Actually it is an insect planet. Just look at the group of animals with the biggest biomass and the most species. Actually this is a problem we now have with Cheetahs they were in a bottle neck and so the genetic variation is verry low.
That's like talking about Dallas Cowboys championships....ancient history. We got over on them fat cold-blooded biyotches.
A whole bunch of scientists believe that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. (If you were talking about the Cowboys being fat, cold-blooded biyotches, I agree.)
About half a million years ago we were owned by the Neanderthals. I wish there were more than one species of human. How cool would it be! Forget national pride, you're talking species pride here!
Anything and everything would have been better of had humans actually gone extinct. As the guy from Matrix said, we are a virus.
If you look at it that way, even dinosaurs weren't around that long relative to the age of Earth. <pre> Millions of Years</pre> Dinosaurs were only around for that relatively small olive green chunk of time on the right (Mesozoic Era). On the other hand, bacteria have been around since the Archaen eon. You'd have to say Earth is a microbial planet. Them little fckrs are like Bay Bay's kids.
And dogs. And various microscopic human parasites. But the numbers are still overwhelmingly against us.
That's one nihilist way of looking at it. All indications are though that we are entirely unique in the way we can give ourselves a purpose that isn't confined to our genetic guidelines. Insofar as we can tell anyway. I wouldn't be so quick to reduce humanity to something to simple and devoid of wonder.
what is good if no one is able to contemplate it enough to contrast it against what is bad? i think it's a gigantic assumption to assume some other life form would have developed that sense of intelligence.
You have a great point. No other life has shown to be as capable as us in the ways that we are. They definitely don't share what we call "values." It's interesting to consider what we know (or think we know) about how other species percieve the world. We can never really know what it would feel like to be a microbe or a millipede. Dogs are a little easier, but why? Why are they called "man's best friend." Dogs don't see color bc they lack the kind of photo receptors or part of the brain that allows them to see the in the spectrum we do. BUT they are much more aware and were adapted over time to be more than competent using their sense of smell and I think hearing. In that sense, they're "better" than us. I still think I have a huge advantage with my ability to reason and not eat my own poop, but it all seems kind of relative in the way we impose the language of our perception on things that don't share them. It does "help" us understand, but in a very limited way. I took a seminar on the history of biology led by a myrmacologist, someone who studies ants. One day, I made a lazy joke and asked her "You don't really pretend you're an ant, do you?" and she looked at me with a straight face and explained to me the value of comparing societal models of different species to help us learn more about our own. It's almost impossible to make those kinds of comparisons without anthropomorphizing everything. It really was eye opening for me. Even then, I still think it's research worth doing. How much of our behavior is hard wired? From that question there is (historically) the danger of putting faith in ideas of determinism. The only one I think has value is geographic determinism, that where you are determines how you act (unless you consider things like alcoholism or food addiction). Even then, I don't think that's absolute. The uniqueness of our species indicates that we're not necessarily subject to any deterministic factors. Adopting any of these deterministic ideas will always be problematic as long as people abuse observations (which in themselves are not harmful) for political ends. What the hell were we talking about again? I fell asleep on the train of thought and woke up in Alaska.
