What's the most significant thing you could do as an ant, if you kept your current mind?
What's the most significant thing you could do as an ant, if you kept your current mind?
Imagine you were reborn as a female queen ant with an expected lifespan of about 15 years (worker ants live about half a queen's timespan), and had the ambition to make the most of your tiny new life. And you got to keep your current intellectual capacity and knowledge.
How much could you achieve as an ant?
Depends on whether I also get the knowledge on living as an ant, as a queen, in a colony.
Hardest thing would be predators.
I suppose the best I could do would be to find something to write with, like dirt or ink, and a scrap of paper, and "walk" some words along a page, hopefully notify a good human that I was an intelligent/human ant - and from there I'd be at the mercy of capitalism...
What on earth would you write?
I feel almost anything would be good, at first - just to show I had human like sentience..
One small example would be "Don't kill me. I have something to tell you"
Or if I had plenty of time
"Hello, I am the ant you can see. I was once human. To prove it, ask me a question and wait while I write the answer..."
Something like that
Once I'd been proven an "ex human" I'd probably demand to see my lord and saviour, Sir David Attenborough
15 years seems like more than long enough with a human's brain to assimilate all other ant colonies and do some hilarious levels of damage to the most ecologically destructive human buildings and apparatuses.
Agriculture and seed cultivation as a learned behavior for colonies. Then spend the rest of my time hitching rides and expanding range across continents.
- I could massively impact Earth's biome in coming centuries due to the population size of antkind.
Never mind that my superiority in bio compute efficiency passed down to my offspring will result in human extinction. Don't have any kids human.
Make inter-nest alliances. Build the foundation of species-as-single-organism. Set ants on the road to total global domination.
How do you know so much about any society and negotiations that you're confident you'd be able to do that?
1974 movie "Phase IV".
The factory must grow, the factory must grow, the factory must grow, the factory must grow, the factory must grow, ...
I could sneak aboard a NASA ship and then blast off to orbit the Earth.