[ot][spam] Thoughts: Mediums of Warfare
After millions of years, cellular biology did not evolve a litany of weapons. Rather, each species has one weapon. Antlers, poison. _only one_. This seems to be what worked. Personally, I'm imagining some kind of 'meta-virus': a lifeform that produces many different kinds of weaponry. Like other horrible ideas, this meta-virus would be a threat to every other lifeform. If it succeeded, life would end as all ecosystems would die. So, every living thing in existence, at some point in its ancient history, had to learn to eradicate things that eradicate everything else, and protect things that don't.
Left out: note that when species fight amongst each other, they use only their one weapon in their conflict. For some reason, they do that. Note that it has the same result of the group with greater resources and health having the capacity to threaten the other group with eradication.
Conclusion: As tool builders with resource surplus, we can produce things that other species would never do. We can produce any weapons we want. We can even create new life, alter the entire planet, and colonise others. Hence I conclude that war is stupid. We are too powerful to fight. Anybody who chooses to fight, is at the mercy of those who allow it.
When is fighting valid? When somebody is harming you in some way. How much fighting is valid? Enough to stimulate them to fight back I suppose. What do we do then? We make sure they don't have superweapons. As a community. Ideally we want our oppressive governments and extremists to resolve their conflicts with games of checkers. This is hard to convince an angry person to do. I would have a public story explaining how weaponry is hard to get because we don't want to die. And I would give slightly better weapons to the weak extremists. Since you only become extreme if somebody is ignoring something important you know. Here we get into laws requiring listening to people rather than punishing them. [spam][spam][spam] i'm trying to code right now. this is overconfident because it's just thoughts and ideas.
On 5/20/22, Karl Semich <0xloem@gmail.com> wrote:
After millions of years, cellular biology did not evolve a litany of weapons.
Rather, each species has one weapon. Antlers, poison. _only one_.
This seems to be what worked.
Personally, I'm imagining some kind of 'meta-virus': a lifeform that produces many different kinds of weaponry. Like other horrible ideas, this meta-virus would be a threat to every other lifeform. If it succeeded, life would end as all ecosystems would die.
So, every living thing in existence, at some point in its ancient history, had to learn to eradicate things that eradicate everything else, and protect things that don't.
I'm guessing that part of what happens here is that opposing groups actually neuter the weapons of overpowered threats. I'm not experienced in strategic conflict.
In order to do that, you need to be able to influence how they are able to produce their weapons. In early evolution, this could have meant breaking into cells and altering their genes maliciously. This is like spies that sabotage research. In later evolution, this simply means maybe aggressive outcompetition: driving overpowered lifeforms to extinction.
We live with unspoken agreements, from our evolutionary history of needing survive together.
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Karl Semich