...They will put a couple of black holes between us and them!

... in which killing other life has become necessary for survival. Even vegans consume their distant relatives.

I keep wondering if there's some planet or moon in which all life survived from consuming inorganic material and energy? Natural selection would favor the life that could more easily locate such resources, providing an advantage for senses and intelligence.

Once they're intelligent enough to travel the cosmos, they can peer down at Earth and pity us all.


I'm sort of joking. At least humanity has the ability to cooperate, possess empathy and imagine greater things than just survival. Well, most of humanity.

At one of the Liberal Arts colleges I taught at I was assigned to teach in a required multi-discipline course that replaced many general studies courses including Western Civilization. We had to use excerpts from 'great' works.

I had to put together a unit that considered human interactions with the environment and that required incorporating, in a general studies/humanities sort of way, some vary basic ecology.

The above snippet was my attempt at a 'catchy', yet truish, sub-heading to the on-line support materials for that unit.

With respect to your comment on chemotrophic planetary ecology, evolution is a process that 'evaluates' attempted novel variations on resource exploitation. Each species node in an ecological community represents a concentration of resources, neatly packaged and potentially available for use. What is useful to support life, and what isn't used when it's incorporated in a living body is often used when it's living 'mobile home' is dead.

Seems to me that as soon as a planet has chemotrophs concentrating resources, the potential resources that will fund a new niche of life forms that consume chemotrophs begin to collect. They become in sense a 'living target', biotic reservoirs of potentially essential life-support awaiting the emergence in some group the physiognomic novelties of a species that will exploit them.

It sort of seems to be a "life-eats-life and everything else" type of universe. The world you imagine did have an existence, but it was subsumed by the roll-out of phylogeny.

My post wasn't totally serious anyway.

Perhaps all life on another planet would be poisonous for other life to consume? That would be very poor in terms of resource recycling, at least if it persisted very long beyond natural death somehow.

It's mostly pointless speculation on my part.

all the historical evidence that "We're all in this together" actually produces better results for the most people.

Liberals do a better job of appreciating and respecting diversity and cooperation versus competition but we are not always perfect either.

Especially them over there. Us over here, we're better(as in a competition?) at cooperation. Competition too apparently.

More of a combination of self imposed, ignorance and the right conditions

To me a man kind self imposed destruction of people would be any eras which have autocrats. The ones in power did not feel it, but others did. Even times when there wasn't a true autocrat in power. Using the tools of fear for some and greed for others they fulfilled their want of power. The history of the world is littered with the dead and enslaved. In the Americas it was the native Americans both south and north, the Africans brought over. For them it was not a time of enlightenment but a time of horror. To some it may seem like a blip in time, something unfortunate in the past. To others a killing off of culture and history. The numbers of dead in the days of the plague may show more then some times of history. But the lives taken from those affected by others with no regard to those different then themselves is just as potent a reminder of the lengths some will go for their own gain. Whole groups of people have been wiped out, people enslaved, culture, and history lost.

This sadly has been the legacy of mankind through out time.

Going even further back in time past the recent history of the last 1,000 years. There may have been gains which most people know about or think of where this applies. A instance would be the roman days. Even though there were advances which is what is considered in a positive light by most people of European ancestry from how it has been taught for generations in history lessons. People think of it almost romantically. And it was for some it was. For others no. Some people say history was written by the winners. Again true to a point. History was written with one hand and erased with the other.