Ok so how does a cancer kill its host?
It grows until it consumes so many nutrients that the other living cells don’t get enough. The host literally starves even if he eats plentifully.
The same applies for the US: The billionaires are not only hoarding wealth, but by doing so they’re crippling the economy for workers and everybody besides themselves.
The same applies to the human race.
Ok, Agent Smith.
Fuck man. Now I need to rewatch The Matrix
Agent Smith wasn’t wrong. Most villains have a weak motivation; Smith’s was strong, because it is true.
Nice try would be funnier
Let’s take the original comment at face value and in earnest for a moment.
Wouldn’t the human race be more like a parasite?
In all honesty, I don’t think the earth needs us, nor would we qualify for a symbiotic relationship. Earth really doesn’t need most of its inhabitants.
That would move to a more existential question of what it means for earth to survive or be “alive”? Support any life?
If we take “Earth” as the biosphere, because honestly the naked rock isn’t that interesting, then the cancer analogy is fitting. After all, we grew as part of that Earth and have developed to a size and growth that now threatens to kill our host/the rest of the body
Yup! Of the things we could be, we’re most like a virus, but parasite might work. Most parasites don’t kill their hosts, and if they do it’s a secondary action - it usually isn’t the parasite itself that kills the host, but some virus or bacteria the parasite transmits. There are some really nasty parasitic worms that will kill you, or make you wish you were dead.
We’re definitely not symbiotic, like most macro and many micro organisms are.
If we consider the the ecosystem as the host, we’re killing it; and individually, we’re micro-sized to the Earth, so I think virus is the most accurate model.
Currently, our collective behavior is parasitic and destructive to the environment, yes. But it’s important to draw a distinction here - a virus or bacterial infection or a parasite are locked into their respective strategies. They cannot help being what they are.
We don’t get that excuse. Humans are the ultimate generalists; we specialized into learning and communicating new behaviors between ourselves. Unlike the flu or a ringworm, we have the capacity to change how we interact with the environment.
See, this is what I find funny about those who promote voluntary extinction, or most of those who promote any philosophy. They never lead by example.
Do you think I’m promoting voluntary extinction? I don’t think anyone has to do that - not only would it not make a dent in the race to doomsday, but it’s unnecessary since we’ve probably already passed the point at which we’re capable of halting the runaway ecological collapse we’ve engineered - even if there was any indication of willingness on the part of the biggest polluters to draw down, which there isn’t.
What I find funny is those people who are still making more people, as if they’re not dooming them to live through a true apocalypse: global societal and ecological collapse, technological regression, famine, and the resurgence of self-perpetuating oligarchies. A dark ages, but one we’ll never come out of.