just a thought about humans page 2

2. Like what? What arguments?

already provided.

3. For a microbe to wipe us out, it would have to be incredibly adept, fast-killing, and very unstable

did yo uforget the black death killing 66% of Europeans at the time?

EVEN THEN, it would NOT BE THE DOMINANT SPECIES. You know why? Any doctor can tell you why: Because if you kill all of your hosts, then YOU DIE TOO. A microbe’s primary objective (granted, I’m semi-pretending that this microbe is somewhat sentient) is never to kill. It is to create a symbiotic relationship with its host. That way, it can continue replicating. A microbe that kills its host (especially one that kills its host prior to infecting another biological target) is not a very successful microbe at all. As a matter of fact, it is a complete and total failure.

it’s not the survival of the indivudual that matters, but of the species/population. so it doesn’t matter if the host dies so long as you are capable of spreading from one host to the other, either before or after death.

also it’s not necessary for a microbe to rely on humans for a host.

4. “Insects” is not a particular species. “Insects” do not work together to form one “supreme being” (same for “microbes”). Thus saying that “insects” can replace us as the dominant species is entirely unfair. Maybe if you said something like “army ants” or something like that, then maybe that would be little more “fair”.

well there are several individual species to choose between. but i am not a walking encyclopedia that knows the name of each individual species of all classes of animals. besides, the distinction between species is not always clear or known. ants for instance, come in many forms, but which are and which aren’t the same species is still largely guess-work. new forms of ants come by very often.
you mentioned army-ants. but that’s probably a sub-species.

Also, majority of insects have similar heat and cold tolerances that we do. In case you didn’t notice, we’re animals too, and, if your resourceful, you can live just about anywhere they can.

nah. most insects can take exceptional heat much better than us. many insects can survive being frozen. and while we are warm-blooded, insects have no blood. they can usually also take a lot more radiation or other forms of poisoning than we can.

look at chernobyl. what lives there? insects. and microbes. even in the vacuüm of space some can live.

With our brains, we have managed to triumph over everything nature has thrown at us. Don’t have fur? We can build a fire. Don’t have venom? Can’t catch our prey on foot? We create weapons.

naw. we can immitate nature, but only because of the brilliant examples they give us. without those examples, we’d never’ve been able to come up with much of our technological feats.

and we are still behind nature in a whole lot of ways. like the Cheetah for instance, can accelerate faster than any man-made machine using land-propulsion.
if you look at the “weird nature” and such documentaries, you will see many more examples. Cuttlefish comes to mind.

More than zero. And that’s enough to prove my point.

hmm, so .0000000001% of us has “been” there, more or less, trapped in a metal bubble, where no other land animal has been alive. meh.

We’ve looked.

We’ve looked multiple times. Both on the moon and in ocean beds. Despite all this looking, we’ve found no evidence of advanced trilobite technology. Also, trilobite physiology suggests they weren’t particularly intelligent.

half a billion years ago there wouldn’t be much left, would it? and how many trilobites do we have fossil records of? i mean, how smart did our ancestors look a few million years ago?

On the other hand, we’ve already wiped out a few diseases, our population is growing faster than ever, and we’re getting better and better at dealing with insects and microbes.

population booms are seen in other animals at times. it’s usually bad. and our population boom is not very impressive if you look at the insect or microbic world.

take the locust…

We are more likely than any species in history to leave the planet, on our own terms.

well yay us. wait, what were we talking about? oh right. so what if other animals chose not to evolve this kind of technology? i mean, what price are we paying for all this? does this really make us superior?

i bet dolphins are laughing their asses off at us for our rat-race adn (self)destruction, while they swim around and have fun. and make us catch some fish for them.

^^I can’t take it much further than that but just one thing…the black death could have been avoided with better hygiene, it killed lots of people in europe but never became an epidemic in (probably never even reached) Japan of that eara, just because they didn’t have showel loads of rats running around….but that’s not the point of this discussion so sorry…

without those examples, we’d never’ve been able to come up with much of our technological feats.

How so? I heavily doubt it that if there were no animals with fur we wouldn’t be able to make clothes.
There also isn’t a lot of examples for any of our more modern technologies in nature.

insects have no blood

This is false. Insects have an open circulatory system with blood.

even in the vacuüm of space some can live.

Only so much until they run out of food. But yes, there is organic matter (and perhaps even life) on asteroids.

did yo uforget the black death killing 66% of Europeans at the time?

Wasn’t that an incredibly adept, fast-killing, and very unstable bacteria? Wasn’t it also nearly 700 years ago, when hygiene was shit?

hmm, so .0000000001% of us has “been” there, more or less, trapped in a metal bubble, where no other land animal has been alive. meh.

