1000th exoplanet discovered, including the most Earth-like world so far
65 replies, posted
[QUOTE=proch;46874275]I bet we're 20 times more badass than they are.[/QUOTE]
What if they're these people
[t]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Prydonian.jpg[/t]
[QUOTE=proch;46874275]I bet we're 20 times more badass than they are.[/QUOTE]
Our Sun can beat up their Sun.
[QUOTE=proch;46874275]I bet we're 20 times more badass than they are.[/QUOTE]
We're just starting to be smart enough to look at the stars and work toward leaving our planet, evolutionary speaking. Chances are they would have technology and intellectual capacity far beyond our understanding.
[QUOTE=DChapsfield;46878073]This is encouraging and all, but we only reached the top because of our intelligence. there's plenty of stuff out there on our own earth that surpasses us in one way or another. Our wound survival rate is pretty boss, but it could be better. You have squid whose CNS is spread between their ten tentacles, and not centered in one limb like us. You have crabs, lizards, and insects that can tear off a leg and just regrow it later, 'cause why not. Unlike us, small insects can survive a drop into the Grand Canyon because terminal velocity isn't lethal to them, due their size and mass. Bees and ants can coordinate like motherfuckers with their hivemind system, at a level we could never reach with our disconnected individually rationing minds. And don't forget water bears, tardigrades that can survive up to 3 years in a vacuum.
It's true that conflict, on a micro and macro level, has advanced our species significantly, but since the break that separated us from other primates after the common ancestor evolved out, our bodies have been softening. Even worse now that the modern age provides our necessities as commodities and we don't have to struggle in physical combat to ensure our future. The sharpest things on us are our brittle nails and blunted omnivorous teeth--leagues away from the jaws of an alligator or the claws of a black leopard. A single bat from a lion's paw or a silverback's fist can cave our soft, soft heads in.
I don't want to kill the fun, I just want to point out that it took us a long, long, long, long time to reach the top of the food chain, and it was only very recently in the planetary timeline. We didn't brute force our way there like the dinosaurs, nor did we stand tall, roll with the punches, and come out on top: we ran away and built tools to kill our predators in lieu of natural defenses. We waited it out until the opportunity when the top land predators were vulnerable to our smarts, then slipped in and dominated by intelligence.
so I guess my point is, yes, we are special, but because of our brainpower, not because we're the ultimate life-form on the planet. It's a long time away before we've really left a mark on Earth. If you judge by the lasting survival of an organism, then you gotta give it up for the bacteria of the world. If you wanna judge animals only, then you gotta respect the blind tunneler ant, the horseshoe crab, and all sea sponges. And if you want to go by numbers, then ants win all the way, at something like ~1,000,000,000,000,000 estimated.
we've been having our time on the planet, and it's all good, but if we were wiped out, the earth wouldn't give a shit. we conquered by self-defense/survival via intelligence, not because we went out and killed everything else. that makes us top dogs, but if anything just as smart as us that was BIGGER than us rolled by, we'd be fucked. bigger, or possessing any of the traits that we lack, like collective reasoning, more limbs, a hard outer carapace, distributed vital organs, anaerobic respiration, or even just tails with spikes on them.
we dominate on our own planet, but only according to the parameters of our own understanding. Imagine an extraterrestrial organism that has six limbs, is amphibious, has duplicates of every vital organ plus its nervous system, which uses a different form of information transfer that is twice as fast as ours, doubling the max speed of their cognitive and reflexive abilities, with senses of smell, hearing, and vision way more pronounced than ours, that can see a wider spectrum of electromagnetic radiation than just our visible spectrum of light, that evolved under water pressure beyond what's found on Earth, under gravity five times as strong, that breathes the .05% methane content in its planet's atmosphere, but can switch to intaking nitrogen if it needs to, that is three times more efficient than us at recycling food and fluids, and that lives on average for 250 years.
And also, it has a tail with spikes on it. I'd say we're pretty fragile, really.[/QUOTE]
But are we? Intelligence is the greatest gift an animal can have, because in the end any flaws can be circumvented through smarts. Leopards may have claws, but we invented our own claws (swords). Alligators have teeth, so we invented our own that we can use at a safe distance (arrows). Your hypothetical creature has a spiked tail, so we have our own (spears).
But even above this level, humans excel at one thing that makes us dominant as a species; cooperation. Despite all that was said about war and violence, we are the only non-insect species to cooperate on a level of millions of individuals working together. We can amass armies that are so large they trample the earth when they march. We build glorious dwellings as tall as mountains, and cityscapes that can cover whole landmasses. At an average of 6ft tall, we are also very big animals compared to the rest of the earth, meaning everything we build needs to accommodate our massive size.
And even where humans fail to produce something, we simply borrow it from the environment. We have ridden [I]fucking elephants[/I] into battle for gods sake. I think any leopard would shit. It would shit [I]hard.[/I] Your hypothetical space squid still doesn't have shit on us because we can outsmart it, we can outnumber it, and if all else fails, we will just get something else to kill it for us.
And it is unfair to say we took a long time to get to the top of the food chain. Comparatively speaking, we did it in practically no time. Sure, for much of human history we, as individuals, were at the mercy of the environment, but as a species we haven't been threatened since the Toba eruption because we work together to insure we don't fucking die. Even before civilization came into being, humans were very much the apex predator; not individually, but collectively.
And now we are the single most threatening thing here. The most likely cause of our own demise is, surprise, ourselves. We are wiping out the planet with unchecked consumption. We have the capability to reduce the surface of this world to ash and cinder should we desire it.
My point is that humans are fucking awesome. As creatures, we are grotesque, hairless monkeys that don't posses any outstanding physical skill, but as a collective species, we are the scariest goddamn thing on earth.
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