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I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating... Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a sp
by breckinloggins 9y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating...
Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a species-level cancer cheating the “rules” of a habitat.
Humans? We just throw the rules away altogether and have historically written new ones that only apply to us. The difference between us and locusts, though, is that many of us fight back against our own short term interests and argue “hey, we’re a tumor right now. We should consider not being one of those.”
- scythe 9y agoThere's an important difference between a tumor and an organism: one can sustain itself, the other is a parasite. So what would obviously put humans over the line? Establishing self-sufficient colonies off Earth seems to be beyond the reach of any swarm of locusts, but possibly viable in a 1000-2000 year timespan for people.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoIgnoring timescale, modeling a single tumor as a parasite of humans seems the same as modeling humanity as parasites of nature/world/universe.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoAnd if nature/world/universe was sentient, it would be angry at us and it would want to fight us. And if tumors were sentient, they would assert their rights to live and write their own rules. Alas, we're the only sentient beings in this comparison, which makes tumors bad and universe a resource, by our standards - i.e. the only ones that matter.