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Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

It's too easy to accuse every such article of arrogance - after all, something is obviously different, especially given that crows and apes didn't take over the planet long before humans existed. It's fair enough to look for it.

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Have we really taken over the planet or is it just that it looks like that from our perspective?

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-ants-live-e...

(answer: 20 quadrillion)

The impact humanity has had on the planet is undeniable. Further, we really are the apex predator globally and we have caused the extinction of numerous species. By most measures it’s absolutely true that we have taken over the planet, imho.

If you go by impact alone, humans are still not the most influential organism.

Cyanobacteria literally poisoned the atmosphere and triggered a global ice age. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Give us a few years? Sadly…

But that was billions of years ago! Cyanobacteria just peaked early. Give us a few more years, and I'm sure we'll catch up splendidly.

That's a very old hat. What has Cyanobacteria done lately, as in the last billion years? Reminiscing about the glory days? We are the future (of screwing things up).

Kids these days don’t appreciate the classics.

There might’ve been other sludges, but no-one ever tried ‘em.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CSX1jNPtNBU

humans have flown to the moon

It may be a difference in quantity rather than a categorical difference. If humans are 10x better at X than animals, it doesn't mean that X is unique to humans. But the things that humans can achieve by using X will obviously very different from what animals can achieve.

>It may be a difference in quantity rather than a categorical difference.

I don't exclude that possibility. But the only way to find out is to test the other possibility as well.

Considering that humans have evolved from animals, if there was a qualitative difference, how and why do you think something like this would have happened?

Like, from one mother to the child, a switch was flipped?

I think that we haven’t even really defined what qualtitative means.

Bog-standard evolution is perfectly capable of large qualitative differences. Animals couldn't fly until they did. Land animals didn't exist until they did. Multi-cellular beings weren't until they were. We can empirically see this, so your question should be flipped to "how can we explain such developments within evolution?" (We can, but that's a different discussion).

Yea, you are making a valid point.

I guess where you stand in this debate depends on how you define “qualitative”.

One could argue that being able to fly or not is a matter of quantity, not quality. But unless you’re being deeply philosophical I admit this is a silly argument to make.

We have orcas teaching their families hunting tricks and bears spreading knowledge about how to open bear-resistant food containers. Maybe we’re only like 1.5X as smart as a bear, but the day-to-day maintenance requires 1X bear intelligence, so they don’t have left over brain-cycles to dream up kick off the feedback loop.

Or maybe there are animals out there that are just as smart, but their environment was not conducive to storing knowledge long term.

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