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What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no diffe

What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes. We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of a sufficiently robust slime mold simply using available resources to continue growing.

detritus 6y ago
The only difference being that we can understand the impact we're having. And yet...
- ditegashi 6y ago
  If we REALLY understood it then maybe we would stop doing it. My bet is that we don't really get it.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    Because individual motivation and macro-behavior aren't necessity aligned, individual understanding might not be enough to changes behavior of the system as a whole. Maybe individual bacteria understand the impact they might have on a host system and are concerned about outcomes as well. I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we? In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
      - ajmurmann 6y ago
        As I understand it, ants and other similar it's like bees don't have a hierarchical structure that issues orders. Instead they follow quasi-baked in behavioral patterns and pheromone signals provided by peers. I'm not a biologist though and also have no experience in what it's like to be a bee or ant
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I think “we” do, but we don’t quite care as much about future generations as we like to think we do. Especially not when others today are disproportionately benefiting.
    - hackflip 6y ago
      If you tell me to deprive myself of some conveniences because some people in another part of the world in another decade/century will suffer as a consequence of my actions... I agree with the selfless option in theory, but in practice I will usually choose the selfish option.
      - RankingMember 6y ago
        I think humans have a hard time with sustaining independent action. If you knew that everyone around you was going to be deprived of some convenience, say a restriction on driving to every other day (like they do in some countries based on the last digit of your license plate), I think it'd be easier to accept and adhere to for a long duration. I think this is both because you know the burden is shared, but also because the impact of a large adherence will tend to be more measurable. If, on the other hand, you independently decide to stop driving your car because you know the world is getting smothered with carbon dioxide, but see people daily driving modified diesel pickups belching smoke into the sky, you're going to feel a bit like you're pissing in the wind even trying.
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    We understand it but humans are composed of a variety of minds and what the rational one wants isn’t necessarily what we do. Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    We do. Problem is, while individually, we're much smarter than bacteria, as a large group, we're just as dumb as groups of them. Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone. We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths. Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.
bndw 6y ago
Joe Rogan talks about the idea in an old clip: I think human beings are just a very complicated form of bacteria. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyc12-neTjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyc12-neTjM
- slver 6y ago
  We do precisely what bacteria does, albeit at a much more complicated level. And I'd argue bacteria does what basic particles do, albeit at a much more complicated level. There are vast number of parallels in the behavior of systems from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
- misterkrabs 6y ago
  Honestly can't stand the guy but I think of this soundbite constantly - he MUST have gotten it from someone else, right? lol
  - jkubicek 6y ago
    Paraphrased from The Matrix maybe? > I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    The earliest I remember in popular culture is from the first Matrix movie. And I’m sure they got it from somewhere else. Anyone studying mathematical biology has also probably come to the same conclusion.
  - CapmCrackaWaka 6y ago
    I've heard the idea expressed by many people in many different ways. Most versions compare our civilizations progress to a cancer or virus instead of just any old bacteria, because of the way we treat our environment. My favorite example is this[1] post about Factorio, which is a game in which you constantly add to a factory and expand to use more resources. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b6gsxp/spreading_like_cancer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b6gsxp/spreading_...
kortilla 6y ago
Sure, we’re the same if you ignore a bunch of important differences. Growing our own food, not reproducing rapidly during food excess, etc.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  We don't grow our food. The chloroplast inside plants that we live around grow it. Fungi can do the same thing. See lichen, for example.
  - scubbo 6y ago
    Did you honestly believe that the person you are replying to was under the mistaken impression that humans photosynthesize, or were you instead choosing to willfully misinterpret their shorthand phrase standing in for "engaging in agriculture"?
    - creddit 6y ago
