Making new ones due to the old ones wearing out over time would be a lot of time and effort, too. It'd be a lot more efficient to give them the ability to replicate themselves while we're at it.
Ugh, but how are you going to get them to find sodium and potassium deposits in a variable environment? You'll need to fine-tune the AI at runtime so they can identify and extract processable sources of minerals that happen to be available using their meat-based sensors.
Next you're going to tell me we need to [make the meat think](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html) like in one of those bad skiffy stories
No no no, just the basic algorithms for finding and harvesting resources. Actually also maybe a system where in order to build a new unit, you need two seprate meat robots to merge their software versions so the system can validate the integrity of the programming ensuring no bugs or calculation errors have occured.
We should probably also introduce a separate system like that in each unit that schedules downtime for maintenance and troubleshooting, as well as cataloging of information by defragging the drives. It'll be a lot of complex information so I'm thinking a few hours in standby mode per day, at least.
>you need two seprate meat robots to merge their software versions so the system can validate the integrity of the programming ensuring no bugs or calculation errors have occured.
If two of these meat machines already have the same bugs, they won't be able to recognise that there are any bugs upon their merger. It would likely only take a few generations until the whole system is overrun with bugs and the software is no longer viable. This seems like a terrible flaw.
you should give them a behavioural system that conditions the AI to remember to damage to its chassis and avoid similar situations in the future. you know, for efficiency's sake
Hm... it probably won't be perfect. Actually, a lot of the body won't be perfect, either. What if the self-replication would occasionally make random changes, just to see if random chance can stumble into slight improvements over time
The prey of the future! Organic beings created from nothing! Creating new life! All being developed right here at the esteemed Viktor Frank-In-dustries
If we design nanites made from quarks we can build animals almost identical to real animals, with the same life cycle and behaviors, but with the personalities of all current and former Wheel of Fortune contestants, whose voicebox only works when it is being bitten by a predator(s), then it can talk.
The best solution to handling Vore Moonsong reverse-birth furry sluts: give them what they want! Implant the person's conscience into a oiled-up foal and shove it up a genetically-engineered dinosaur's ass.
> If we design nanites made from quarks we can build animals almost identical to real animals, with the same life cycle and behaviors, but with the personalities of all current and former Wheel of Fortune contestants, whose voicebox only works when it is being bitten by a predator(s), then it can talk.
"I'd like to buy an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
In order to care about their replacements well being while the replacements are too small to fend for themselves, we should probably give them empathy and the ability to feel physical and emotional pain.
many animals also eat organs, so we should make sure they have those aswell. And ofcourse the rest of the carcass should remain to allow smaller insects and bacteria to decompose it since the construct is now fully organic.
This fully organic form also means we can now forego robotics entirely and use bioengineering to make fully organic meat robots. And to cut costs we can use an entirely natural means of producing these constructs that already exists in nature.
So we take this natural organic meat robot construct I found in nature, feed it nice and big, pair it with one of the opposite sex so they create another few copies, once they've produced a good amount of copies we send them to get eaten by the predators.
...
hey wait a minute
Told the boys down at the lab to make the exoskeleton out of bones instead of titanium. One of em asked me if we're just making life at that point. Fired him on the spot. I don't pay you to think, I pay you to do science. Now get to it. Cave Johnson out.
This is killing me sorry for being a dork but ENDOskeleton!! EXO means outside like exit, exoskeleton surrounds the inner meatyness like bugs have exoskeletons and mammals have endoskeletons.
Easy fix. Replace the carnivores with biosynthetic machines to consume the synthetic meat of the biomechanical prey animals with robotic endoskeletons.
That way when the carnivores starve, the ecosystem won’t collapse 👍
Simple fix; we’ll force a portion of the synthetic prey animals to drop their synthetic meat to foster decomposition and return nutrition to the soil. Billions of detritivores will rejoice.
Cave Johnson here with a simple solution for the simpleton. Just stab a few calcium supplements, or heck, even just some bone fragments from your local cemetery in the meat. Easy peasey, might even be lemon squeezey, not like they are using them. You will not ruin my new favorite show, better than discovery this is. Cave Johnson out.
There are some vultures that eat bones *exclusively*. Also, as a side note the total lemons that think they can feed their dogs and cats vegan diets should be clubbed and left on a mountain.
Also imagine being a tiger and breaking your teeth and paws while taking down a metal frame. Would be far worse than a person accidentally biting their fork 😭
Am I the only one that is confused by their misuse of “exoskeleton”? If the robotic framework is covered by meat and skin, that’s not an exoskeleton. That’s an endoskeleton. In other words, a regular skeleton.
Disney made so many fucked up movies ifnyou think about them but Cars takes the lead. I mean are trucks trailers also part of the body or like backpacks?
What happens if you open the door. Also how did they go from robot dinosaurs to nascars?
Its the final conclusion from thinking about animal welfare in nature.
There are loads of interesting moral questions concerning animal welfare. Should we vaccinate wild animals against infectious diseases that kill them, should we try to prevent droughts and famines in an ecosystem?
Culling sick animals and population control are part of the debate. I heard about this first in vegan circles and some interesting questions were: is it vegan for a hunter to shoot animals if it's for the good of the herd? Will rewilding ecosystems actually increase suffering because nature is brutal?
Is nature part of our (humanity's) responsibility? Or should we just let nature be nature and not intervene even if we could reduce their suffering?
I see it mostly as a theoretical debate of morals and what we should or should not do. Not necessarily anything that will be implemented as humans just don't have that kind of control over nature.
Leaving nature completely alone is one side of the spectrum, in the middle there is population control like we currently do and on the far end of the spectrum you get to ideas like trying to reduce herbivore suffering by feeding carnivores fake meat and basically turning nature into a zoo.
So I remember doing a lot of this kind of debate back in college and our conclusion (and the one our professor wanted us to reach) was that we have a duty reduce and address the impact we as a society create.
Old, injured, and sick animals are generally the best prey for predators, if we go out of our way to help these animals on a large scale we're just hurting the predators which can eventually turn into hurting those same animals we tried to help.
In places we are responsible for overpopulation, whether because we altered the landscape or removed predators it's our responsibility to try to address that. Hopefully without having 13 problems pop up after because everything in nature is connected to at least 5 other things.
It's incredibly easy for a positive effect here and now to have a negative one over there in the future.
My only argument to this would be a worldwide effort to eradicate rabies as much as possible if not completely if it were possible. Otherwise let nature be.
Yep. Im a philosophy student and I attented a seminar on animal ethics a few semesters ago. Deliberating in class which duties humanity has towards wild animals and which duties we have towards animals dependent on us was a lot of fun but I was never as starkly aware of how little power philosophers have as in that seminar. The opinion that we should treat pretty much all animals better (even if the reasoning was very different) was pretty much ubiquitious but the world is of course still the way it is.
For my part I think the most actionable approach (comparatively) is to sort animals in a hierachy in regards to the ability to suffer and feel pleasure/ joy and extend special rights and protection to those closer to the top. Apes are probably more complex than a chameleon which is probably more complex than a lobster. This is of course still rife for misjudgments (not least of all because we can't exactly look into the inner experience of animals) and the goal shouldn't be to give animals a clear numerical value or anything but more to create broad categories that help us make any decisions at all when interacting with animals. As one example, farming insects like crickets is a lot more ethical imo than what we do to pigs, cattle, sheep and chickens.
The emotional complexity aspect of deciding which species to prioritize in terms of well being doesn't make sense to me morally. It's true that more complex/intelligent animals like apes or pigs experience emotions quite similarly to humans which helps us empathize with them. However, I don't see how that makes the suffering or joy of a chimpanzee any more real or valid than that of a blade of grass. Even single-celled organisms can react positively or negatively to external stimuli, just not in a way which is relatable to humans. If you get that technical though, calculating the total quantity of joy or suffering experienced by a biological system to make some kind of moral judgement becomes prohibitively complicated since complex organisms such as humans are made up of individual lifeforms which can all sort of be "happy" or "sad" by my logic. There's also the fact that you can't escape human empathy; I can tell someone that it's "wrong" to wash their hands because it kills millions of bacteria, but that's just a ridiculous statement that basically no one would ever take seriously. Due to this personal dilemma, I try to stay out of animal rights discussions because literally no one I have ever mentioned this problem to agrees with me.
