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Comment by BelleOfTheBall | Hacker News Reader

I'm amused that people call ants doing pretty human behavioral quirks "scary". Obviously the implication is that they're smarter than we knew, but I'm giggling imagining some other species going "Have you seen what humans can do?" and then just describing the beef industry, Boston Dynamics robot dogs or Facebook.

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Humans are absolutely terrifying. The most scary and dangerous of all creatures. I'm sure humans kill far more than any other animal. Perhaps only bacteria and viruses exceed the level of scary that humans have attained.

But ants are pretty damn close to human levels of scary, IMO. Look up the acid spitting crazy ants and tell me that's not a little bit scary.

Mosquitoes kill more than any other animal. Specifically a parasite inside the mosquito that causes malaria.

According to some quick googling I just did malaria kills around 600-700 thousand people per year, while in 2016 road traffic accidents killed around 1.3 million (both numbers attributed to the World Health Organisation).

Assuming that a majority of the road traffic deaths are attributable to humans then humans seem to very easily beat mosquitos/malaria at killing other humans.

If you start in 2016 your data is correct. If you start from 4000BCE I believe the largest human killer ever is malaria.

You may be correct, I'm not sure. Apparently about half of humans ever have lived in the last 2000 years, and the death rate for those in the earlier half (before 2000 years ago) was overwhelming dominated by very high child mortality. I guess the answer probably depends on what proportion of those infant deaths were due to malaria.

The fact that humans have surpassed what historically was the #1 killer is honestly the more scary part. For all parts of that dynamic

Humans have already killed 600 million animals for meat this year and the year is only 4 days old. Humans aren't the only relevant creature on this planet.

Hey, two out of those three things are kinda scary!

Two?

Yeah I was wondering which one of those gets a pass. All three are terrifying IMO.

most definitely not the botson dynamics robot dogs, that’s wayy too DARPA to be not scary as hell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalhead_(Black_Mirror)

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