So what? What matter is that us as a species managed to do that. We could send everyone down there, but it’s useless. WE ARE CAPABLE.

half a billion years ago there wouldn’t be much left, would it?

It’s heavily unlikely. Stop with the conspiracy theories – every single evidence points to trilobytes being extremely primitive and non-capable of going to the moon. It’s more likely that “the sun is actually -50ºC in temperature but is made of a substance that irradiates a special kind of wave that becomes hot after a few thousand miles” than that the “trilobites left a memento on the moon intentionally” (meaning a meteor explosion that blew up the land here and made a fossil reach the moon isn’t valid).

can accelerate faster than any man-made machine using land-propulsion.

It can accelerate faster than any normal car, but surely not faster than all of our land-propulsion machines.

and how many trilobites do we have fossil records of?

An incredible amount.

i mean, how smart did our ancestors look a few million years ago?

As smart as a conservative, a religious person, a pro-life, a Mitt Romney supporter, etc. all together. Which is not much.

so what if other animals chose not to evolve this kind of technology?

I don’t think they are aware that this technology exists. Laika didn’t even know what the fuck she was doing.

Disclaimer: I don’t even know what the discussion is about. Is it about humans being superior than other animals or not? If so, let me warn you that this is a deeply philosophical question that could fill books and still reach no answer. You guys should stick to the scientific parts of the argument like I did just for the fun of it and forget about the superiority thing.

How so? I heavily doubt it that if there were no animals with fur we wouldn’t be able to make clothes.
There also isn’t a lot of examples for any of our more modern technologies in nature.

it’s not about being able to make it; it’s about coming up with the idea. clothes i’m sure we’d have come up with eventually, but it has to do with how more than what.

with almost any advanced technology, we look to how it’s done in nature to see how it’s done right, and then mimic that. like gecko tape. in many ways nature is still ahead of us. nature is far ahead of us in sensory system. despite all our technology, nothing compares to a sharks ability to smell. and then there’s echolocation, there’s sensing electricity or disturbances in the water. there are fish that can see the difference between direct light and refracted light. what about taste? i don’t think we have any technology that can instantly tell that much about the chemical composition of something. some animals taste with their “feet”.
we’re constantly just trying to mimic nature. they already had jet engines and many things like that.

even more dramatic is how it is said that animals knew about the tsumani when humans didn’t. there’s even so much we don’t know yet.

This is false. Insects have an open circulatory system with blood.

no, no blood. “open circulatory system” means airways. we breathe air to our lungs, and use blood to pass it around. they skip a step.

Only so much until they run out of food. But yes, there is organic matter (and perhaps even life) on asteroids.

so they traveled space probably way before us.

Wasn’t that an incredibly adept, fast-killing, and very unstable bacteria? Wasn’t it also nearly 700 years ago, when hygiene was shit?

yes.

So what? What matter is that us as a species managed to do that. We could send everyone down there, but it’s useless. WE ARE CAPABLE.

great. we can enter fish and invertabrae territory. except we don’t really enter it, we isolate ourselves from it with several inch thick metal.

It’s heavily unlikely. Stop with the conspiracy theories – every single evidence points to trilobytes being extremely primitive and non-capable of going to the moon. It’s more likely that “the sun is actually -50ºC in temperature but is made of a substance that irradiates a special kind of wave that becomes hot after a few thousand miles” than that the “trilobites left a memento on the moon intentionally” (meaning a meteor explosion that blew up the land here and made a fossil reach the moon isn’t valid)

we’ve been wrong before. but anywya, the trilodites don’t really matter. ANY species having developed intentional space-travel before us would do. some dinosaurs were pretty intelligent.

It can accelerate faster than any normal car, but surely not faster than all of our land-propulsion machines.

uhm….yes, faster acceleration than motorcycles as well.

As smart as a conservative, a religious person, a pro-life, a Mitt Romney supporter, etc. all together. Which is not much.

lol.

I don’t think they are aware that this technology exists. Laika didn’t even know what the fuck she was doing.

crows can read traffic lights.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

with almost any advanced technology, we look to how it’s done in nature to see how it’s done right, and then mimic that.

Like with computers, right?

When designing the ALU (the unit that performs the simple mathematical operations that serve as the basis for everything else), we looked at birds’ brains to see what algorithm they used to add binary numbers.

When optimizing the pipeline (the setup that manages sequences of operations), we took inspiration from how polar bears do their laundry.

Transistors are based on rivers and their tributaries (because without a tributary flowing in, the main river stops flowing). The C programming language is based on the Mediterranean Sea. AES (an encryption protocol) is based on how squirrels hide nuts from one another. HTTP (the protocol used for much of the web) is based on how bees communicate the location of desirable flowers.

