chance by pulling back from inflicting the same kind of damage to animals as they constantly keep inflicting upon each other.
|
|
Bookmarks