      Obviously the entire point of this thread is to disparage humanity and not come to meaningful conclusions. For your own sanity, just leave the anti-humanists to their own devices.
      - bngybmgrglflps 6y ago
        There are people who would blot out the sun, and take satisfaction in it. They don't bother me nearly as much as the taboo against speaking frankly about them.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      Do you honestly believe I did?
Grimm1 6y ago
You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recall slime molds are optimal planners regarding surrounding resources so it just sounds like a natural optimality to me. I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? Looking at it is disparagingly is weird to me, when the conclusion is maybe humans in aggregate are optimal with regards to finding and using resources to grow. Not that we're growing unbounded either because that would be bad, we're in population decline across many major nations right now and are working towards a greener future in multiple industries to avoid resource collapse. The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy is generally unwarranted if you look around at the steps we're taking to better ourselves as a species and every time I read things like this I can't help but think people revel in the supposed helplessness of our potential destruction and inability as some perverted pleasure.
- abraae 6y ago
  > I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    There’s a conservation goal that’s going around. 30 by 30. Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030. The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.
    - ThalesX 6y ago
      Wouldn't some weird interpretation of the Pareto Principle [0] mean that we should be using 20% of the available resources for 80% of our production goals?
  - DeusExMachina 6y ago
Waterluvian 6y ago
We conquer topography, yes, but it's economical to follow it.
mullingitover 6y ago
I think of humans as a form of fire uniquely cursed with the ability to see the beauty in what it's burning, and to feel bad about it.
- Infernal 6y ago
  I just wanted to let you know I really appreciate this idea - there is beauty in the layers of analogy.
- sen 6y ago
  I truly think it’s a minority who feel bad about it, or care about it at all.
- drc500free 6y ago
  I think the important distinction between life and non-life is that life creates local reductions in entropy. At a macro scale, both fire and life create net entropy. The difference is when you zoom in and see either created order or uniform destruction.
dudeman13 6y ago
That's some oddly specific characteristic to use to counter the value of being special, having conquered environments, technology and more. Why would the traditional mathematics of growth make all that less?
jdkee 6y ago
I think the growth of humanity contains much more complexity than that of a slime mold to be honest. Uncountably so.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Right, obviously as scale goes up, much more complexity is needed to maintain the same level of behavior. A bit like how unicellular organisms can replicate simply, but humans need to go through a whole process to make an offspring. This Game of Life video shows what I mean perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 Yes, there's a ton of complexity in there, but when you zoom out enough, it looks and acts very similar to the lower level.
  - fooker 6y ago
    Wow this is awesome! Thanks.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Very nice, but of course this was designed/engineered to act like this. It's basically a computer implemented in the game of life, which runs the game of life.
frereubu 6y ago
I’ve always been fond of Bill Hicks’ description of humanity as “a virus with shoes.”
- yesenadam 6y ago
  I raise you HL Mencken's "since the first 'advanced' gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour"! Here's the paragraph, from a much longer piece: Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci. (Meditation on Meditation, 1922) It's hard to believe the USA's top newspaper editor once wrote like that! Writing worth paying for. Here's some more: [The Declaration of Independence is] "a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented baseball." (Smart Set, 1914) He said of US politics: "It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. … In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes." (Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920)
marc__1 6y ago
in this case you should definitely read Vaclav Smil book Growth. It covers how similar growth patterns can be identified, from cities, vegetation, motors and human life. It is a long book, but recommended by none other than gates [1] [1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth
beaconstudios 6y ago
that would seem to follow from a historical materialist perspective (which makes sense to me, if you consider cultures to optimise their ideals to fit their environment). Human history is a function with material conditions as an input.
samstave 6y ago
Any sufficiently robust advanced species is indistinguishable from fungi.
ModernMech 6y ago
Makes me think about this recent thread: "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847 The bacteria within us certainly don't know anything about our consciousness. Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being. If we as humans look and act like bacteria when we zoom out, do we suffer the same myopia of our bacteria friends, unable to recognize the consciousness our collective activity creates? It's fun to think about.