Oh, wait, none of that is actually true.

Nothing in nature resembles the inner workings of a modern computer, and we designed said computers on our own.

well, that’s very creative, i liked that, but you can’t really say that nature doesn’t have something similar to computers. and i doubt there’s nothing in a computer that wasn’t at some point based on something found in nature. i can’t know everything, but i know many things are found out or developed that way.

anyway, i think we’ve lost the point here.

with almost any advanced technology, we look to how it’s done in nature to see how it’s done right

Not really. Most high-tech stuff have no inspiration from nature – technologies that copy animals are rare and far between.

nature is far ahead of us in sensory system.

I would like to know if any animal other than humans can know the composition of the Earth’s core, or give an educated and well-based guess of Jupiter’s atmosphere composition, or even see distant galaxies. We have built machines that can do far more than any organic material could ever even dream to.

and then there’s echolocation

It’s a very simple process, and it’s an example of something we’ve mimicked.

there’s sensing electricity or disturbances in the water

Easy to do.

there are fish that can see the difference between direct light and refracted light

I don’t think I quite understand this. How is it useful and how does it work?

i don’t think we have any technology that can instantly tell that much about the chemical composition of something.

Just like animals taste with their feet, we taste with our mouth (and nose). What’s so special about it? Regardless, we can tell much more about chemical compositions than animals can with our machines.

they already had jet engines and many things like that.

?

even more dramatic is how it is said that animals knew about the tsumani when humans didn’t.

Proof? Regardless, if we lived in the sea we’d know it to, if they really can. Nothing special about it, just different lifestyles.

no, no blood. “open circulatory system” means airways. we breathe air to our lungs, and use blood to pass it around. they skip a step.

I mean, come on, you’re using a computer.

• http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2005/10/17/do_insects_have_blood/
• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090607214721AAcmTAc
• http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/general-facts-about-insects-and-bugs
• http://www.whyzz.com/do-insects-have-blood
• http://insects-science.blogspot.com.br/2011/05/do-insects-have-blood.html
• http://insects.about.com/od/morphology/ss/internalanatomy_4.htm

so they traveled space probably way before us.

What kind of reasoning is this? We made the advanced technology to travel through space in the direction we want, with food & water, without being exposed to the maelstrom of bad shit the vacuum of space has, etc. etc.
Animals have only ever gotten there without even knowing what the hell was happening. A meteor hits the groud, BAM, a rock gets launched into space and inside it there are microbes. Do you REALLY consider this “traveling to space”?

great. we can enter fish and invertabrae territory. except we don’t really enter it, we isolate ourselves from it with several inch thick metal.

So what? What matters is that we’re there. We can be everywhere with our technology, because we are smart enough to use it to make-up for our biological imperfections. The fishes, in the other hand, have never built a machine that makes them able to survive on land.

ANY species having developed intentional space-travel before us would do. some dinosaurs were pretty intelligent.

Source? Regardless, my bets are on that even dolphins are smarter than dinosaurs – and there’s a gigantic gap between them and us. 99,99999999999999999999999999% of the evidence shows that they did not do so.

crows can read traffic lights.

But can they understand their purpose? Can they build it? Can they understand what are the mechanics behind it?

When optimizing the pipeline (the setup that manages sequences of operations), we took inspiration from how polar bears do their laundry.

I LOL’D

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

anyway, i think we’ve lost the point here.

That we have. In fact, I knew my last post was getting off track even before posting it. I went ahead anyway because I had to go and wanted to have posted something first.

Anyway, I think the following would make for a more productive discussion:

• You’re willing to admit, however grudgingly, that humans can do things with technology that other life forms cannot.
• However, you don’t think this is all that important. (Direct quote: “meh.”)
• So, the center of your argument lies elsewhere.

This is, as far as I can tell, the main point you are trying to make:

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

i bet dolphins are laughing their asses off at us for our rat-race adn (self)destruction, while they swim around and have fun.

Your point isn’t really about how well our technology works, it’s about other animals being better off anyway.

Does that sound about right?

Yeah, the main point of this topic has been lost, so with that I bow out and leave this to the smarter people and those that understand what the hell is going on to duke it out.

Not really. Most high-tech stuff have no inspiration from nature – technologies that copy animals are rare and far between.

ok, they’re rare.

I would like to know if any animal other than humans can know the composition of the Earth’s core, or give an educated and well-based guess of Jupiter’s atmosphere composition, or even see distant galaxies. We have built machines that can do far more than any organic material could ever even dream to.

by proximity. we can’t tell the earth’s core form here, we have to make our machines dig down. i wonder how deep down organisms go… all the way i bet.