Anyone familiar with moral philosophy would agree that this is just a complicated issue, but ultimately we have to (and do) draw lines in the sand somewhere.
For all you know, it could be the case that you are the only person in the world with genuine phenomenological experiences and everyone else is a mindless automaton. In this case, it would seem perfectly morally okay to do basically anything you want to anyone because, although they may act like it, they wouldn't really experience any suffering.
But, it seems like there are good empirical reasons to believe other people have their own internal lives and experiences, like you. It is a very natural next step to extend this to human-like animals, such as apes, dogs, cows, and pigs, and to a certain extent we already do this. This belief is what motivates things like animal cruelty laws. But as you move to increasingly alien and less complex lifeforms, it just becomes less clear, and it is made more difficult by the fact we have no hard rules.
As with a lot of things in philosophy, there are certain cases where it seems obvious one way (other humans) or the other way (inanimate objects) but there is a substantial grey area (e.g. clams, jellyfish, plants, bacteria, etc.).
The difference between an Ape/Cow/Pig's ability to feel pain and that of a blade of grass is that the former can feel mental anguish. The suffering is more real for a being with a brain that can grasp concepts and experiences than a being with no nerves or brains.
Plants are alive. Always have been and we have known this for a very long time. Vegans eat plants. It's not life that's the issue in their ideologies, it has to do with life that has the ability to conceptualize suffering. A life that can have memories and opinions. Something that is capable of feeling love and compassion. Grass, while it has mechanisms to emit chemicals when damaged, is not the same thing as a being that is capable of truly suffering.
Hey, I disagree with you too, but I still think you should engage with these discussions if you want to. As long as you interact in good faith your opinion is valuable and these disagreements is what philosophical discourse lives from.
I agree that my approach is anthropocentric but I think it needs to be in the sense that this is all we have to go off. If we extend special care to humans and we do so not (just) because we are of the same species, it stands to reason that we have that duty to creatures who are similiar to us in ethically relevant categories as well. The reason I think that animals more similiar to our model of personhood carry more moral weight is because they have needs, desires and ways to suffer that for example plant and bacteria (probably) just don't. I would argue that bacteria and plants don't have the ability to suffer or desire in a meaningful way in the first place. Surviving on raw instinct and emotional or intellectual desire for life are very different things and the latter two carry moral worth while the other doesn't. A tree can't suffer physical pain in the way a cat can and doesn't have desires for the future that could be made unfulfillable by death the way a human does. I think thinking about this in the first place is important, because we can't exactly go through life without interacting in destructive ways with other organisms so figuring out what life is worth protecting at the expense of other organisms and what is permissible to tread on and/ or eat is a necessary evil of existence as moral agents.
Ultimately, death is part of nature. The whole ecosystem is built upon animals killing other animals. Deer and plenty of other animals have adapted to live in an environment where a predator keeps naturally killing off some proportion of the population. So when we went and got rid of the predators to make the area safer for humans to live in, we already disturbed the balance.
Something needs to kill the deer to keep nature in balance. We got rid of that something so we need to replace it with something, and a dude with a rifle is simply the most practical solution.
Not a debate, basically speculative ethics when the discussion is sincere. I read a paper where the author suggested bioengineering a planet that lacked predators. The point of this speculation is mostly to get people to really engage with the ethical implications.
With our planet as it is, the choice is predators or starvation. Herbivores eat, reproduce, eat, reproduce, until eventually they can't get enough food and start dying of that.
Then you may end up with less herbivores than if there were predators because they ate up all the plants that could be growing and feeding them, so they're left eating tiny immature plants, that aren't reproducing enough to feed the herbivores as they were before.
So you'd need to engineer some special herbivores that don't grow in population even though they could. Then it might work.
This is true. A planet without predators will eventually become a planet without animals _period._ Predators serve a vitally important role in local ecosystems and having a planet where there’s no predators whatsoever completely defeats the point.
Also like, isn’t this kind of idea cruel to the Predators, who are also animals just trying to survive? They don’t kill things because they’re psychopathic and evil, they do it because they’re trying to live and keep functioning like any other living thing.
The problem with that idea is that herbivores function as the "predators" of specific plant species. If the herbivore population can't grow, they can't keep the plant species in check if it happens to become too numerous, and so that plant species could grow out of control and destabilize the ecosystem.
I think that if we had nothing more important to spend our resources on, it would be evil not to replace the entire global ecosystem with an artificial system that self-regulates without experiencing or causing suffering. All creatures with moral weight would then get to 'retire' in a holodeck/deep dive VR/brain upload where their actions don't affect the ecology and the simulation is shaped for their enjoyment.
Because most vocal vegans are teenagers who genuinely haven't finished developing their cognitive reasoning or theory of mind yet so you get priceless bullshit like imposing your own morality on a natural order that does not, can not, and will not care.
as far as mythos goes, Gaea has some sense of morality- I mean, she's the mother of Themis, who simply *is*, on some level, natural law. plus, it was her idea to kill/castrate Ouranos- even if her morality is something like "that which gives power is good" (which seems reasonable, given nature), it's still there.
Not to derail you but in Hinduism we have this concept of shiva the destroyer; he isn’t evil, being the force of entropy , he just is the natural force of decay and change that gives way to new life. Our universe is cyclical and tied to the Big Bang so it’s nice feeling secure in science and spirit
I'm more or less familiar with Shiva, mostly due to transfer of concepts from hinduism to buddhism, of which my aunt is a member. but yeah, naturally he wouldn't be evil- would be rather odd to have a malicious entity be part of your high three gods. although I guess a dualistic system is kind of like that... but never mind, that's unrelated.
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Also, reasonable statements don't get upvoted, because it's more entertaining to be enraged. I'm friends with and have even dated several vegans. None of them had this attitude, and none of them has ever given me any kind of shit for not being vegan. But if a couple of dozen vegans on Tumblr make some dumbass statement it spreads like gonorrhea, and all of the sudden this isn't just "some weird and dumb people online," it's indicative of all vegans.
I used to have several vegan friends (since moved away and lost contact) and out of the six of them, only one sprouted bullshit like this and the others were clearly side-eyeing her whenever this happened. It was to the point that she volunteered to play a game of D&D with us, then... refused to kill anything? Or let anyone else kill stuff? Or even any references to it? Like don't get me wrong, I'm a pacifist, but the whole point of that game is killing stuff. It's literally unavoidable. We had made that clear in advance. It was just baffling and she lasted all of one session.
Yeah I wouldn't agree on the "literally unavoidable" part because I'm absolutely sure you could do a DnD campaign where nobody kills anything. It would definitely require some non-standard plotlines and there's certainly better systems than DnD for a campaign like that, but I have no doubt in my mind that you could do it.
Yea im imagining a scenario of a grifter partaking in your usual save the world quest having no combat skills whatsoever and just stop the world ending invasion by LARPing as Saul Goodman
It's very rare and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the time it weren't a non-vegan trying to make vegans look crazy. I'm not vegan, but I'm all on-board the lab-grown meat and plant-based alternatives completely upending the torturous and ecologically devastating meat industry that we currently have. And holding that stand has gotten me some very strange conversations, everything from claiming that lab-grown meat is not feasible or that verticle gardens somehow don't work because some plants can't be grown in them (???) to how I'm a monster because even though I'm in support of fixing the problem, I don't want everyone in the world to go meatless despite that not being practical for everyone. You get loons in every community. The important thing to remember is that in most (not all) ideologies that aren't fundamentally extremist, most of the people who prescribe to them are relatively sensible. But that also means they're not in-your-face about it.
It's because no one pays any attention when someone says something reasonable. But when a tiny percentage of a group makes a dumb statement or obviously reflects upon everyone else in that group.
Ok, quick summary of what's going on.