- jfk13 6y ago
  > Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being That seems like a slightly peculiar idea of what a conscious being is.
  - Vrondi 6y ago
    Humans are essentially a collective of symbiotic organisms which have been working together for so very long that some are no longer distinguishable as separate. We know that we have DNA that came from external sources. We know that we carry around a host of bacteria that are vital to our life and health. Somehow all of this (Scientifically speaking)results in an entity with a sense of "I". If you aren't thinking about it religiously, how else would one think about it?
    - jamiek88 6y ago
      Even mitochondria were external beings originally. In a real sense we are a joint venture.
- matthewcanty 6y ago
  I think you could be right. At least, we know but choose or are too lazy to do anything about it. Recently I've found myself too stressed to even think about it. Too many stresses in life and I can do without the planet for now. Totally selfish I know, but I'll get back to it when other things have died down. I think what we need is something which helps us recognise the issues. Not only that but show us what we can do to help! We have to understand at a micro-level, how we can make an impact in aggregate.
mmaunder 6y ago
And,technically speaking, cities are an infestation of humans.
- seppin 6y ago
  Pretty dirty ones, at that.
matthewcanty 6y ago
It'z funny that I often compare the way things are to spots|zits. Something I do quietly to myself, in my own mind :-) Too much/little X causes outbursts of Y. The question is, has Earth got a few spots lurking behind the earlobes. Or is there a feature-length episode of Dr Pimple Popper taking place?
BurningFrog 6y ago
"X reminds me of Y" often says more about the speaker than about X or Y.
Engineering-MD 6y ago
My question is what would not look like microorganisms colonising? There is a range of manners that they expand from growing from a core, spores, milliary, fronds. I imagine most simple growth patterns possible are taken advantage of by microorganisms.
pmastela 6y ago
Here's a specific example of your slime mold hypothesis [1] in which a slime mold grew a network just like Tokyo's rail system. Slime mold doesn't have the same ring as "rail network planning AI", but it seems that's what it is. 1: https://outline.com/t8hxKh https://outline.com/t8hxKh (original: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/ https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-...)
rland 6y ago
Said best by Agent Smith in this classic scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8
divbzero 6y ago
I suppose we would still be in the exponential phase [1] and haven’t yet reached the stationary phase or death phase. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth
cblconfederate 6y ago
life is fractal
- wonminute 6y ago
  Why yes it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
btbuildem 6y ago
The self-similarity (or, fractal nature if you like) of living things at various levels of scale.. it's really beautiful and fascinating.
vbtemp 6y ago
What's so fascinating to me about our civilizations that look like fungal colonies on Petri dishes from a cosmic perspective, is that if you zoom in enough you see all sorts of individuals doing and creating all sorts of fascinating things. No one would ever suspect it if they didn't focus in to look. Billions of autonomous individuals, self-aware creating art, innovating technologies, and in general being a fascinating conduit through which the universe becomes aware of itself.
- drc500free 6y ago
  Totally agree. The magic of life, and human life in particular, is the local defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. When you zoom out, the law is the law.
abraxas 6y ago
And just like mold this expansion will continue until we hit resource limits and then it's colony collapse.
roody15 6y ago
well said
tus88 6y ago
We did a lot more than merely spread though.
7952 6y ago
I guess what makes humans different is that culture can let us go beyond our phenotype. And whilst it may look simplistically deterministic it really isnt. For example in the UK a lot of development clusters around old WWII airfields. The pattern of development is a result of aircraft needing flat places for runways. Runways that were needed because of a complex geopolitical conflict. And then selected for development due to politics. Slime molds don't do that. To suggest we are somehow not different is another kind of arrogance. We absolutely are and that gives us a unique level of agency and control. That is brilliant and scary. We are able to turn down the thermostat of an entire planet (reduce co2). That kind of culturally motivated intervention is completely unprecedented and totally different to historic humans and other species.
stared 6y ago
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure." - Agent Smith, The Matrix
- bestorworse 6y ago
  "And you exist only because of us" - Neo I think this pattern of exponential growth of human beings is a curse of their intelligence. All other animals end up being controlled by these large ecosystem dynamics because they can't adapt and/or do group work sufficiently. Species with this property are easily influenced/controlled by large scale dynamics. Maybe, a species with more intelligence than us wouldn't grow so fast and unorderly because they can see the future consequences of their own dynamics more easily. We just happen to not deal with large temporal scales very well.