Easy to do.

not with that aptitude.

I don’t think I quite understand this. How is it useful and how does it work?

it’s useful for detecting transparant marine creatures. how it works…if it’s known, it’s very complex. i don’t remember the creatures name, so.

Just like animals taste with their feet, we taste with our mouth (and nose)

we’re not very good at it.

?

watch more weird nature docs.

Proof? Regardless, if we lived in the sea we’d know it to, if they really can. Nothing special about it, just different lifestyles.

just different lifestyle…great blanket excuse for everything. i have no proof but it’s said that animals cleared the area.

I mean, come on, you’re using a computer.

•http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2005/10/17/do_insects_have_blood/
•http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090607214721AAcmTAc
•http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/general-facts-about-insects-and-bugs
•http://www.whyzz.com/do-insects-have-blood
•http://insects-science.blogspot.com.br/2011/05/do-insects-have-blood.html
•http://insects.about.com/od/morphology/ss/internalanatomy_4.htm

yes, and so are you. if you would actually read that stuff, you’d see that, even though they keep calling it blood, it really doesn’t sound like blood. it doesn’t run through vessels, but through the tissue itself, meaning it is merely tissue fluid. with a single tunnel (which they call a heart, but this is too, not a heart) tunneling the fluid to their head so as to create something of a flow in it, and functioning similar to our lympha system.

tissue fluid is not blood. the only difference with tissue fluid i found is that it can clot, but clottable tissue fluid still isn’t blood.

Animals have only ever gotten there without even knowing what the hell was happening. A meteor hits the groud, BAM, a rock gets launched into space and inside it there are microbes. Do you REALLY consider this “traveling to space”?

so? they still got there, presumably. does it really matter that we did so deliberately?

and do we really know there is no mind behind the microbes? i mean, what is our ‘mind’? do we even know what “thought” is?
who knows, maybe a group of dancing bees is a form of thought. maybe a bee is just a cog, and the hive as a whole actually has a mind.

Source? Regardless, my bets are on that even dolphins are smarter than dinosaurs – and there’s a gigantic gap between them and us. 99,99999999999999999999999999% of the evidence shows that they did not do so.

source for what? and how big is that “gap” between dolphins and us? i really don’t think dolphins are that much smarter than us.
or did you mean the other way around? it’s hard to tell.

and what evidence? there is no evidence whatsoever, because dinosaurs leaving the earth seems pretty much unfalsifyable.

But can they understand their purpose? Can they build it? Can they understand what are the mechanics behind it?

on a superficial level they seem to. they can’t built it, but can you? and who knows what animals can understand? perhaps they understand things we can’t understand.

Does that sound about right?

yes. that was the opinion of the OP aar.

Yeah, the main point of this topic has been lost, so with that I bow out and leave this to the smarter people and those that understand what the hell is going on to duke it out.

that would leave no one.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

2. Like what? What arguments?

already provided.

3. For a microbe to wipe us out, it would have to be incredibly adept, fast-killing, and very unstable

did yo uforget the black death killing 66% of Europeans at the time?

EVEN THEN, it would NOT BE THE DOMINANT SPECIES. You know why? Any doctor can tell you why: Because if you kill all of your hosts, then YOU DIE TOO. A microbe’s primary objective (granted, I’m semi-pretending that this microbe is somewhat sentient) is never to kill. It is to create a symbiotic relationship with its host. That way, it can continue replicating. A microbe that kills its host (especially one that kills its host prior to infecting another biological target) is not a very successful microbe at all. As a matter of fact, it is a complete and total failure.

it’s not the survival of the indivudual that matters, but of the species/population. so it doesn’t matter if the host dies so long as you are capable of spreading from one host to the other, either before or after death.

also it’s not necessary for a microbe to rely on humans for a host.

4. “Insects” is not a particular species. “Insects” do not work together to form one “supreme being” (same for “microbes”). Thus saying that “insects” can replace us as the dominant species is entirely unfair. Maybe if you said something like “army ants” or something like that, then maybe that would be little more “fair”.

well there are several individual species to choose between. but i am not a walking encyclopedia that knows the name of each individual species of all classes of animals. besides, the distinction between species is not always clear or known. ants for instance, come in many forms, but which are and which aren’t the same species is still largely guess-work. new forms of ants come by very often.
you mentioned army-ants. but that’s probably a sub-species.

Also, majority of insects have similar heat and cold tolerances that we do. In case you didn’t notice, we’re animals too, and, if your resourceful, you can live just about anywhere they can.

nah. most insects can take exceptional heat much better than us. many insects can survive being frozen. and while we are warm-blooded, insects have no blood. they can usually also take a lot more radiation or other forms of poisoning than we can.

look at chernobyl. what lives there? insects. and microbes. even in the vacuüm of space some can live.

