We have devoted large amounts of time and resources to studying the differences between seemingly similar ant colonies, and we have lived alongside ants for our entire existence as a species.
Imagine now that we had never seen an ant, had a totally different biological origin to the ants, and had no idea why they did what they do because we had no cultural conception of them as an entity.
This is missing the point. We might be interested in ants, but the ants would not be interested in us, because ants cannot understand us.
We can prod and research ant hills all we want. But all ants will ever see are some unexpected occurrences - maybe a very unusual scent which they can't place, or some food which wasn't there earlier, or an unexpected plague of ant death - which they will forget almost instantly.
It will never occur to ant-kind that they're even being studied, because ants have no concept of what "being studied" means.
There is nothing at all in the ant (hill) mind capable of understanding that a creature like a human might exist, never mind how to communicate with it.
So we can do what we like, and we will remain not just invisible, but unthinkable - forever.
I don't know about that - we don't have any real scale equivalence in actual life forms so I'll use celestial objects as an example. The movement of other planets has almost no impact on our daily lives - the moon may impact the tides and the sun leads to our day night cycle but we can't effectively impact that and so, for the average person, life goes on without more than a momentary thought given to how things are going on up there. Though, we are all vaguely aware that we could suddenly and arbitrarily be killed by an asteroid impact (much like a colony being arbitrarily chosen to become some kid's ant-farm - or being run over by a truck) it isn't in the front of our minds because we need to get back to filling out that TPS report.
Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.
A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.
We might not be unique in those senses. If DNA and carbon based life is the standard then we are likely more similar to most life in the universe even if we have small differences in physiology or culture. We don’t share a direct biological origin but we are still made of the same stuff, probably originated under very similar conditions, etc. Unique forms of life likely develop under equally rare conditions in exotic environments. We’re probably just run of the mill meat bags.
I disagree that Aliens even if we share the exact same building blocks would look similar to us. For example even for planets that would be habitable for us would have minor differences in atmospheric pressure, gravity, the types of radiation their star produces would result in drastically different evolutionary paths. Also even if there was a clone of our solar system evolution would be random and the life would look different from each other, I mean look at Australia, or even look at Earth's history the fauna during the Jurassic looks way different than what we have today.
Small differences here means within the realm of what’s possible to build out of organic molecules. We’re talking about averaging life across the span of a galaxy. By unique and exotic I meant unlikely life forms like Boltzmann brains or sentient planets. We are probably one out of a million sentient, organic, sexually reproducing species. Once you’ve seen a few thousands of these you’re probably bored.
That’s different because the iPhone is not a generic object like a fruit. You could totally call a business Macintosh Records and get away with it though
Yeah I don’t think iPhone flies as generic but by god in my time of technical support do I find people refer to all manner of cheap $50-$100 Walmart special android tablets as “iPads” and it’s caused me more than a few headaches.
Most projectors don’t and it’s wonderful. So many smart TVs get loaded up with ads because you are essentially a captive audience tied to a very expensive purchase. Throw a Roku or Apple TV on there and you’ll get the same thing with far less premature obsolescence
Just because someone exists doesn’t mean you get to quote them anonymously in the article. You don’t write an article about a Mars rover and include “some geocentric societies claim that Mars is not real and space is not real”. You need to establish why those people and their opinions are in any way notable otherwise it’s pointless to include them
They are long term on many things, but not things that concern national pride. It is unclear what threat a semiautonomous HK actually presents to them, beyond just being a bunch of people near Shenzhen who can say mean things about you. It’s not like a rebellion could start there, they would be perfectly happy being left alone.
The threat of HK is that the mainlanders might start wanting some democracy for themselves.
In a way China made a mistake asking for HK back. While it was British they had a convenient boogeyman to point to, now it is part of China, Beijing has nowhere to hide, and the only option they have is to destroy it. This will be a painful process for both Beijing and HK.
There is a genuine fear of social disintegration if democracy were implemented in the mainland. Unfortunately, since Tian'anmen Square, the CPC has lacked leaders with the wisdom and guts to experiment with political reform and so now, HK's 1C2S is a threat that needs to be fire-walled off instead of an opportunity.
In terms of political culture, I don't think either side really understands the other.
German cars, Mercs especially, seem to have a desirability curve that bottoms out and then skyrockets later. Few people are going to hold a car that looks dated long enough for it to start looking awesome
If I hit someone repeatedly with their toaster, and they uninstall the toaster, so I beat them with their frying pan, the fact that they owned a toaster isn’t very relevant in the situation, the hitting is
Imagine now that we had never seen an ant, had a totally different biological origin to the ants, and had no idea why they did what they do because we had no cultural conception of them as an entity.
We’d only be more interested in ants.