- tediousdemise 6y ago
  This is why I think reproduction is unethical. We have the capacity to understand the implications of birthing new sentient lifeforms, knowing the harm it will cause to the planet and the other species we share it with. Yet people breed anyway, for a multitude of selfish reasons. Everyone else is having babies so why shouldn't I, it's my right as a human to reproduce, I want to pass on my genes, I want my life to be fulfilling, I don't want to die alone, the list goes on. It is these lines of thinking that have caused our population to balloon to over 7 billion people with no end in sight. No one is thinking of the planet.
  - batch12 6y ago
    I teach my kids that reproduction is a good thing. I hope they pass it on.
    - 6y ago
anonred 6y ago
Sounds similar to the micro story “Mold of the Earth” (1884) posted to HN a few weeks ago: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mold_of_the_Earth https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mold_of_the_Earth
remir 6y ago
I agree that from a certain distance, we look like simple bacterias doing their thing. But to me the fascinating part is that we're aware of looking like bacterias. We are matter that became conscious of itself. Isn't that the weirdest thing?
- amelius 6y ago
  Who says bacteria don't have a (simple) form of consciousness?
  - remir 6y ago
    Could be possible. Who knows?
devenvdev 6y ago
Apple tree "apples"(v) Earth "peoples" Alan Watts
bestorworse 6y ago
Isn't this growth pattern a straightforward consequence of disorderly growth? When microorganisms divide, the children "appear" in the same location. Our species growth dynamics kind of has this same property in that it's easier to build something closer to the already established region than far away. So, in the end, looking from far away, the growth pattern is the same.
pojzon 6y ago
We have one extremely important trait that makes us a lil bit different than regular bacteria. We are mostly lead by greed and not a need of growth. This is ofcourse not the case for all individuals but good enough portion.
- overboard2 6y ago
  Greed seems like a slightly more individualistic version of a need for growth. The only reason that we don't call the behavior of bacteria greedy is that they're not sentient.
xwolfi 6y ago
But we know about it and we can't exchange on how unspecial we are, you maybe in the US and me here in China. Potentially, one of us could even decide to stop being a parasite and scale down, move to the forest and live naked as a result. My personal theory is that we're nature way of extending beyond earth. Yes we're a funghi, but a clever enough one we can be the earth's tentacle to go spread beyond.
- jamiek88 6y ago
  Yes I like that! A little tentative fungi cell trying to get to Mars and from there, the galaxy.
momirlan 6y ago
Agent Smith : "humans are just another virus"
baby 6y ago
I often think about that, and recently I thought about something else: zoom out enough and humans appear as a single individual /intelligence, the same way it you zoom out of our own cells the aggregate of it all seems to be acting as one intelligent individual (a human). Now can we extrapolate? If we zoom out more do we see the same happening? Does the interaction between all the galaxies create a thought? A slow one perhaps.
llcoolv 6y ago
If you see humans as vermin, why don't you stop being a hypocrite, follow your words and commit suicide? Virtue signalling and hypocrisy. It always amuses me how many people fall for it. Here is some little inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMCFoudyYxQ&ab_channel=ITSTactical%2FImminentThreatSolutions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMCFoudyYxQ&ab_channel=ITSTa...
- dang 6y ago
  Yikes. You can't be vicious like this here, and unfortunately you've been breaking the site guidelines elsewhere also. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
winter_blue 6y ago
This is a really sad (and rather disgusting) comment. Your comment takes an incredibly depreciating view of humanity, and it ignores / rejects the beauty and wonder of humans, by comparing us to bacteria. Humans are the peak of Earth life; humans are the most glorious form of life that’s existed on this planet. I agree with everything that the user Grimm said in reply to you. I have no clue why such a horrible, repulsive, and repugnant comment would be the most-upvoted/top comment on HN.
- dkarp 5y ago
  It’s an interesting observation and sparks thought and discussion. Discussion into how the observation is true in many ways, e.g. the clustering around resources. But also discussion into how it’s not true, e.g. political lines or nature preserves. Exactly the sort of comment that fits the community here. I hope that gives some clue why this is an upvoted comment.
127 6y ago
Would be really nice if this "bacterial and fungal growth" also spread to Mars and Venus.
hota_mazi 6y ago
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2adrUaiyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2adrUaiyI
playingchanges 5y ago
I think what you are noticing is the ‘fractal’ nature of growth patterns which exists all throughout nature. It’s a fascinating topic that I know almost nothing about. The Wikipedia mentions slime mold though :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal

detritus 6y ago

The only difference being that we can understand the impact we're having. And yet...

ditegashi 6y ago
If we REALLY understood it then maybe we would stop doing it. My bet is that we don't really get it.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  Because individual motivation and macro-behavior aren't necessity aligned, individual understanding might not be enough to changes behavior of the system as a whole. Maybe individual bacteria understand the impact they might have on a host system and are concerned about outcomes as well. I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > I sometimes think that it is a valid mental model to think of us as not much different from ants in a hive who think they possess more control and freedom than they do I think it is the opposite. We are different from ants, and have a lot of control and freedom, so we know that if others will not make the sacrifice, why should we? In an ant colony, I imagine the orders are being given top down and they do not think about what others are or are not sacrificing.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      As I understand it, ants and other similar it's like bees don't have a hierarchical structure that issues orders. Instead they follow quasi-baked in behavioral patterns and pheromone signals provided by peers. I'm not a biologist though and also have no experience in what it's like to be a bee or ant
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I think “we” do, but we don’t quite care as much about future generations as we like to think we do. Especially not when others today are disproportionately benefiting.
  - hackflip 6y ago
    If you tell me to deprive myself of some conveniences because some people in another part of the world in another decade/century will suffer as a consequence of my actions... I agree with the selfless option in theory, but in practice I will usually choose the selfish option.
    - RankingMember 6y ago
      I think humans have a hard time with sustaining independent action. If you knew that everyone around you was going to be deprived of some convenience, say a restriction on driving to every other day (like they do in some countries based on the last digit of your license plate), I think it'd be easier to accept and adhere to for a long duration. I think this is both because you know the burden is shared, but also because the impact of a large adherence will tend to be more measurable. If, on the other hand, you independently decide to stop driving your car because you know the world is getting smothered with carbon dioxide, but see people daily driving modified diesel pickups belching smoke into the sky, you're going to feel a bit like you're pissing in the wind even trying.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  We understand it but humans are composed of a variety of minds and what the rational one wants isn’t necessarily what we do. Although conservation probably has more to do with reality looking different depending on your own local observations, to a Brazilian cattle rancher or Indonesian logger at the frontlines of the biodiversity crisis, things look different. For a consumer of those goods and materials, they likely don’t realize the connection.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  We do. Problem is, while individually, we're much smarter than bacteria, as a large group, we're just as dumb as groups of them. Take our main coordination mechanism - the market. For all that's been said and written about it, it's still basically gradient descent. As greedy as it gets - in the technical sense. It's what's been driving the development of humanity ever since we formed societies. It's what controls the behavior of everyone. We may think we're smart and have principles - and we do. But the reality still is, everyone is spending most of their lives trying to align themselves to exploit the local economic gradient - because that's how individuals get more of what they want, and less of what they don't want. Nobody is strong enough to single-handedly reshape the larger economic gradient. So while individually, we play complex games, at macro scale, we're not all that different from slime molds or fungal growths. Maybe one day our economy grows so sophisticated it'll gain sentience. But that doesn't necessarily mean things will get better - much like an individual human being sentient doesn't mean their cells are happy.

bndw 6y ago

Joe Rogan talks about the idea in an old clip: I think human beings are just a very complicated form of bacteria. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyc12-neTjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyc12-neTjM

slver 6y ago
We do precisely what bacteria does, albeit at a much more complicated level. And I'd argue bacteria does what basic particles do, albeit at a much more complicated level. There are vast number of parallels in the behavior of systems from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
misterkrabs 6y ago
Honestly can't stand the guy but I think of this soundbite constantly - he MUST have gotten it from someone else, right? lol
- jkubicek 6y ago
  Paraphrased from The Matrix maybe? > I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  The earliest I remember in popular culture is from the first Matrix movie. And I’m sure they got it from somewhere else. Anyone studying mathematical biology has also probably come to the same conclusion.
- CapmCrackaWaka 6y ago
  I've heard the idea expressed by many people in many different ways. Most versions compare our civilizations progress to a cancer or virus instead of just any old bacteria, because of the way we treat our environment. My favorite example is this[1] post about Factorio, which is a game in which you constantly add to a factory and expand to use more resources. [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b6gsxp/spreading_like_cancer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/b6gsxp/spreading_...

kortilla 6y ago

Sure, we’re the same if you ignore a bunch of important differences. Growing our own food, not reproducing rapidly during food excess, etc.

globular-toast 6y ago
We don't grow our food. The chloroplast inside plants that we live around grow it. Fungi can do the same thing. See lichen, for example.
- scubbo 6y ago
  Did you honestly believe that the person you are replying to was under the mistaken impression that humans photosynthesize, or were you instead choosing to willfully misinterpret their shorthand phrase standing in for "engaging in agriculture"?
  - creddit 6y ago
    Obviously the entire point of this thread is to disparage humanity and not come to meaningful conclusions. For your own sanity, just leave the anti-humanists to their own devices.
    - bngybmgrglflps 6y ago
      There are people who would blot out the sun, and take satisfaction in it. They don't bother me nearly as much as the taboo against speaking frankly about them.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Do you honestly believe I did?