With our brains, we have managed to triumph over everything nature has thrown at us. Don’t have fur? We can build a fire. Don’t have venom? Can’t catch our prey on foot? We create weapons.

naw. we can immitate nature, but only because of the brilliant examples they give us. without those examples, we’d never’ve been able to come up with much of our technological feats.

and we are still behind nature in a whole lot of ways. like the Cheetah for instance, can accelerate faster than any man-made machine using land-propulsion.
if you look at the “weird nature” and such documentaries, you will see many more examples. Cuttlefish comes to mind.

More than zero. And that’s enough to prove my point.

hmm, so .0000000001% of us has “been” there, more or less, trapped in a metal bubble, where no other land animal has been alive. meh.

We’ve looked.

We’ve looked multiple times. Both on the moon and in ocean beds. Despite all this looking, we’ve found no evidence of advanced trilobite technology. Also, trilobite physiology suggests they weren’t particularly intelligent.

half a billion years ago there wouldn’t be much left, would it? and how many trilobites do we have fossil records of? i mean, how smart did our ancestors look a few million years ago?

On the other hand, we’ve already wiped out a few diseases, our population is growing faster than ever, and we’re getting better and better at dealing with insects and microbes.

population booms are seen in other animals at times. it’s usually bad. and our population boom is not very impressive if you look at the insect or microbic world.

take the locust…

We are more likely than any species in history to leave the planet, on our own terms.

well yay us. wait, what were we talking about? oh right. so what if other animals chose not to evolve this kind of technology? i mean, what price are we paying for all this? does this really make us superior?

i bet dolphins are laughing their asses off at us for our rat-race adn (self)destruction, while they swim around and have fun. and make us catch some fish for them.

1. They’re weak.
2. Yes. But here we are. Still breathing. Still carrying on, and the plague is essentially gone in almost all developed countries.
3. If a microbe kills off the entire human race, it is NOT the DOMINANT SPECIES. IT IS FUCKING DEAD. Make me spell it out, eh? And yes, a microbe may not need to rely on humans to be its host, but if we’re talking about a microbe that wipes out humanity, then humans would have to be its primary target…not anything else.
4. Then pick one. And no, army ants are not a sub-species. Eciton burchellii is the species name.
5. Really? Cuz I just picked a tick off my dog and killed it by throwing it into my lit Zippo. It’s dead. Via fire. Same as what would happen to you and me. They can freeze. Try it. Stick an ant colony in your freezer. The liquid in their body freezes, expands, and causes lethal internal damage. Sure. There are…exceptions. But if you want examples of these of so elegant creature’s fragility, simply step on one. Or better yet, reach for the Raid. They’re quite fragile creatures I will have you know.
6. Really? Where was our idea for the bow and arrow? The gun? The car? The computer? The internet? The phone? Where do all of these ideas come from? You can’t possibly tell me that something out there has a computer, right?
7. Doesn’t matter. We’ve still been there.
8. Are you suggesting that what I would classify as nothing more than ancient bugs somehow created an advanced civilization? Give me a break. And it doesn’t matter how smart our ancestors looked a million years ago. All’s that matters is that Homo Sapien is the dominant species.
9. We kill locusts by the millions. No matter how many of them there are, they will never take us over. We will just kill more of them. It’s quite simple really.
10. Other animals choosing not to evolve this type of technology? You don’t get it, do you? WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS TO EVEN HAVE THE OPTION TO EVOLVE THIS TYPE OF TECHNOLOGY. That’s what makes us superior. We have so much opportunity, so many options, so much power. No other species has this.

i would think why were we chosen to be the alpha species we and talk have feelings build great things beyond most thinking of others and if we can do all those things why havent we figurerd out a way to communicate with other species

1. They’re weak.

i disagree. they’d only be weak if you assume those things to be less important than whatever it is humans have on other species of animals. so show that. this seems merely an assumption naturally flowing form the fact that we, and everyone that could have this discussion with us, is a human, and tends to evaluate everything by human terms. i’m trying to find objectivity here.

2. Yes. But here we are. Still breathing. Still carrying on, and the plague is essentially gone in almost all developed countries.

yes, so they won the battle but we won the war. still shows that they are capable of winning a battle. if they could win a battle, they could probably win a war.

3. If a microbe kills off the entire human race, it is NOT the DOMINANT SPECIES. IT IS FUCKING DEAD. Make me spell it out, eh? And yes, a microbe may not need to rely on humans to be its host, but if we’re talking about a microbe that wipes out humanity, then humans would have to be its primary target…not anything else.

yes, spell it out all you want. you’re WRONG. i just mentioned the black death. it lived in rats and fleas as well, but it did not kill those, it was only lethal to us. if, hypothetically, it killed every last one of us, that wouldn’t really hurt the bacteria/virus/what was it, because it would still endure in other tolerant hosts.

notice that i had to spell it out for you eh?

