41–50 of 73 posts
The more I learn about ants, the more it seems to me that they are the ones who will take over the world. I'm starting to fear them.
Earth: Human population: 8.2 billion humans. Ant population: 20 quadrillion ants. I'm not sure they need to take over the world - it looks like it is already theirs.
> David wondered if, rather than humans going extinct and letting the mushrooms take over, humans could eat the mushrooms and survive. That question led him and Joshua Pearce to research and write Feeding Everyone No Matter What
This is awesome. We could do the same. Those oyster mushroom drones got me thinking. With fungus we could build perpetual motion machines to generate infinite energy or food. Just like the ants.
If they generate power in response to sunlight, we could organize the drones in a way to generate solar power with a turbine or something similar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such changes could be millions of years in the making
Evolution, like geology, tends to happen in fits and starts - yes, it happens over very long timescales as a general phenomenon , but significant changes tend to happen in very short timescales, before then annealing over a population and finding equilibrium over a longer timescale. Take lactose tolerance in humans, for instance. That happened almost spontaneously in Northern European populations 6kYa, as it was such…
I still remember this episode from the 80s when sir David Attenborough climbs into a termite mound up to 6 feet below the surface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbbLCgh6sso These termites are fungus farmers and feed the gigantic queen with it. Unfortunately the fungus farming is not part of this clip, but it is also described the same program. Edit: This is an older version of sir David Attenborough, revisiting ano…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evolution, like geology, tends to happen in fits and starts - yes, it happens over very long timescales as a general phenomenon , but significant changes tend to happen in very short timescales, before then annealing over a population and finding equilibrium over a longer timescale. Take lactose tolerance in humans, for instance. That happened almost spontaneously in Northern European populations 6kYa, as it was such…
If there are bacteria that can feed on plastic (not saying there aren't), wouldn't they have essentially no competition and thus thrive in plastic polluted environments?
I still remember this episode from the 80s when sir David Attenborough climbs into a termite mound up to 6 feet below the surface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbbLCgh6sso These termites are fungus farmers and feed the gigantic queen with it. Unfortunately the fungus farming is not part of this clip, but it is also described the same program. Edit: This is an older version of sir David Attenborough, revisiting ano…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Earth: Human population: 8.2 billion humans. Ant population: 20 quadrillion ants. I'm not sure they need to take over the world - it looks like it is already theirs.
But what's their GDP?