Grimm1 6y ago

You can say the same thing about ant colonies. I think it's probably just what anything that groups and branches around resource deposits looks like. If I recall slime molds are optimal planners regarding surrounding resources so it just sounds like a natural optimality to me. I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? Looking at it is disparagingly is weird to me, when the conclusion is maybe humans in aggregate are optimal with regards to finding and using resources to grow. Not that we're growing unbounded either because that would be bad, we're in population decline across many major nations right now and are working towards a greener future in multiple industries to avoid resource collapse. The level of doom and gloom and misanthropy is generally unwarranted if you look around at the steps we're taking to better ourselves as a species and every time I read things like this I can't help but think people revel in the supposed helplessness of our potential destruction and inability as some perverted pleasure.

abraae 6y ago
> I'd be more interested in what you think it "should" look like for an "advanced" species besides optimal? An advanced species would recognize the uniqueness and importance of the natural world, and would fence off huge sections of it to protect it for future generations.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  There’s a conservation goal that’s going around. 30 by 30. Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030. The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see it as a global goal as well.
  - ThalesX 6y ago
    Wouldn't some weird interpretation of the Pareto Principle [0] mean that we should be using 20% of the available resources for 80% of our production goals?
- DeusExMachina 6y ago

Waterluvian 6y ago

We conquer topography, yes, but it's economical to follow it.

mullingitover 6y ago

I think of humans as a form of fire uniquely cursed with the ability to see the beauty in what it's burning, and to feel bad about it.

Infernal 6y ago
I just wanted to let you know I really appreciate this idea - there is beauty in the layers of analogy.
sen 6y ago
I truly think it’s a minority who feel bad about it, or care about it at all.
drc500free 6y ago
I think the important distinction between life and non-life is that life creates local reductions in entropy. At a macro scale, both fire and life create net entropy. The difference is when you zoom in and see either created order or uniform destruction.

dudeman13 6y ago

That's some oddly specific characteristic to use to counter the value of being special, having conquered environments, technology and more. Why would the traditional mathematics of growth make all that less?

jdkee 6y ago

I think the growth of humanity contains much more complexity than that of a slime mold to be honest. Uncountably so.

ehsankia 6y ago
Right, obviously as scale goes up, much more complexity is needed to maintain the same level of behavior. A bit like how unicellular organisms can replicate simply, but humans need to go through a whole process to make an offspring. This Game of Life video shows what I mean perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 Yes, there's a ton of complexity in there, but when you zoom out enough, it looks and acts very similar to the lower level.
- fooker 6y ago
  Wow this is awesome! Thanks.
- amelius 6y ago
  Very nice, but of course this was designed/engineered to act like this. It's basically a computer implemented in the game of life, which runs the game of life.

frereubu 6y ago

I’ve always been fond of Bill Hicks’ description of humanity as “a virus with shoes.”

yesenadam 6y ago
I raise you HL Mencken's "since the first 'advanced' gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour"! Here's the paragraph, from a much longer piece: Man’s natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first “advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci. (Meditation on Meditation, 1922) It's hard to believe the USA's top newspaper editor once wrote like that! Writing worth paying for. Here's some more: [The Declaration of Independence is] "a mere string of sonorous phrases, a piece of windy flapdoodle, a rhapsody almost empty of intelligible meaning, and probably composed under the influence of ethyl alcohol. And yet, as I say, it is more powerful than a million swords. It looms larger than the massive fact of Gettysburg. It is worth more than the whole Civil War. The man who loosed it upon posterity has left it a vaster heritage than the man who invented baseball." (Smart Set, 1914) He said of US politics: "It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. … In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes." (Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920)

marc__1 6y ago

in this case you should definitely read Vaclav Smil book Growth. It covers how similar growth patterns can be identified, from cities, vegetation, motors and human life. It is a long book, but recommended by none other than gates [1] [1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Growth

beaconstudios 6y ago

that would seem to follow from a historical materialist perspective (which makes sense to me, if you consider cultures to optimise their ideals to fit their environment). Human history is a function with material conditions as an input.

samstave 6y ago

Any sufficiently robust advanced species is indistinguishable from fungi.