4. Then pick one. And no, army ants are not a sub-species. Eciton burchellii is the species name.

why? i don’t need to pick one. there are several candidates, there is no need to take a bet in this. i don’t know all charactaristics of all ant species from memory, what are you thinking? and i’m not going to take an hour studying all this just for you.

and we have classified a lot of ant species, but that doesn’t mean they actually ARE species. we’ve only classified that as such. i don’t think we’ve tried to cross-reproduce them by artificial insemination into fertile half-breeds. until we try, we don’t know what are actually seperate species and what are not.

5. Really? Cuz I just picked a tick off my dog and killed it by throwing it into my lit Zippo. It’s dead. Via fire. Same as what would happen to you and me. They can freeze. Try it. Stick an ant colony in your freezer. The liquid in their body freezes, expands, and causes lethal internal damage. Sure. There are…exceptions. But if you want examples of these of so elegant creature’s fragility, simply step on one. Or better yet, reach for the Raid. They’re quite fragile creatures I will have you know.

yeah, open fire is known to kill everything. just like pure alcohol. that’s what they use in hospitals to steralise operating equipment.

and they gotta do something to survive the winter. but ok, fine, most are not frost tolerant. some are. i mean… we’re not.

as for fragility: that’s just size difference. stepping on a bug does not hurt the insect species. because they have us beat in numbers and especially reproducivity (i like that word) by far. in fact, a hive of Japanese Giant Hornets is so much more likely to kill you than you are to kill it.

still think they are fragile as opposed to us? with our fragile physiology with virtually no poison tolerance at all?

6. Really? Where was our idea for the bow and arrow? The gun? The car? The computer? The internet? The phone? Where do all of these ideas come from? You can’t possibly tell me that something out there has a computer, right?

well yeah, sortof. they have brains don’t they? in fact the Portia jumping spider has almost no brain and still seems very smart, and we have no idea how that’s possible.

and do you really want to get into the history of those tools you mentioned? you know the car is just a motorized horse carriage do you? adn the early ideas for most of those were invented millennia ago. there’s no way to show how people came up with that.

also you don’t think animals shoot missiles or use weapons? and they do so much more. i mentioned cuttlefish didn’t i? we still can’t mimic that, unless you believe some conspiracy theories. we still can’t mimic many things.

what is this still about, anyway?

7. Doesn’t matter. We’ve still been there.

ok, so what is that supposed to show? we are the superior species now because we’ve entered fish and invertabrae territory? whoopsidoops! yeah, that doesn’t mean shit at all.

8. Are you suggesting that what I would classify as nothing more than ancient bugs somehow created an advanced civilization? Give me a break. And it doesn’t matter how smart our ancestors looked a million years ago. All’s that matters is that Homo Sapien is the dominant species.

oh, i thought you were talking about ancient proto-mammals. uhm, synapsids? something like that. they ruled the world before the dinosaurs, so…

and the reason it matters how smart our ancestors looked is because, we’ve only been this technologically developed for a very brief time, and it is possible the last species of whatever ancient animals were never found, but only ancestors. so to make a fair comparison…

9. We kill locusts by the millions. No matter how many of them there are, they will never take us over. We will just kill more of them. It’s quite simple really.

not quite so simple, really. you must have never heard of locust plagues. check this one in 2004. this is trillions of them. you suggested we have a population boom. well…

10. Other animals choosing not to evolve this type of technology? You don’t get it, do you? WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS TO EVEN HAVE THE OPTION TO EVOLVE THIS TYPE OF TECHNOLOGY. That’s what makes us superior. We have so much opportunity, so many options, so much power. No other species has this.

THAT’S MERELY AN ASSUMPTION. and look at what we use all this “opportunity”, “options” and “power” for? you know just as well all of that is driven by the military, because we use it primarily for war against eachother.

i’d think the way we are constantly sorta at the brink of wiping ourselves out, while so many insects and microbes are not, and will survive whatever dumb shit we pull puts a huge dent in your suggestion of our superiority.

self-destructiveness is not a feature of greatness. it’s a feature of weakness.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

Does that sound about right?

yes. that was the opinion of the OP aar.

My interpretation is that the OP made a slightly different point. Still, as long as this your point, that’s good enough for me.
Now, to get this discussion back on track:

You suggested that dolphins are laughing at our futile lives and constant running in circles, as they splashed around having all sorts of fun.