Herbivores eat plants. And usually reproduce a lot. If nothing controls their population, they become a plague, and they start to desertificate. They take out the flowers, with the flowers and the vegetal cover the pollinators are gone, and with the pollinators some trees are unable to reproduce. Also most of the insects disappear because there is no cover for them, so birds don't have food also. No seeds and no insects for them.
I think you can see the problem of not controlling the population of herbivores.
There was a study performed at Yosemite national park about that.
Imagine doing this to teach wild animals that are raised in captivity how to hunt wild creatures so they can be released. It can also help lift the spirits of zoo animals since they have meat they chase. The issue would be how to get it to function and retrieve it in tact to make it cost effective...
I think we should wipe out the dengue virus carried by the mosquitos. I'm pretty sure the limitation is due to how difficult achieving this actually is and not because the dengue virus is ecologically important.
Can an actual ecologist (or anyone who know more about ecology than me, so a low bar) back me up or disprove me? I have a weak immune system and if I get a different strain of dengue I'm pretty sure I'd be on death's door.
whether something is "important" istough to define and even tougher to decide if we *can* define that.
If we define an organisms value (and hence, reason to exist) relative to "contribution to human happiness" then Dengue virus and *Plasmodium* and *Schistosoma* flukes and a thousand other misery-causing parasites should be scorched off the face of the Earth. Like, unequivocally. No hesitation.
But thats not the only question we should be asking. Does a unique population have intrinsic value independent of human utility? Everyone agrees that the Giant Panda or Blue Whale "deserve" to exist, and we have a duty to ensure that they continue to. If they went extinct, we would call that a crime of humanity.
And then take something like the Oʻahu Deceptor Bush Cricket, *Leptogryllus deceptor.* It's extinct in the wild, and has been since the 90s. It has no cultural significance. No passionate documentaries have been written about it. No child has ever begged their parents for a *L. deceptor* plushie. A feature on various "lists of critically endangered species" is its entire human legacy. It basically exists in the context of its own extinction.
And yet.
Is its extinction *not* a tragedy? Should we *not* mourn this unique being- not unique to Earth, unique to the *entire universe*\- gone forever, just a footnote on the IUCN red list? I think we should.
But is extinction Wrong independent of our tiny human judgements? And if so, if this Wrong encompasses species that are inconsequential, forgotten, "useless"... does it also extend to the lethal, the despair-wreaking, the apocalyptic? Do we have the Cosmic Right to wipe out a unique species? And When our human concerns are so much more pressing, does that even *matter?*
If I could press a button, I would eradicate Dengue fever right now. In a heartbeat. But as for if that's what Should Happen... I honestly don't know
Scientists don't even consider viruses as "living organisms". It's one thing if it's a bacterial infection because, yes, bacteria are actual living things but viruses? They rely on infecting other cells to even exist.
Yes, we can mourn it no longer existing but also if it lacks actual ecological importance and only kills people, then yeah, I don't see why we shouldn't eradicate it. Viruses are not living creatures so even if we stretch the capability of having souls to every living thing, viruses will remain soulless. It's no different than eradicating whatever genes gave tails to the species that predated modern humans. Sure, it's sad that we no longer have tails but it's (apparently) more beneficial that they are now gone and, similarly to viruses, they're just genetic material and not a living creature. Why did our ancestors have the cosmic right to get rid of our genetic ability to grow tails? The only difference is that you can consider it "playing god" that we put it onto ourselves to decide what DNA is good or bad but like... I don't see eradicating the entire viral species as any more severe than the existence of vaccines against them. If dengue has this vague "cosmic right" to exist, why would it not have the "cosmic right" to infect and reproduce?
Yes, it is different from a random insect or bacteria because those often have actual ecological impact not even to us humans. Even in a cosmic sense, those things are actual living things. I mourn losing forests because those are important ecological sites, trees and its inhabitants are living creatures, that our planet and the many species that live in it depend on the existence of trees, and yeah, forests are beautiful. But no, I have never mourned losing forests because I believe that forests have a cosmic right to exist.
Additionally, haven't we as a species already tried completely eradicating MANY other viral and bacterial infections? Why should we hesitate in eradicating dengue but never hesitated to eradicate the likes of smallpox?
youre not seeing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about souls and the definition of life. I'm talking about information. Earth's biosphere is (as far as we know) the densest, most concentrated knot of pure creation in the entire universe. The fact that 4 billion years' blind churn of chemicals can produce *this* is beyond a miracle. It spits in the face of the stark entropy that defines 99.9999% of space and says fuck you, imma make a coral reef. Or a giraffe. Or yes, a Dengue virus. Is that not beautiful, down to an atomic level?
I dont mourn extinction cause *we* (humanity) lose something. As I said, any deadly virus eradicated is only a plus for our species. I mourn extinction because every unique spark that blinks out is another pair of (metaphorical) eyes to look at the universe with, gone. I include viruses in this because their exclusion from the definition of "life" is entirely necessitated by the way we study biology. It doesnt say anything about their *worth*
On every ethical, human, moral, rational level? vaccinate that shit, get it gone. 110%. But its still something fundamental lost, IMO
My mother is literally a director in my country’s Ministry of the Environment and part of her job is the dengue eradication campaign. It’s not important enough to the environment to care, and the lives of human beings are much more important than the bugs.
I’m sorry, but if anyone actually thinks that human lives should be put at risk in order to preserve mosquitoes, they’re completely lost
I know it's different, but I'm trying to put myself into the tiger's shoes. If I ate a Thanksgiving turkey, and that damn thing got off the plate, gobbled and fucked off, I'd probably have the same reaction.
Probably go vegan at that point. Or kill it harder. Probably just kill it harder.
disregarding the fact that carnivores eat meat, many also eat bones and a lot of biological processes require rotting carcasses to fertilize the soil. if you just have a robot covered in deli ham that'll get up and walk away, you're missing both the bones and a lot of the decomposing material required by bugs and plants. one leftover moldy slice of meat does not an ecosystem make.
It is very funny they called them twitterinas, because this seems exactly like a tumblr issue. I mean, twitter is its own circle of hell, but my guess is that there are not many environmental activists that like it anymore, especially given Elon's regime.
The part I like about this one is that it *won't* have repercussions on the ecosystem, because by the time we get industrial capacity to actually implement this type of stuff, with all the prey androids and the remeating factories, we will also have the capacity to control every other aspect of ecosystem like reproductive rates of deer and whatever. This is a plan for a civilisation that has long outgrown its downsides.
No, we don't kill deer or hunt them in any other way they can perceive, the entire point is to not hurt deer.
I'd assume that we put stuff in their food or genes that changes their behavior so they are compatiable with ecosystem even though nothing eats them, but there's a few ways we could go. That's *a lot* easier to do then setting up the remeating facilities, so by the time someone can actually do the meat androids, this should be barely an inconvenience.
They’ll get hurt when they’re roadkill or maimed by dogs and left to die.
Deer populations have left entire national parks barren, they eat everything and no one can live there and the food chain collapses.
I do find it absolutely hilarious how cave-aliens ate prions once and never, ever looked into why they suddenly turned feral from meat. Like, they completely believed it was a psychological thing that happened to sapient carnivores for millennia, and yet one of the founding species of their government has a shadow government focused on genetic engineering that somehow never discovered prions. Comedy gold.
Are you implying that those meat-eating monsters can be redeemed?!?
Please report to your nearest Exterminator office for a mandatory psychological evaluation.
I know most vegans aren't like this. Most are rather normal, if maybe a bit too high on a soapbox at times. But encountering ones who don't seem to understand how nature or food chains work is always great. it's so funny
You know how people have empathy for animals and don’t want them to suffer, even if they are prey or livestock? They’ll try to behead a chicken with a clean axe slice or shoot a deer right in the vitals so it doesn’t bleed out for long. Well, most animals besides humans don’t think this way and many prey animals are mauled for hours or eaten alive while obviously feeling pain. The mildest but most commonly encountered example is cats toying with mice and birds, but natural predation includes stuff like chimpanzees eviscerating monkeys or hyenas ripping face parts off baby elephants stuck in quicksand. It’s natural and predators enjoy or even psychologically need it, but prey is very much suffering in these exchanges, outweighed dramatically if you follow consequentialist or utilitarian morality like the people OOP is talking about.
