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Ant Geopolitics

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Re: Ant Geopolitics

#81

Post by renjimen »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

Olaf Stapledon has two sci fi works that incorporate many ecological ideas into his vision of a future history of the human species (Last and First Men) and his ideas for possible alien life (Star Maker). They are both incredible works of human imagination

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#82

Post by xipho »

octagons wrote: post #75
xipho wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At present it's just the data being dumped from TaxonWorks and re-integrated into the existing front-end (separation of concerns nicely done). In the future we hope efforts that wrap TaxonWorks APIs and tooling, "companions", will evolve to make things look better. For example it would be trivial to wrap AntWeb in TaxonPages (see Github for everything) to get a new front end there, though that software is focused at…

I’d love to discuss contributing further. Do you have a link to a GitHub repository or organization?

https://speciesfilegroup.org and https://github.com/SpeciesFileGroup, among others.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#83

Post by BlueTemplar »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #25
ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing ( https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png ) :) (slight spoilers, FYI) https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-…

Thanks, this has put in perspective my frustrations with RimWorld simulation being a bit skin-deep... also how that frustrating rotting plants issue that you get zero advanced warning for might have made it into RimWorld !

Also : https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=57492.msg497822#ms...

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#84

Post by [deleted] »

ses1984 wrote: post #36
octagons wrote: post #19

If you found this story interesting, you may be interested to know that antkeeping is a rewarding and fairly inexpensive hobby. The Global Ant Nursery (GAN) project run by AntsCanada, a popular YouTube channel, is a great way to obtain new queens responsibly. Alternatively, it’s fairly easy to find queens on your own. AntsCanada offers a starter guide, and there are many other resources that teach you when and where…

AntsCanada is a great gateway into antkeeping but I would beware about the GAN. I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The person said that they already gave away the species I wanted, but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They pushed a species which isn't r…

[deleted]

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#85

Post by throw310822 »

octagons wrote: post #73
ses1984 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AntsCanada is a great gateway into antkeeping but I would beware about the GAN. I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The person said that they already gave away the species I wanted, but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They pushed a species which isn't r…

I’ve also experienced this using GAN. Be wary and use common sense. I never bothered reporting it but I’d be willing to bet we’re talking about the same person. They listed the same advertisement in basically every state with a different Google Voice number so as to appear local. I was under the impression that we would be meeting because they were local, which is how GAN is intended to operate.?Instead, they shipped…

So there is someone that is running a shady operation selling ants?

> They started a web store not longer afterwards.

At this point I'm not sure if it's a store online or one that sells spider-related stuff.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#86

Post by abrookewood »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

Can you please let everyone know where this interview will be available?

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#87

Post by kibwen »

permo-w wrote: post #79
mullingitover wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The enslaved ants which grew up in the slave maker ant colony kill the slave maker ant queens (along with other pupae, but they kill the queens at higher rates) in their pupal stage. They're basically in rebellion. Researchers think that this behavior is selected for, as it reduces the effectiveness of the slave maker ants and increases the odds of survival of the enslaved ant species.

it could make a pretty cool film. baby taken as a child turns on his captors and destroys their queen.

A tale as old as time. Literally, this is the story of Moses.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#88

Post by graemep »

hammock wrote: post #14
xipho wrote: post #13

Disclaimer- shameless plug involved. Humans are one species, a complicated on for sure, Ants are well over 15k species. Of course not all are found together, but many species are. As the article notes the diversity of their social structures is collectively nuts. The combinatorics of all these species interacting with a myriad of micro-habitats and resultant behaviors emerging is crazy. The sheer number of non-ant sp…

> The sheer number of non-ant species that have evolved to look and behave exactly like ants, from being drug-pushers to parasitoids, to meme-ready social influencers says a lot about how long they've been around and how important they are to how natural systems work. Fascinating to me, and thank you for calling it out. Ants aren't the only "form" that this happens to in the animal kingdom either. Homo sapiens used t…

> Many have wondered what society would be like if we still had close species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today

It would not be great. If you consider the track record human being have of being horrible to those who look very slightly different or have a slightly different culture, how would we treat beings who were far more different?

It would be even worse if they were are mental inferiors. Imagine a world in which scientific racism was proven true rather than debunked. They would be perfect slaves or research subjects.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#89

Post by hoseja »

xipho wrote: post #13

Disclaimer- shameless plug involved. Humans are one species, a complicated on for sure, Ants are well over 15k species. Of course not all are found together, but many species are. As the article notes the diversity of their social structures is collectively nuts. The combinatorics of all these species interacting with a myriad of micro-habitats and resultant behaviors emerging is crazy. The sheer number of non-ant sp…

A single human weighs on the order of tens of millions of ants. The Earth is so much bigger for them.

Re: Ant Geopolitics

#90

Post by arc-in-space »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #25
ryanblakeley wrote: post #10

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing ( https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png ) :) (slight spoilers, FYI) https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-…

This is super random but for a brief time I happened to be in a WoW guild with Adrian, did some raiding together. Really should get around to reading Children of Time at some point.
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