ModernMech 6y ago

Makes me think about this recent thread: "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847 The bacteria within us certainly don't know anything about our consciousness. Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being. If we as humans look and act like bacteria when we zoom out, do we suffer the same myopia of our bacteria friends, unable to recognize the consciousness our collective activity creates? It's fun to think about.

jfk13 6y ago
> Yet somehow the sum total of their activity results in a conscious being That seems like a slightly peculiar idea of what a conscious being is.
- Vrondi 6y ago
  Humans are essentially a collective of symbiotic organisms which have been working together for so very long that some are no longer distinguishable as separate. We know that we have DNA that came from external sources. We know that we carry around a host of bacteria that are vital to our life and health. Somehow all of this (Scientifically speaking)results in an entity with a sense of "I". If you aren't thinking about it religiously, how else would one think about it?
  - jamiek88 6y ago
    Even mitochondria were external beings originally. In a real sense we are a joint venture.
matthewcanty 6y ago
I think you could be right. At least, we know but choose or are too lazy to do anything about it. Recently I've found myself too stressed to even think about it. Too many stresses in life and I can do without the planet for now. Totally selfish I know, but I'll get back to it when other things have died down. I think what we need is something which helps us recognise the issues. Not only that but show us what we can do to help! We have to understand at a micro-level, how we can make an impact in aggregate.

mmaunder 6y ago

And,technically speaking, cities are an infestation of humans.

seppin 6y ago
Pretty dirty ones, at that.

matthewcanty 6y ago

It'z funny that I often compare the way things are to spots|zits. Something I do quietly to myself, in my own mind :-) Too much/little X causes outbursts of Y. The question is, has Earth got a few spots lurking behind the earlobes. Or is there a feature-length episode of Dr Pimple Popper taking place?

BurningFrog 6y ago

"X reminds me of Y" often says more about the speaker than about X or Y.

Engineering-MD 6y ago

My question is what would not look like microorganisms colonising? There is a range of manners that they expand from growing from a core, spores, milliary, fronds. I imagine most simple growth patterns possible are taken advantage of by microorganisms.

pmastela 6y ago

Here's a specific example of your slime mold hypothesis [1] in which a slime mold grew a network just like Tokyo's rail system. Slime mold doesn't have the same ring as "rail network planning AI", but it seems that's what it is. 1: https://outline.com/t8hxKh https://outline.com/t8hxKh (original: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/ https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-...)

rland 6y ago

Said best by Agent Smith in this classic scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8

divbzero 6y ago

I suppose we would still be in the exponential phase [1] and haven’t yet reached the stationary phase or death phase. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth

cblconfederate 6y ago

life is fractal

wonminute 6y ago
Why yes it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

btbuildem 6y ago

The self-similarity (or, fractal nature if you like) of living things at various levels of scale.. it's really beautiful and fascinating.

vbtemp 6y ago

What's so fascinating to me about our civilizations that look like fungal colonies on Petri dishes from a cosmic perspective, is that if you zoom in enough you see all sorts of individuals doing and creating all sorts of fascinating things. No one would ever suspect it if they didn't focus in to look. Billions of autonomous individuals, self-aware creating art, innovating technologies, and in general being a fascinating conduit through which the universe becomes aware of itself.

drc500free 6y ago
Totally agree. The magic of life, and human life in particular, is the local defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. When you zoom out, the law is the law.

abraxas 6y ago

And just like mold this expansion will continue until we hit resource limits and then it's colony collapse.

roody15 6y ago

well said

tus88 6y ago

We did a lot more than merely spread though.

7952 6y ago

I guess what makes humans different is that culture can let us go beyond our phenotype. And whilst it may look simplistically deterministic it really isnt. For example in the UK a lot of development clusters around old WWII airfields. The pattern of development is a result of aircraft needing flat places for runways. Runways that were needed because of a complex geopolitical conflict. And then selected for development due to politics. Slime molds don't do that. To suggest we are somehow not different is another kind of arrogance. We absolutely are and that gives us a unique level of agency and control. That is brilliant and scary. We are able to turn down the thermostat of an entire planet (reduce co2). That kind of culturally motivated intervention is completely unprecedented and totally different to historic humans and other species.