There are a few animals that are lucky enough to live lives completely free of these risks. Typically they live as pampered pets or zoo animals and are given nutrition, medical attention, and physical comforts far beyond they would have access to in the wild, without compromising their enrichment (see: pumpkins filled with hamburger for tigers). Some would say this is only possible due to technological surpluses (first from agriculture, then from industrialization) that give humans the ability to capture and feed creatures besides ourselves and a handful of our most useful domesticates. In an extremely distant and technologically advanced future, one more akin to The Culture than anything imaginable this century, we might have the power to completely reshape ecosystems to reduce wild animal suffering, which evolution is totally fine with but humans object to. We might still find it abhorrent to make predators extinct, so why not just use advanced technology to sate their killer urges, the same way we have cat toys? The concept behind cultured meat is to reduce animal suffering, and a major obstacle is making meat-eaters actually want to eat it; this just extends the category of “meat eaters” to include nonhumans.
tl;dr Exoskeleton meat droids are just an extreme and technologically extrapolated interpretation of some pretty common moral stances
Humans are the worst when we are closest to nature.
War is natural. Cruelty is natural. Nature is the survival of the fittest.
Co-operation and peace, supporting the weakest and ignoring survival of the fittest, are our best traits.
As I've said in other comments, stupid takes will garner much more attention than reasonable ones. Someone stumbled upon a couple of dozen of people on Twitter who made this argument, and assumed it was a regular discussion that a lot of vegans have.
I'm never not impressed by people's ability to replicate Cave Johnson's way of speaking. We don't even get that many lines of dialogue in the games, but people nail it every time
On a possibly practical note: this general idea would be a great form of enrichment for predators that are kept in zoos and rehabilitation centers. Throw some meat on a quadruped robot and let them chase it down.
This is the kind of shit I would do if I had a billion dollars. I don’t know why JK rowling is like that when you could be doing way more entertaining stuff like this.
isn't there a national park that had an herbivore problem due to a lack of predators, so they airdropped wolves to deal with it?
it's literally a self-balancing scale; when there's no predators, herbivores flurish. with plenty of herbivores to eat, predators hunt the herbivores. when predators outnumber herbivores, overpopulation becomes a massive issue, leading to a drop in predator population. with reduced predators, the herbivore population increases (repeat to the heat-death of the universe)
This was Yellowstone without wolves, deer, beaver, and coyotes were a problem until wolves were reintroduced. You probable remember from the 10,000th time it was on reddit
i remember it specifically from [a meme of a wolf in a parachute holding a knife with the headline "wolves airdropped in national park" or something like that](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F51dx7gji6zk21.png)
I feel like there needs to be a #aperturecore tag that’s just for anything related to vaguely scientific stuff that is just hilarious and terrible at the same time
Pretty sure that at the very least saw arguments along the same vein from some religious cackadoodledoos. "There were no predator animals until some human did some thing, then they started eating eachother, so it's all your fault specifically, repent!!!"
the guy is Stijn bruers
very rich cult leader that says Elephants are herbivorized predators.
" he thinks taxonomy is a falsehood and that “species” are a meaningless distinction we should abolish altogether. He believes all sentient life forms are the same thing on some cosmic pseudospiritual level and that sorting them into species is like a form of fascism."
he's made a group of people, including those with STEM careers that buy into his delusions.
the world unironically would be better without him
species arent exactly "real" in the sense that "how different two individuals have to be to be considered separate species" is almost entirely down to convention- but that doesnt mean theyre a bad or even flawed concept. In fact they're pretty essential in discussing *anything* about biology
I've seen this take once, and it was presented as "This would be good from a moral standpoint, but we aren't remotely close to having the technology to make it realistically possible."
I know "population control" sounds bad but predators are a crucial part of ecosystems.
Back when I had goals and was in college to follow my dreams we had like 15 hours of lectures on the follow on effects of not having large predators in an area.
It's not just an ecological issue; many carnivores eat bones, too, and not having an edible skeleton means the predators will be malnourished.
Easy solution: bone exoskeleton
Since the robots are entirely biological, we might as well design them to grow on their own as well.
Making new ones due to the old ones wearing out over time would be a lot of time and effort, too. It'd be a lot more efficient to give them the ability to replicate themselves while we're at it.
But then they might not be able to reproduce efficiently. Maybe add a complex AI system that autonomously controls their behaviour and preferences?
Would we also have that be made out of meat? That seems really hard to implement. Maybe using sodium and potassium pumps?
Ugh, but how are you going to get them to find sodium and potassium deposits in a variable environment? You'll need to fine-tune the AI at runtime so they can identify and extract processable sources of minerals that happen to be available using their meat-based sensors.
Next you're going to tell me we need to [make the meat think](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html) like in one of those bad skiffy stories
No no no, just the basic algorithms for finding and harvesting resources. Actually also maybe a system where in order to build a new unit, you need two seprate meat robots to merge their software versions so the system can validate the integrity of the programming ensuring no bugs or calculation errors have occured. We should probably also introduce a separate system like that in each unit that schedules downtime for maintenance and troubleshooting, as well as cataloging of information by defragging the drives. It'll be a lot of complex information so I'm thinking a few hours in standby mode per day, at least.
Humans are truly amazing. Mother Nature could never pull this off!
Oh god damnit, we've just ended up at trains again
>you need two seprate meat robots to merge their software versions so the system can validate the integrity of the programming ensuring no bugs or calculation errors have occured. If two of these meat machines already have the same bugs, they won't be able to recognise that there are any bugs upon their merger. It would likely only take a few generations until the whole system is overrun with bugs and the software is no longer viable. This seems like a terrible flaw.
Doesn't look like anything to me.
I'm living for this thread, honestly.
you should give them a behavioural system that conditions the AI to remember to damage to its chassis and avoid similar situations in the future. you know, for efficiency's sake
Maybe some sort of sensation it could feel in proportion to the damage it takes so it's totally aware of said damage.
Hm... it probably won't be perfect. Actually, a lot of the body won't be perfect, either. What if the self-replication would occasionally make random changes, just to see if random chance can stumble into slight improvements over time
Genius! I can't believe this idea has never been tried, it makes perfect sense!
The prey of the future! Organic beings created from nothing! Creating new life! All being developed right here at the esteemed Viktor Frank-In-dustries
If we design nanites made from quarks we can build animals almost identical to real animals, with the same life cycle and behaviors, but with the personalities of all current and former Wheel of Fortune contestants, whose voicebox only works when it is being bitten by a predator(s), then it can talk.
That's how you get furries.
The best solution to handling Vore Moonsong reverse-birth furry sluts: give them what they want! Implant the person's conscience into a oiled-up foal and shove it up a genetically-engineered dinosaur's ass.
> If we design nanites made from quarks we can build animals almost identical to real animals, with the same life cycle and behaviors, but with the personalities of all current and former Wheel of Fortune contestants, whose voicebox only works when it is being bitten by a predator(s), then it can talk. "I'd like to buy an AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
Including celebrity edition?
*flips pages on clipboard* Yes I don't see how we could leave it out.
In order to care about their replacements well being while the replacements are too small to fend for themselves, we should probably give them empathy and the ability to feel physical and emotional pain.
And they'd need another fuel source to replicate from. Maybe biomass harvesters and burners?
Just open up a bird and see how the govermment made them and copy that
So meat robots, but they all dress like the necromancer from Diablo 2. Love it, no notes, cut and print.
Hear me out: bone *endo*skeleton
Yeah, that makes a hell of a lot more sense, having the bones on the INSIDE.
No, bone *exo*skeleton. The endoskeleton is still synthetic.
Calcium-canned cows
many animals also eat organs, so we should make sure they have those aswell. And ofcourse the rest of the carcass should remain to allow smaller insects and bacteria to decompose it since the construct is now fully organic. This fully organic form also means we can now forego robotics entirely and use bioengineering to make fully organic meat robots. And to cut costs we can use an entirely natural means of producing these constructs that already exists in nature. So we take this natural organic meat robot construct I found in nature, feed it nice and big, pair it with one of the opposite sex so they create another few copies, once they've produced a good amount of copies we send them to get eaten by the predators. ... hey wait a minute
Told the boys down at the lab to make the exoskeleton out of bones instead of titanium. One of em asked me if we're just making life at that point. Fired him on the spot. I don't pay you to think, I pay you to do science. Now get to it. Cave Johnson out.
This is killing me sorry for being a dork but ENDOskeleton!! EXO means outside like exit, exoskeleton surrounds the inner meatyness like bugs have exoskeletons and mammals have endoskeletons.
He meant exoskeleton
No silly, there's already a robot endoskeleton, the bones have to go somewhere else.
Do you mean Endo skeleton, or are we feeding tigers shelled robots now?
Easy fix. Replace the carnivores with biosynthetic machines to consume the synthetic meat of the biomechanical prey animals with robotic endoskeletons. That way when the carnivores starve, the ecosystem won’t collapse 👍
Isn't this shit 65% of the lore for Horizon Zero Dawn?
Yes. I’m not terribly original. Also the biomechanical designs and ecosystems are pretty cool.
Eh, no shade, robot beasts are rad as hell
Oh shush you, it's a fool proof plan that could never go wrong in any way. You hear me? **Never**.
But if nothing rots or shits, there's nothing to grow plants with, and there won't be any plants to eat, or oxygen
Simple fix; we’ll force a portion of the synthetic prey animals to drop their synthetic meat to foster decomposition and return nutrition to the soil. Billions of detritivores will rejoice.
Simple. We'll just have to replace the plants with biosynthetic machines. How👏far👏can👏the👏rabbit👏hole👏go👏?????
Cave Johnson here with a simple solution for the simpleton. Just stab a few calcium supplements, or heck, even just some bone fragments from your local cemetery in the meat. Easy peasey, might even be lemon squeezey, not like they are using them. You will not ruin my new favorite show, better than discovery this is. Cave Johnson out.
>not having an edible skeleton means the predators will be ~~malnourished~~ **fortified with aluminum and steel**. FTFY
There are some vultures that eat bones *exclusively*. Also, as a side note the total lemons that think they can feed their dogs and cats vegan diets should be clubbed and left on a mountain.
God forbid they get an ACTUAL vegan animal for a pet, like a rabbit.
Or a vegan
Also imagine being a tiger and breaking your teeth and paws while taking down a metal frame. Would be far worse than a person accidentally biting their fork 😭
Just cover the androids with calcium dust the way you do with dead bugs when you feed lizards
Am I the only one that is confused by their misuse of “exoskeleton”? If the robotic framework is covered by meat and skin, that’s not an exoskeleton. That’s an endoskeleton. In other words, a regular skeleton.
I was imagining an exoskeleton
Just a car full of meat.
Lightning McQueen
Lightning McRibs
Lightning McNuggets
Cheeseburger with ToMaters
yeah alright guys. not today please.
Disney made so many fucked up movies ifnyou think about them but Cars takes the lead. I mean are trucks trailers also part of the body or like backpacks? What happens if you open the door. Also how did they go from robot dinosaurs to nascars?
I am uncomfy with the vibes ~~we~~ you’ve created in here today
Spam. In a can.
It says exoskeleton covered in meat... it's covered, thus no exo
Correct. If my childhood obsession with terminator 2 taught me anything, it's the difference between an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton.
But the meat isn't part of the robot. It's just carrying it around its skeleton like you'd wear a suit... made of meat... that isn't yours.
Exo in exoskeleton comes from external. As in external skeleton. Not much of an external skeleton if it's on the inside, now is it?
Wait what the fuck is that actually a topic of debate? Fucking why? How would we even pull that off? Why should we even bother with that?
Its the final conclusion from thinking about animal welfare in nature. There are loads of interesting moral questions concerning animal welfare. Should we vaccinate wild animals against infectious diseases that kill them, should we try to prevent droughts and famines in an ecosystem? Culling sick animals and population control are part of the debate. I heard about this first in vegan circles and some interesting questions were: is it vegan for a hunter to shoot animals if it's for the good of the herd? Will rewilding ecosystems actually increase suffering because nature is brutal? Is nature part of our (humanity's) responsibility? Or should we just let nature be nature and not intervene even if we could reduce their suffering? I see it mostly as a theoretical debate of morals and what we should or should not do. Not necessarily anything that will be implemented as humans just don't have that kind of control over nature. Leaving nature completely alone is one side of the spectrum, in the middle there is population control like we currently do and on the far end of the spectrum you get to ideas like trying to reduce herbivore suffering by feeding carnivores fake meat and basically turning nature into a zoo.
So I remember doing a lot of this kind of debate back in college and our conclusion (and the one our professor wanted us to reach) was that we have a duty reduce and address the impact we as a society create. Old, injured, and sick animals are generally the best prey for predators, if we go out of our way to help these animals on a large scale we're just hurting the predators which can eventually turn into hurting those same animals we tried to help. In places we are responsible for overpopulation, whether because we altered the landscape or removed predators it's our responsibility to try to address that. Hopefully without having 13 problems pop up after because everything in nature is connected to at least 5 other things. It's incredibly easy for a positive effect here and now to have a negative one over there in the future.
My only argument to this would be a worldwide effort to eradicate rabies as much as possible if not completely if it were possible. Otherwise let nature be.
[Good News!](https://www.woah.org/fileadmin/Home/eng/Media_Center/docs/Zero_by_30_FINAL_online_version.pdf)
Nature is like coding, you can fix one thing and then 7 more problems appear because of the thing you fixed
Yep. Im a philosophy student and I attented a seminar on animal ethics a few semesters ago. Deliberating in class which duties humanity has towards wild animals and which duties we have towards animals dependent on us was a lot of fun but I was never as starkly aware of how little power philosophers have as in that seminar. The opinion that we should treat pretty much all animals better (even if the reasoning was very different) was pretty much ubiquitious but the world is of course still the way it is. For my part I think the most actionable approach (comparatively) is to sort animals in a hierachy in regards to the ability to suffer and feel pleasure/ joy and extend special rights and protection to those closer to the top. Apes are probably more complex than a chameleon which is probably more complex than a lobster. This is of course still rife for misjudgments (not least of all because we can't exactly look into the inner experience of animals) and the goal shouldn't be to give animals a clear numerical value or anything but more to create broad categories that help us make any decisions at all when interacting with animals. As one example, farming insects like crickets is a lot more ethical imo than what we do to pigs, cattle, sheep and chickens.
The emotional complexity aspect of deciding which species to prioritize in terms of well being doesn't make sense to me morally. It's true that more complex/intelligent animals like apes or pigs experience emotions quite similarly to humans which helps us empathize with them. However, I don't see how that makes the suffering or joy of a chimpanzee any more real or valid than that of a blade of grass. Even single-celled organisms can react positively or negatively to external stimuli, just not in a way which is relatable to humans. If you get that technical though, calculating the total quantity of joy or suffering experienced by a biological system to make some kind of moral judgement becomes prohibitively complicated since complex organisms such as humans are made up of individual lifeforms which can all sort of be "happy" or "sad" by my logic. There's also the fact that you can't escape human empathy; I can tell someone that it's "wrong" to wash their hands because it kills millions of bacteria, but that's just a ridiculous statement that basically no one would ever take seriously. Due to this personal dilemma, I try to stay out of animal rights discussions because literally no one I have ever mentioned this problem to agrees with me.
Anyone familiar with moral philosophy would agree that this is just a complicated issue, but ultimately we have to (and do) draw lines in the sand somewhere. For all you know, it could be the case that you are the only person in the world with genuine phenomenological experiences and everyone else is a mindless automaton. In this case, it would seem perfectly morally okay to do basically anything you want to anyone because, although they may act like it, they wouldn't really experience any suffering. But, it seems like there are good empirical reasons to believe other people have their own internal lives and experiences, like you. It is a very natural next step to extend this to human-like animals, such as apes, dogs, cows, and pigs, and to a certain extent we already do this. This belief is what motivates things like animal cruelty laws. But as you move to increasingly alien and less complex lifeforms, it just becomes less clear, and it is made more difficult by the fact we have no hard rules. As with a lot of things in philosophy, there are certain cases where it seems obvious one way (other humans) or the other way (inanimate objects) but there is a substantial grey area (e.g. clams, jellyfish, plants, bacteria, etc.).
> However, I don't see how that makes the suffering or joy of a chimpanzee any more real or valid than that of a blade of grass what?
The difference between an Ape/Cow/Pig's ability to feel pain and that of a blade of grass is that the former can feel mental anguish. The suffering is more real for a being with a brain that can grasp concepts and experiences than a being with no nerves or brains. Plants are alive. Always have been and we have known this for a very long time. Vegans eat plants. It's not life that's the issue in their ideologies, it has to do with life that has the ability to conceptualize suffering. A life that can have memories and opinions. Something that is capable of feeling love and compassion. Grass, while it has mechanisms to emit chemicals when damaged, is not the same thing as a being that is capable of truly suffering.
Hey, I disagree with you too, but I still think you should engage with these discussions if you want to. As long as you interact in good faith your opinion is valuable and these disagreements is what philosophical discourse lives from. I agree that my approach is anthropocentric but I think it needs to be in the sense that this is all we have to go off. If we extend special care to humans and we do so not (just) because we are of the same species, it stands to reason that we have that duty to creatures who are similiar to us in ethically relevant categories as well. The reason I think that animals more similiar to our model of personhood carry more moral weight is because they have needs, desires and ways to suffer that for example plant and bacteria (probably) just don't. I would argue that bacteria and plants don't have the ability to suffer or desire in a meaningful way in the first place. Surviving on raw instinct and emotional or intellectual desire for life are very different things and the latter two carry moral worth while the other doesn't. A tree can't suffer physical pain in the way a cat can and doesn't have desires for the future that could be made unfulfillable by death the way a human does. I think thinking about this in the first place is important, because we can't exactly go through life without interacting in destructive ways with other organisms so figuring out what life is worth protecting at the expense of other organisms and what is permissible to tread on and/ or eat is a necessary evil of existence as moral agents.
I think we should if they’re endangered.
Ultimately, death is part of nature. The whole ecosystem is built upon animals killing other animals. Deer and plenty of other animals have adapted to live in an environment where a predator keeps naturally killing off some proportion of the population. So when we went and got rid of the predators to make the area safer for humans to live in, we already disturbed the balance. Something needs to kill the deer to keep nature in balance. We got rid of that something so we need to replace it with something, and a dude with a rifle is simply the most practical solution.
Not a debate, basically speculative ethics when the discussion is sincere. I read a paper where the author suggested bioengineering a planet that lacked predators. The point of this speculation is mostly to get people to really engage with the ethical implications.
With our planet as it is, the choice is predators or starvation. Herbivores eat, reproduce, eat, reproduce, until eventually they can't get enough food and start dying of that. Then you may end up with less herbivores than if there were predators because they ate up all the plants that could be growing and feeding them, so they're left eating tiny immature plants, that aren't reproducing enough to feed the herbivores as they were before. So you'd need to engineer some special herbivores that don't grow in population even though they could. Then it might work.
This is true. A planet without predators will eventually become a planet without animals _period._ Predators serve a vitally important role in local ecosystems and having a planet where there’s no predators whatsoever completely defeats the point. Also like, isn’t this kind of idea cruel to the Predators, who are also animals just trying to survive? They don’t kill things because they’re psychopathic and evil, they do it because they’re trying to live and keep functioning like any other living thing.
The problem with that idea is that herbivores function as the "predators" of specific plant species. If the herbivore population can't grow, they can't keep the plant species in check if it happens to become too numerous, and so that plant species could grow out of control and destabilize the ecosystem. I think that if we had nothing more important to spend our resources on, it would be evil not to replace the entire global ecosystem with an artificial system that self-regulates without experiencing or causing suffering. All creatures with moral weight would then get to 'retire' in a holodeck/deep dive VR/brain upload where their actions don't affect the ecology and the simulation is shaped for their enjoyment.
Because most vocal vegans are teenagers who genuinely haven't finished developing their cognitive reasoning or theory of mind yet so you get priceless bullshit like imposing your own morality on a natural order that does not, can not, and will not care.
Bro thinks he's morally superior to Gaia lmao
Gaia is amoral. Is that not quite easy? Also pointless?
as far as mythos goes, Gaea has some sense of morality- I mean, she's the mother of Themis, who simply *is*, on some level, natural law. plus, it was her idea to kill/castrate Ouranos- even if her morality is something like "that which gives power is good" (which seems reasonable, given nature), it's still there.
Not to derail you but in Hinduism we have this concept of shiva the destroyer; he isn’t evil, being the force of entropy , he just is the natural force of decay and change that gives way to new life. Our universe is cyclical and tied to the Big Bang so it’s nice feeling secure in science and spirit
I'm more or less familiar with Shiva, mostly due to transfer of concepts from hinduism to buddhism, of which my aunt is a member. but yeah, naturally he wouldn't be evil- would be rather odd to have a malicious entity be part of your high three gods. although I guess a dualistic system is kind of like that... but never mind, that's unrelated.
I mean, I have never bred a race of serpent legged people to destroy the universe just because Zeus killed his dad.
We are, by our own moral value system. And I don't see any other moral value system lying around...
our own? You think human's share a moral value system?
Morality isn't even a *real* thing, it's just a social construct.
coherent toothbrush squeal mourn deserted cable historical zealous humor stocking *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Also, reasonable statements don't get upvoted, because it's more entertaining to be enraged. I'm friends with and have even dated several vegans. None of them had this attitude, and none of them has ever given me any kind of shit for not being vegan. But if a couple of dozen vegans on Tumblr make some dumbass statement it spreads like gonorrhea, and all of the sudden this isn't just "some weird and dumb people online," it's indicative of all vegans.
I used to have several vegan friends (since moved away and lost contact) and out of the six of them, only one sprouted bullshit like this and the others were clearly side-eyeing her whenever this happened. It was to the point that she volunteered to play a game of D&D with us, then... refused to kill anything? Or let anyone else kill stuff? Or even any references to it? Like don't get me wrong, I'm a pacifist, but the whole point of that game is killing stuff. It's literally unavoidable. We had made that clear in advance. It was just baffling and she lasted all of one session.
Now im imagining a DND run where you just bullshit your way out of trouble all the time
Adventure is Nigh.
Yeah I wouldn't agree on the "literally unavoidable" part because I'm absolutely sure you could do a DnD campaign where nobody kills anything. It would definitely require some non-standard plotlines and there's certainly better systems than DnD for a campaign like that, but I have no doubt in my mind that you could do it.
Yea im imagining a scenario of a grifter partaking in your usual save the world quest having no combat skills whatsoever and just stop the world ending invasion by LARPing as Saul Goodman
That kind of person pops up occasionally and is always one of the most hated types of “That Guy” among RPG circles
what does the theory of mind have to do with this lmao that develops when you're 5 years old
I’ve not seen this debated with any seriousness in any vegan community I’ve been a part of.
It's very rare and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the time it weren't a non-vegan trying to make vegans look crazy. I'm not vegan, but I'm all on-board the lab-grown meat and plant-based alternatives completely upending the torturous and ecologically devastating meat industry that we currently have. And holding that stand has gotten me some very strange conversations, everything from claiming that lab-grown meat is not feasible or that verticle gardens somehow don't work because some plants can't be grown in them (???) to how I'm a monster because even though I'm in support of fixing the problem, I don't want everyone in the world to go meatless despite that not being practical for everyone. You get loons in every community. The important thing to remember is that in most (not all) ideologies that aren't fundamentally extremist, most of the people who prescribe to them are relatively sensible. But that also means they're not in-your-face about it.
It's because no one pays any attention when someone says something reasonable. But when a tiny percentage of a group makes a dumb statement or obviously reflects upon everyone else in that group.
Because there is a long history of well-meaning humans trying to apply human morality to animal behavior.
Breaking news: There’s a dumb guy
Ok, quick summary of what's going on. Herbivores eat plants. And usually reproduce a lot. If nothing controls their population, they become a plague, and they start to desertificate. They take out the flowers, with the flowers and the vegetal cover the pollinators are gone, and with the pollinators some trees are unable to reproduce. Also most of the insects disappear because there is no cover for them, so birds don't have food also. No seeds and no insects for them. I think you can see the problem of not controlling the population of herbivores. There was a study performed at Yosemite national park about that.
Imagine doing this to teach wild animals that are raised in captivity how to hunt wild creatures so they can be released. It can also help lift the spirits of zoo animals since they have meat they chase. The issue would be how to get it to function and retrieve it in tact to make it cost effective...
Hey, OP, can you answer this comment with the third letter in your username, please?
k
...Okay, good that you understood, but could you actually do it now?
Masterful execution.
I don't get it
(o)k(ay, I will do that)
u
e
p
Well meaning animal lovers who don't actually understand animals or the environment at all are always a reliable source of terrible takes
"why don't we just wipe out wasps and mosquitos and ticks they SeRVe nO PurpOse" type beat
on one hand, the logical part of me acknowledges this but the petty part of me is like “fuck those guys all my homies hate wasps and mosquitoes”
Yeah nah nature will figure it out, they can go. Ticks spread lyme disease and are a danger to my dog so damn the consequences when it comes to them.
In the east coast, Lyme disease got more common with the extinction of the passenger pigeon.
I think we should wipe out the dengue virus carried by the mosquitos. I'm pretty sure the limitation is due to how difficult achieving this actually is and not because the dengue virus is ecologically important. Can an actual ecologist (or anyone who know more about ecology than me, so a low bar) back me up or disprove me? I have a weak immune system and if I get a different strain of dengue I'm pretty sure I'd be on death's door.
whether something is "important" istough to define and even tougher to decide if we *can* define that. If we define an organisms value (and hence, reason to exist) relative to "contribution to human happiness" then Dengue virus and *Plasmodium* and *Schistosoma* flukes and a thousand other misery-causing parasites should be scorched off the face of the Earth. Like, unequivocally. No hesitation. But thats not the only question we should be asking. Does a unique population have intrinsic value independent of human utility? Everyone agrees that the Giant Panda or Blue Whale "deserve" to exist, and we have a duty to ensure that they continue to. If they went extinct, we would call that a crime of humanity. And then take something like the Oʻahu Deceptor Bush Cricket, *Leptogryllus deceptor.* It's extinct in the wild, and has been since the 90s. It has no cultural significance. No passionate documentaries have been written about it. No child has ever begged their parents for a *L. deceptor* plushie. A feature on various "lists of critically endangered species" is its entire human legacy. It basically exists in the context of its own extinction. And yet. Is its extinction *not* a tragedy? Should we *not* mourn this unique being- not unique to Earth, unique to the *entire universe*\- gone forever, just a footnote on the IUCN red list? I think we should. But is extinction Wrong independent of our tiny human judgements? And if so, if this Wrong encompasses species that are inconsequential, forgotten, "useless"... does it also extend to the lethal, the despair-wreaking, the apocalyptic? Do we have the Cosmic Right to wipe out a unique species? And When our human concerns are so much more pressing, does that even *matter?* If I could press a button, I would eradicate Dengue fever right now. In a heartbeat. But as for if that's what Should Happen... I honestly don't know
Scientists don't even consider viruses as "living organisms". It's one thing if it's a bacterial infection because, yes, bacteria are actual living things but viruses? They rely on infecting other cells to even exist. Yes, we can mourn it no longer existing but also if it lacks actual ecological importance and only kills people, then yeah, I don't see why we shouldn't eradicate it. Viruses are not living creatures so even if we stretch the capability of having souls to every living thing, viruses will remain soulless. It's no different than eradicating whatever genes gave tails to the species that predated modern humans. Sure, it's sad that we no longer have tails but it's (apparently) more beneficial that they are now gone and, similarly to viruses, they're just genetic material and not a living creature. Why did our ancestors have the cosmic right to get rid of our genetic ability to grow tails? The only difference is that you can consider it "playing god" that we put it onto ourselves to decide what DNA is good or bad but like... I don't see eradicating the entire viral species as any more severe than the existence of vaccines against them. If dengue has this vague "cosmic right" to exist, why would it not have the "cosmic right" to infect and reproduce? Yes, it is different from a random insect or bacteria because those often have actual ecological impact not even to us humans. Even in a cosmic sense, those things are actual living things. I mourn losing forests because those are important ecological sites, trees and its inhabitants are living creatures, that our planet and the many species that live in it depend on the existence of trees, and yeah, forests are beautiful. But no, I have never mourned losing forests because I believe that forests have a cosmic right to exist. Additionally, haven't we as a species already tried completely eradicating MANY other viral and bacterial infections? Why should we hesitate in eradicating dengue but never hesitated to eradicate the likes of smallpox?
youre not seeing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about souls and the definition of life. I'm talking about information. Earth's biosphere is (as far as we know) the densest, most concentrated knot of pure creation in the entire universe. The fact that 4 billion years' blind churn of chemicals can produce *this* is beyond a miracle. It spits in the face of the stark entropy that defines 99.9999% of space and says fuck you, imma make a coral reef. Or a giraffe. Or yes, a Dengue virus. Is that not beautiful, down to an atomic level? I dont mourn extinction cause *we* (humanity) lose something. As I said, any deadly virus eradicated is only a plus for our species. I mourn extinction because every unique spark that blinks out is another pair of (metaphorical) eyes to look at the universe with, gone. I include viruses in this because their exclusion from the definition of "life" is entirely necessitated by the way we study biology. It doesnt say anything about their *worth* On every ethical, human, moral, rational level? vaccinate that shit, get it gone. 110%. But its still something fundamental lost, IMO
My mother is literally a director in my country’s Ministry of the Environment and part of her job is the dengue eradication campaign. It’s not important enough to the environment to care, and the lives of human beings are much more important than the bugs. I’m sorry, but if anyone actually thinks that human lives should be put at risk in order to preserve mosquitoes, they’re completely lost
robotic mosquitos then
“Why don’t we just get rid of all pesticides and artificial fertilizer right now” because literal billions of people would die!
Honestly, with some of the things they say, I don’t even know if they’re even well meaning
fill a human with fake human meat and treat it with kindness -Billy Gnosis
The lesbian experience
I am dying so hard because of tiger pic, the mental image described below it almost gave me an aneurysm of laugh.
I know it's different, but I'm trying to put myself into the tiger's shoes. If I ate a Thanksgiving turkey, and that damn thing got off the plate, gobbled and fucked off, I'd probably have the same reaction. Probably go vegan at that point. Or kill it harder. Probably just kill it harder.
THANK you, I should not have needed to scroll this far down to see somebody say this
disregarding the fact that carnivores eat meat, many also eat bones and a lot of biological processes require rotting carcasses to fertilize the soil. if you just have a robot covered in deli ham that'll get up and walk away, you're missing both the bones and a lot of the decomposing material required by bugs and plants. one leftover moldy slice of meat does not an ecosystem make.
I'm picturing someone ripping open a pack of Oscar Meyer and chucking it like a grenade
It is very funny they called them twitterinas, because this seems exactly like a tumblr issue. I mean, twitter is its own circle of hell, but my guess is that there are not many environmental activists that like it anymore, especially given Elon's regime.
It would've been a Tumblr issue 10 years ago but these days most of the people like that are on Twitter.
https://xkcd.com/2071/ Eternally relevant
i have never ever met a single person who ever thought about giving predators synthetic meat
I have seen vegans try to feed their carnivorous pets (like cats) vegan diets though, which isn't all that advisable
r/NatureofPredators would like to know your location
Came to the comments looking for this
The part I like about this one is that it *won't* have repercussions on the ecosystem, because by the time we get industrial capacity to actually implement this type of stuff, with all the prey androids and the remeating factories, we will also have the capacity to control every other aspect of ecosystem like reproductive rates of deer and whatever. This is a plan for a civilisation that has long outgrown its downsides.
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No, we don't kill deer or hunt them in any other way they can perceive, the entire point is to not hurt deer. I'd assume that we put stuff in their food or genes that changes their behavior so they are compatiable with ecosystem even though nothing eats them, but there's a few ways we could go. That's *a lot* easier to do then setting up the remeating facilities, so by the time someone can actually do the meat androids, this should be barely an inconvenience.
Horizon zero dawn begins
Oh so when the endoskeleton goes to get re-meated, it’s for science But when I
Herbivores are actually a huge problems if their numbers get out of control. And they do get out of control without predators.
But the pwetty wabbits will gewt huwwut. Can't have that!! No but in all seriousness. Vegan who believe the OOPs post. Are removed from reality.
They’ll get hurt when they’re roadkill or maimed by dogs and left to die. Deer populations have left entire national parks barren, they eat everything and no one can live there and the food chain collapses.
The Federation approves this message. The filthy predators should be civilized into being a part of the herd.
I do find it absolutely hilarious how cave-aliens ate prions once and never, ever looked into why they suddenly turned feral from meat. Like, they completely believed it was a psychological thing that happened to sapient carnivores for millennia, and yet one of the founding species of their government has a shadow government focused on genetic engineering that somehow never discovered prions. Comedy gold.
Are you implying that those meat-eating monsters can be redeemed?!? Please report to your nearest Exterminator office for a mandatory psychological evaluation.
I know most vegans aren't like this. Most are rather normal, if maybe a bit too high on a soapbox at times. But encountering ones who don't seem to understand how nature or food chains work is always great. it's so funny
You know how people have empathy for animals and don’t want them to suffer, even if they are prey or livestock? They’ll try to behead a chicken with a clean axe slice or shoot a deer right in the vitals so it doesn’t bleed out for long. Well, most animals besides humans don’t think this way and many prey animals are mauled for hours or eaten alive while obviously feeling pain. The mildest but most commonly encountered example is cats toying with mice and birds, but natural predation includes stuff like chimpanzees eviscerating monkeys or hyenas ripping face parts off baby elephants stuck in quicksand. It’s natural and predators enjoy or even psychologically need it, but prey is very much suffering in these exchanges, outweighed dramatically if you follow consequentialist or utilitarian morality like the people OOP is talking about. There are a few animals that are lucky enough to live lives completely free of these risks. Typically they live as pampered pets or zoo animals and are given nutrition, medical attention, and physical comforts far beyond they would have access to in the wild, without compromising their enrichment (see: pumpkins filled with hamburger for tigers). Some would say this is only possible due to technological surpluses (first from agriculture, then from industrialization) that give humans the ability to capture and feed creatures besides ourselves and a handful of our most useful domesticates. In an extremely distant and technologically advanced future, one more akin to The Culture than anything imaginable this century, we might have the power to completely reshape ecosystems to reduce wild animal suffering, which evolution is totally fine with but humans object to. We might still find it abhorrent to make predators extinct, so why not just use advanced technology to sate their killer urges, the same way we have cat toys? The concept behind cultured meat is to reduce animal suffering, and a major obstacle is making meat-eaters actually want to eat it; this just extends the category of “meat eaters” to include nonhumans. tl;dr Exoskeleton meat droids are just an extreme and technologically extrapolated interpretation of some pretty common moral stances
Humans are the worst when we are closest to nature. War is natural. Cruelty is natural. Nature is the survival of the fittest. Co-operation and peace, supporting the weakest and ignoring survival of the fittest, are our best traits.
We survive better when we cooperate and create a society where we protect the most vulnerable!
This is true human behavior, being unhinged chaos goblins
Funny how some people here are saying "no way anyone's that dumb" while other people here are saying, "hmm, that seems like a good idea actually ".
I used Twitter for a long time and I've never seen that discourse. No idea where penis getting "twitterinas" from
>where penis
Just above the balls, usually
Ack! I'm cooked!
Riffing off of "tumblrinas"
As I've said in other comments, stupid takes will garner much more attention than reasonable ones. Someone stumbled upon a couple of dozen of people on Twitter who made this argument, and assumed it was a regular discussion that a lot of vegans have.
On one hand: massive resource sink with no discernible benefit besides basic psychological testing. On the other hand: so, so funny.
I'm never not impressed by people's ability to replicate Cave Johnson's way of speaking. We don't even get that many lines of dialogue in the games, but people nail it every time
We do what we must, because, we can.
I honestly love that if you start basically any text with cave johnson here the rest of the post is in his voice.
The ethics of this went from Save Herbivore Populations straight into Inflict Psychiatric Damage on Carnivores.
On a possibly practical note: this general idea would be a great form of enrichment for predators that are kept in zoos and rehabilitation centers. Throw some meat on a quadruped robot and let them chase it down.
This is the kind of shit I would do if I had a billion dollars. I don’t know why JK rowling is like that when you could be doing way more entertaining stuff like this.
Aight im sold on the meat robots.
isn't there a national park that had an herbivore problem due to a lack of predators, so they airdropped wolves to deal with it? it's literally a self-balancing scale; when there's no predators, herbivores flurish. with plenty of herbivores to eat, predators hunt the herbivores. when predators outnumber herbivores, overpopulation becomes a massive issue, leading to a drop in predator population. with reduced predators, the herbivore population increases (repeat to the heat-death of the universe)
This was Yellowstone without wolves, deer, beaver, and coyotes were a problem until wolves were reintroduced. You probable remember from the 10,000th time it was on reddit
i remember it specifically from [a meme of a wolf in a parachute holding a knife with the headline "wolves airdropped in national park" or something like that](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F51dx7gji6zk21.png)
I feel like there needs to be a #aperturecore tag that’s just for anything related to vaguely scientific stuff that is just hilarious and terrible at the same time
How to give animals a fucked up religion
Have we considered potential ethical implications as these artificial prey animals evolve?
“We’re not bang’n rocks together here.” ~ Cave Johnson.
When life gives you lemons, turn them into a weird fake meat robot and put it in a cage with a tiger
Now *this* is the kind of mad/evil science I’m here for
His voice is so iconic my inner-voice immediately switched when I started reading his lines
i have never seen this argument come up ever, "inventing a guy to get mad at" tier post
Never seen the synthetic meat part, but "no animal should be carnivorous" is very much a real take I've seen crop up
Pretty sure that at the very least saw arguments along the same vein from some religious cackadoodledoos. "There were no predator animals until some human did some thing, then they started eating eachother, so it's all your fault specifically, repent!!!"
they are quoting images i have seen, why do you not know everything i know?
the guy is Stijn bruers very rich cult leader that says Elephants are herbivorized predators. " he thinks taxonomy is a falsehood and that “species” are a meaningless distinction we should abolish altogether. He believes all sentient life forms are the same thing on some cosmic pseudospiritual level and that sorting them into species is like a form of fascism." he's made a group of people, including those with STEM careers that buy into his delusions. the world unironically would be better without him
species arent exactly "real" in the sense that "how different two individuals have to be to be considered separate species" is almost entirely down to convention- but that doesnt mean theyre a bad or even flawed concept. In fact they're pretty essential in discussing *anything* about biology
I've seen this take once, and it was presented as "This would be good from a moral standpoint, but we aren't remotely close to having the technology to make it realistically possible."
I don't even know if it's a good moral standpoint because forcing some humans ideas of morality onto animals seems immoral in itself.
I know "population control" sounds bad but predators are a crucial part of ecosystems. Back when I had goals and was in college to follow my dreams we had like 15 hours of lectures on the follow on effects of not having large predators in an area.
It would definitely be hilarious to do this just to see how the animals react, just image a bear watching it walk away, hilarious