It’s nice to think this way but it’s an oversimplification. The trees are trying to strangle and poison each other The mice will eat each other’s babies etc. Lol
Oh yeah. I’m not intending to imply only shitty things ever happen for sure. There are many beautiful tiny shiny moments of good. The bad just serves to make them even more beautiful
Behind every jaded cynic was once a hopeful optimist. Kurzgesagt has been doing good work about countering Doomerism.
I’ve always been the optimist at least. I have no doubts humanity will continue to live on and do good things in general while fighting some of the worst among ourselves. Most people are good when you strip away most of what we cloak ourselves in. It’s unfortunate that some people just sew it right into their skin though.
Humanity’s capacity to be kind to one another in small groups is great…but that’s not how the world works most of the time.
Like, sure, it’s great that a bunch of humans can get together and be kind…but my right to get married to my boyfriend, and my sister’s reproductive rights, aren’t helped by this fact. I don’t really care how kind you are in private or close knit groups, if you’re going to the polls and voting for horrible people that do horrible things when there’s another choice that is objectively less harmful, I’m sorry, that invalidates everything. You can feed 200 people but with one vote you can help rip the rights away from millions and condemn them to suffer or die in poverty. The latter is more revealing of your nature.
The latter is more a push by people with more resources than they know what to do with trying to hang onto those resources by inventing new problems for us to fight about.
We could accomplish so much more as a species of our goals were set on future generations and sustainability, but instead some 89 year old multi-billionaire needs another yacht to haul around his shriveled husk.
Humanity is kind as long as everyone has what they need. Our society has stripped security away and turned everything into a competition for resources. There’s little room for kindness when you’re on the verge of starvation yourself
I genuinely believe people should live in small clades of about ~1000 people. They could be any kind of clade; democratic, technocratic, fascist, egalitarian, monarchy, dictatorship, etc. But essentially everyone has the right to leave their clade and live in whichever one accepts them.
Why do I think that fascists and dictators should have their own clades? Well, because, as our own world shows – there is a significant proportion of our population that loves being told what to think, and who to hate. There might even be some benefits even (e.g. a culturally homogenous populace is more likely to unionize than a diverse one). If they want to vote in a despot, let them! As long as that despot can’t control more than the ~1000 people in that clade.
I always had a rather negative view of the world. At least as long as i remember. I never saw it as a bad thing, and it never made me a bitter and negative person. There is a lot of war and shit going on right now, which is obviously bad and daunting. The only time i ever felt like we are not gonna make it as a species was the other day when i saw how they are building that stupid ass line in saudi arabia. I don't know, something about seeing the engery, manpower and materials throwing at this beyond stupid thing made me think of the end of the world. No more ice for Antarctica, but we are building this shit over here.
It’s actually really crazy how little we know. Pretty much every discipline has questions that are answered with “we don’t know”. When it comes to knowledge we have barely scratched the surface.
We don’t know what we don’t know and that’s okay. Actually I think it’s exciting, there are new understandings of the things around us that are just waiting to be discovered. It can certainly be scary too, being the first one to explore a new field alone and in the dark.
To be honest, this is like saying that cars tires scream in pain during an accident. It’s highly unlikely to be a “voluntary” sound emission and not just a result of their physiology of being literally a bunch of tiny water tubes drying up.
The article talks about plants being able to “hear” at the beginning of the article which implies communication between the plants about stressful conditions but they haven’t been able to demonstrate that it’s actually happening as fun as it is to think about.
Well, I don’t doubt that plants can perceive acoustic stimuli, however the context is probably something else and the usefulness of telling neighbouring plants that you have no water is also not really obvious. There’s just a lot of sensationalism regarding such capabilities.
Since there aren't any spider scientists present, I'll take a stab at it:
This is probably some kind of bullshit oversimplification. There was probably like one study by some professor who loves LSD and spiders at a small rural college in New Zealand who published a paper in Spider Science Journal. And it's not singing so much as some very complex and scientific spider stuff that I won't bore you with.
Hopefully I'm just cynical and wrong and there's a little spider Pavarotti out there.
That pretty much hits the nail on the head. Most of this X does “human like™️” stuff Y is anthropomorphism par excellence. Usually some form of instinctual behaviour or even simple results of basic physiological processes are compared to stuff that humans do as a high level cognitive process (singing, talking, etc.) so that it generates clicks and draws attention.
This paints a completely wrong picture of animal (or even plant) behaviour, spreads misinformation and overshadows the actually interesting scientific discoveries.
There is a spider that hunts other spider species and uses chirps to identify its own species so they don’t attack their own kind. A sort of spider shibboleth.
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