I would suggest in return that wild dolphins are largely unaware of humans, and that they spend much of their time looking for their next meal, fighting off or fleeing from predators, and seeking mates. They play around and have fun when they can, but they’re in a “rat race” as much as we are.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

self-destructiveness is not a feature of greatness. it’s a feature of weakness.

A) Greatness
B) Weakness
C) None of the above

(Even though we haven’t really been on the brink of destroying ourselves since the Cold War…)

We’re dangerous, far more so than any species before us. But for the exact same reason, we are also the only species so far with a chance of breaking out of the eat/sleep/reproduce/defend cycle, permanently.

Humanity’s intelligence isn’t strictly bad. It’s more than just dangerous.

Originally posted by player_03:

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

anyway, i think we’ve lost the point here.

That we have. In fact, I knew my last post was getting off track even before posting it. I went ahead anyway because I had to go and wanted to have posted something first.

---

Anyway, I think the following would make for a more productive discussion:

• You’re willing to admit, however grudgingly, that humans can do things with technology that other life forms cannot.
• However, you don’t think this is all that important. (Direct quote: “meh.”)
• So, the center of your argument lies elsewhere.

This is, as far as I can tell, the main point you are trying to make:

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

i bet dolphins are laughing their asses off at us for our rat-race adn (self)destruction, while they swim around and have fun.

Your point isn’t really about how well our technology works, it’s about other animals being better off anyway.

Does that sound about right?

Fine if the discussion has to switch over to a debate about superiority…if you keep ripping out our technological capabilities…animals don’t stand a chance, some of them are really smart and clever, but even a gorilla won’t be able to stand in the way of a bulldozer (but, granted, an elephant may be able too). And talking about elephant there one of the multiple animals that use infrasound not only to comunicate over exceptionally large distances but have been reported to use this as an early warning system for tsunamis and earthquakes, giving them a head start to clear the area, just to fall back on what Omega said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Animal_reactions_to_infrasound
^^read the part about animals and their reaction.

Anyway…I don’t want to take away the fact of our intelligence, because that’s what we evolved to survive and so it is a natural ability for us, taking it away in the discussion would be unfair…but if we do loose our intelligent capabilities, we are extremely futile compared to most animals on this earth and would just plainly die where in most cases they would survive…

Through history if the change is slow enough in the enviroment, animals adapted…humans panicked and alot died, we just don’t seem to work well with “sudden” changes.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

global pervasiveness and number-wise, several ants and the common house fly, and other species of insects/anthropods have us beat like 100 to 1 oslt. maybe even mass-wise.

and we’re not exactly at the top of the food-chain. that’s a common misperception. when is the last time you ate a lion?

we don’t eat predatory mammals or birds (although we do eat predatory fish, and omnivores), so food chain-wise we’re a mostly dead end tangent. and btw, the reason we don’t eat predators is because of aggregatory biohazard…hence kosher food in Judaism and Islam.

also the reason we don’t get eaten by other animals a lot is mostly because of the extinction of predators due to destruction of habitat.
so what you just declared to be our distincting greatest achievement is the destruction of life. great thing to feel proud of.

We can eat whatever animal we want to, we just choose as a society to not eat certain animals because they aren’t tasty or they’re endangered (Except in the case of bush meat. With that on the table, humans will eat just about any animal). And, of course, we’re involved in making most of those species endangered. Great impact, uber-high status on the food chain- we are on top, and we are the best this planet has ever produced in all terms, even, yes, ethics, because guess who invented them. Without humans, there wouldn’t be a good/bad dichotomy.

I would suggest in return that wild dolphins are largely unaware of humans, and that they spend much of their time looking for their next meal, fighting off or fleeing from predators, and seeking mates. They play around and have fun when they can, but they’re in a “rat race” as much as we are.

no slavery. no wage slavery. have you read about Galley slaves? i don’t think dolphins do anything like that. ok, we’ve evolved to mostly not do something that attrocious no more, but we still do a lot of things that in the future we’ve going to see as very vile nad primitive, that i don’t think dolphins do.

and hunting for food in dolphins could be described as having fun io a rat race. and they hardly have to flee from predators, they can defeat just about anything. and seeking mates is definitely something i would not count as rat race.

i’m pretty sure i could show you some things about dolphins that’s gonna make you esteem them a little higher: they trained us to catch fish for them; they are capable of making life-long friends with humans and i’m talking about wild dolphins; they have human-like social structures and can probably communicate in a quite advanced manner; their hunting strategies appear contemplated…

here they push up sardines so their friends the gannets can keep feeding.

and maybe they know more about our lives then we about theres… how many of us know anything at all anyway?

we are also the only species so far with a chance of breaking out of the eat/sleep/reproduce/defend cycle, permanently.

what does that mean? we may stop having to eat or sleep? what…what does that mean?