stared 6y ago

"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure." - Agent Smith, The Matrix

bestorworse 6y ago
"And you exist only because of us" - Neo I think this pattern of exponential growth of human beings is a curse of their intelligence. All other animals end up being controlled by these large ecosystem dynamics because they can't adapt and/or do group work sufficiently. Species with this property are easily influenced/controlled by large scale dynamics. Maybe, a species with more intelligence than us wouldn't grow so fast and unorderly because they can see the future consequences of their own dynamics more easily. We just happen to not deal with large temporal scales very well.
tediousdemise 6y ago
This is why I think reproduction is unethical. We have the capacity to understand the implications of birthing new sentient lifeforms, knowing the harm it will cause to the planet and the other species we share it with. Yet people breed anyway, for a multitude of selfish reasons. Everyone else is having babies so why shouldn't I, it's my right as a human to reproduce, I want to pass on my genes, I want my life to be fulfilling, I don't want to die alone, the list goes on. It is these lines of thinking that have caused our population to balloon to over 7 billion people with no end in sight. No one is thinking of the planet.
- batch12 6y ago
  I teach my kids that reproduction is a good thing. I hope they pass it on.
  - 6y ago

anonred 6y ago

Sounds similar to the micro story “Mold of the Earth” (1884) posted to HN a few weeks ago: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mold_of_the_Earth https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mold_of_the_Earth

remir 6y ago

I agree that from a certain distance, we look like simple bacterias doing their thing. But to me the fascinating part is that we're aware of looking like bacterias. We are matter that became conscious of itself. Isn't that the weirdest thing?

amelius 6y ago
Who says bacteria don't have a (simple) form of consciousness?
- remir 6y ago
  Could be possible. Who knows?

devenvdev 6y ago

Apple tree "apples"(v) Earth "peoples" Alan Watts

bestorworse 6y ago

Isn't this growth pattern a straightforward consequence of disorderly growth? When microorganisms divide, the children "appear" in the same location. Our species growth dynamics kind of has this same property in that it's easier to build something closer to the already established region than far away. So, in the end, looking from far away, the growth pattern is the same.

pojzon 6y ago

We have one extremely important trait that makes us a lil bit different than regular bacteria. We are mostly lead by greed and not a need of growth. This is ofcourse not the case for all individuals but good enough portion.

overboard2 6y ago
Greed seems like a slightly more individualistic version of a need for growth. The only reason that we don't call the behavior of bacteria greedy is that they're not sentient.

xwolfi 6y ago

But we know about it and we can't exchange on how unspecial we are, you maybe in the US and me here in China. Potentially, one of us could even decide to stop being a parasite and scale down, move to the forest and live naked as a result. My personal theory is that we're nature way of extending beyond earth. Yes we're a funghi, but a clever enough one we can be the earth's tentacle to go spread beyond.

jamiek88 6y ago
Yes I like that! A little tentative fungi cell trying to get to Mars and from there, the galaxy.

momirlan 6y ago

Agent Smith : "humans are just another virus"

baby 6y ago

I often think about that, and recently I thought about something else: zoom out enough and humans appear as a single individual /intelligence, the same way it you zoom out of our own cells the aggregate of it all seems to be acting as one intelligent individual (a human). Now can we extrapolate? If we zoom out more do we see the same happening? Does the interaction between all the galaxies create a thought? A slow one perhaps.

llcoolv 6y ago

If you see humans as vermin, why don't you stop being a hypocrite, follow your words and commit suicide? Virtue signalling and hypocrisy. It always amuses me how many people fall for it. Here is some little inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMCFoudyYxQ&ab_channel=ITSTactical%2FImminentThreatSolutions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMCFoudyYxQ&ab_channel=ITSTa...

dang 6y ago
Yikes. You can't be vicious like this here, and unfortunately you've been breaking the site guidelines elsewhere also. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

winter_blue 6y ago

This is a really sad (and rather disgusting) comment. Your comment takes an incredibly depreciating view of humanity, and it ignores / rejects the beauty and wonder of humans, by comparing us to bacteria. Humans are the peak of Earth life; humans are the most glorious form of life that’s existed on this planet. I agree with everything that the user Grimm said in reply to you. I have no clue why such a horrible, repulsive, and repugnant comment would be the most-upvoted/top comment on HN.

dkarp 5y ago
It’s an interesting observation and sparks thought and discussion. Discussion into how the observation is true in many ways, e.g. the clustering around resources. But also discussion into how it’s not true, e.g. political lines or nature preserves. Exactly the sort of comment that fits the community here. I hope that gives some clue why this is an upvoted comment.

127 6y ago

Would be really nice if this "bacterial and fungal growth" also spread to Mars and Venus.

hota_mazi 6y ago

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2adrUaiyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2adrUaiyI

playingchanges 5y ago

I think what you are noticing is the ‘fractal’ nature of growth patterns which exists all throughout nature. It’s a fascinating topic that I know almost nothing about. The Wikipedia mentions slime mold though :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal