{"id":179,"date":"2007-06-12T11:32:35","date_gmt":"2007-06-12T16:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=179"},"modified":"2007-06-12T11:32:35","modified_gmt":"2007-06-12T16:32:35","slug":"killers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=179","title":{"rendered":"Killers"},"content":{"rendered":"

My last post<\/a> was about how we rearrange atoms to make what we want. But that reminded me about a frequent thought I have about how we’re all killers. <\/font>Here’s how I look at it: The sun is a burning mass radiating energy. That energy comes to the rock known as earth. Some arrangements of atoms here are able to absorb that energy, and use it to arrange other atoms to be more or less the same as they are. That is, they take the energy from the sun (which is otherwise just gonna bounce off the planet, or get absorbed into the dirt) and they harness it to replicate themselves.<\/font> Lets call these arrangements of atoms “plants.”<\/font><\/p>\n

Now, “plants” of course also use the energy to get bigger and stuff. But in the end, they get bigger only if they need to in order to get enough energy to replicate themselves. The bigger they are, the more atoms they can arrange, and the more leaves they have. Leaves, for complex “plants,” are their solar panels. Leaves are the energy collectors.<\/font> And of course, “plants” have to compete with other “plants” for the sunlight and for the atoms they need to replicate and to grow bigger. So they end up acting and looking differently from each other because if they didn’t, they’d all need the exact same atoms and energy, in the exact same amounts, and some wouldn’t make it.<\/font> <\/font>But the point is that these “plants” can just sit there and get the energy from the sun. They could do actual work with that energy, and the work is to arrange the atoms around them. As long as the sun is giving energy, and the atoms nearby are the right kind, then there’s no problem.<\/p>\n

Animals are different. Humans can’t sit in the sun and get energy from it. We sit in the sun and get hot, but we can’t convert that heat into anything usable. We can’t make that heat arrange atoms to make more of us. We need that raw energy to be partially digested for us. Also, most complicated animals, like humans, can’t extract the atoms we need from the dirt.<\/p>\n

So we have a fuel problem, and a resource problem.<\/p>\n

But wait, these “plants” have stored energy in their leaves, stalks, roots, and especially their seeds. They also get lots of atoms from the soil or water, and store them as well.<\/p>\n

So we animals, killers that we are, go kill those “plants” and EAT THEM! That way, all the energy and atoms that they’ve painstakingly stored goes to us. We don’t need to bother with daylight. We don’t worry whether the atoms we need are in the soil or water around us. We move where we want, killing whatever energy and atom collectors we see, and get everything we need.<\/p>\n

[Now, of course, it didn’t happen that animals were around and figured this problem out. It’s more like, some of those plants said, “hey, why am I bothering with all this converting energy and grabbing atoms? My neighbors are doing all that like crazy, so why not just steal some from them?” But that’s a different story.]<\/p>\n

Now, because we move around, we need huge amounts of energy. Compared to “plants,” animals are incredibly wasteful. Blowing tons of energy walking around (or flying! Even more energy!) means that we need to kill tons of “plants.” So one little animal means the death of thousands of plants. Disgraceful.<\/p>\n

Now, some animals are even worse. They note that one animal, let’s call it an “impala,” has already killed thousands of plants, and therefore has collected the energy and atoms of those plants. That “impala” is walking around with more energy than you could get from a week’s worth of eating “plants.” And it’s already got the atoms in concentrated form, just the way an animal would want it. It’s discarded the stuff it doesn’t need, and kept the good stuff. (By the way, the stuff it doesn’t need is still pretty good for plants. So the place where the impala discarded it is now a little grassier than it was.)<\/p>\n

So, hey, here’s this bundle of concentrated energy and atoms of the right sort. The animal thinks to itself, “I could spend the next week eating “plants” and wasting some of the energy converting and arranging the plant-energy and plant-atoms to my kind of energy and atoms… or, I could just go kill and eat that impala.”<\/p>\n

And guess what? Now the animal has to run. That takes even more energy than walking. Once it starts running, in a real sense, it can never stop. It has the muscles and the physique for running, and it needs energy to maintain itself. There’s not enough time in the day to get that kind of energy from plants, and anyway, its digestive system is now streamlined for high octane energy. It would knock like crazy if you tried to put the low-quality stuff in there.<\/p>\n

So there we are. Not an innocent animal on the planet. The “impala” can’t bitch about having the tables turned. A thief and murderer sounds pretty pathetic crying about someone stealing from him and trying to kill him. I bet the grasses are laughing their asses off when the “impala” hits the ground from a lion’s swipe.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s all just atoms, so it doesn’t really matter. Once the\u00c2\u00a0lion is dead,\u00c2\u00a0the atoms it collected\u00c2\u00a0will mainly go back to the soil (as refuse of “worms” or “bacteria”), where the “plants” will use them all over again. Maybe every once in a while the earth is upheaved and there are new atoms for the taking, but for the most part, it’s just recycling the same old ones. So when the “impala” eats some grass, the philosophical\u00c2\u00a0grass just waves to his grassy buddies and says, “catch ya on the flip side.”<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My last post was about how we rearrange atoms to make what we want. But that reminded me about a frequent thought I have about how we’re all killers. Here’s how I look at it: The sun is a burning mass radiating energy. That energy comes to the rock known as earth. Some arrangements of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany","category-science-and-such"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}