Humanity’s intelligence isn’t strictly bad. It’s more than just dangerous.

but it also isn’t strictly good. that was my point.

Through history if the change is slow enough in the enviroment, animals adapted…humans panicked and alot died, we just don’t seem to work well with “sudden” changes.

yeah, that’s what happened 70000 years ago. our numbers went down to maybe a few 100, but other animal species were less affected.

what if there’s some big solar disturbance and all our technology gets knocked out? we’d be in major trouble. most of us would probably die in a month if we don’t get our machineries back operating.

All semantics (and the odd hint of arrogance). Superiority complex. We eat animals, and at the same time some people care for other animals. We eat plants, and at the same time water others. To call it “dominating” is arrogant. Being “on top of the food chain”, maybe. But that’s as far as we go.

Maybe it is egoism, but that egoism has gotten us far.

It is egoism to call it beyond anything what it truly is. The rest is subjective.

We can eat whatever animal we want to, we just choose as a society to not eat certain animals because they aren’t tasty or they’re endangered (Except in the case of bush meat. With that on the table, humans will eat just about any animal). And, of course, we’re involved in making most of those species endangered. Great impact, uber-high status on the food chain- we are on top, and we are the best this planet has ever produced in all terms, even, yes, ethics, because guess who invented them. Without humans, there wouldn’t be a good/bad dichotomy.

not really. if we were to start eating predators or scavangers, the amount of toxins in our systems would rise dramatically. also, without cooking our food we can’t eat almost anything.

and ethics? give me a break. on ethics, we have our asses disintegrated by the elephant.

Humans are not monsters. Animals are not paragons of morality. Cynicism is not a shortcut to enlightenment.

How many elephants have started charities or activist groups? How many of them can report successes like this?

we were now talking about ethics, not the use of economy. elephants probably do charities by adopting orphans.

besides, “charity”, again, is a societal word, and since we’re part only of human society, we only use societal discriptions for what humans do. if animals do it, we’d use different terms. doesn’t mean that both don’t have similar society building.

for instance, as mentioned by Wolf, elephants warn other tribes of elephants with ultra-low sounds of oncoming dangers. if humans were to spend a similar effort without getting payed, we’d call that charity.

plus, if you weigh the occurances of charity in humans against occurances of destructive selfishness…

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

we were now talking about ethics, not the use of economy.

Why does there have to be a difference? Why can’t economy be used to improve the world?

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

if animals do it, we’d use different terms.

I don’t care about the exact terminology. I’m talking about how there are humans who have saved (or helped save) millions of children’s lives.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

plus, if you weigh the occurances of charity in humans against occurances of destructive selfishness…

A number of elephants have demonstrated extraordinary kindness. Therefore, elephants as a group are highly moral.
A number of humans have demonstrated extraordinary selfishness and brutality. Therefore, humans as a group are highly immoral.

Why does there have to be a difference? Why can’t economy be used to improve the world?

eh, what? perhaps. but it can also be used negatively. but what’s the point? i’m pointing out that we were talking about ethics, because the only difference i found between human and elephantine charity is that human charities involve economy. but that of course says nothing about ethics.

I don’t care about the exact terminology. I’m talking about how some humans have saved (or contributed to the saving of) millions of children’s lives.

again, you were trying to show a difference between humans and elephants, that i’m saying is merely a difference of terminology. i’m glad we agree that that doesn’t make a real difference.

and i wonder what millions of children’s lives we saved? i mean, what kind of “saving” are you taling about. saving them from starving by feeding them? lots and lots of animals do that.

your not showing a clear difference here. unless you mean adoption which i already told you elephants do too. however, elephants don’t molest their adopted children, as often.

A number of elephants have demonstrated extraordinary kindness. Therefore, elephants as a group are highly moral.
A number of humans have demonstrated extraordinary selfishness and brutality. Therefore, humans as a whole are highly immoral.

yes, now you’re getting it. that’s exactly the way it is.

Originally posted by OmegaDoom:

A number of elephants have demonstrated extraordinary kindness. Therefore, elephants as a group are highly moral.
A number of humans have demonstrated extraordinary selfishness and brutality. Therefore, humans as a whole are highly immoral.

yes, now you’re getting it. that’s exactly the way it is.

I sincerely hope that was sarcastic, but I’m not sure. Could you confirm/deny?

heres what i think is thelist on animal inteligence
1senineint capleble of making citys humans
2highly inteligent dolphins wolves elephants parrots dogs cats primates
3inteligent most other mamels
4somwhat dum most non-extinct animals
5dummost extinctanimals
6verydum most other animals