that is the reason i like ants more than humans
If you get enough of them together, they complete the wantās of the colony faster.
As for intelligence, iām not so sure about that, because if theyāre so smart whats preventing them from inventing metalworki-
nevermind this is going to turn into another underwater civs talk
I donāt know, it actually seems plausible for ants to do metalworking. At least more plausible than underwater metalworking.
Also, in Children of Time (which is a speculative evolution novel), ants develop accidentally develop metalworking, which they use to make weapons attached to their mandibles.
Then intelligent jumping spiders domesticate them for manual labor, but not after the ants almost wipe them out.
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True, although ants have existed for millions, if not tens of millions of years. WAY more than humans have. Yet: They havnt developed metalworking, while humans have.
as you can see, there is a large intelligence gap, no matter the colony size.
I have arguments against thatā¦ but underwater Civ talk aināt allowed so letās just leave it to lie. We are getting off topic for this thread anyway
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Actually i know exactly why ant donāt have metalworking!
The reasons are 1. ants do not have long arms with 3-5 digits with one of them being an opposable thumb
2. ants are afraid of fire because it makes the water boil out of their bodies (and it makes it sound like a very small human screaming at the top of their lungs) so they do not know that they can heat up strong shiny rocks to make them glow and be bendable
3. ants do not learn as quickly as humans due to individuals being stupid and the colony having to communicate via pheromones causing them to learn about as quickly as a tree would if it had eyes
4. ants are not big enough to deal with the heat as well as bigger animals do
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so what youāre saying is,
they would be smart, if they were smart?
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iām saying they would be smart if they had better communication methods, had opposable thumbs (or the ability to make them), and were bigger
That is a great book! Apparently it is in a series; have you read the other books?
Not yet, but Iām going to soon (once the other books are available at the local library)
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if even one ant became intelligent and passed on the genes allowing it to be intelligent some ants would likely make a structure called an āants manā which is just a humanoid made of ants(if there were humans around it) and if there were several intelligent ants that communicated via bioluminescence in the head you could have an ant brain (brain made of ants not brain of an ant) and you could have all non sensory ants be able to use their senses but not able to send light signals this would allow ant creatures(ex: ants man) to exist and a large enough ants being would specialize some ants for sight, some for feeling things, some for hearing, and some for smelling amd if left near a blacksmith start metalworking out of curiosity (the ant creatures would likely be hives of ants and stay out of the rain at all costs and have several queen ants)
but bees are much better for metalworking as if a bee hive made a lung out of bees with their wings pointed inwards they could heat up the air to high enough temperatures to kill absolutely anything it can slow down and get some metals to glow red
No, that wouldnt work.
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which part wouldnāt work
if it is the ants man one then it would definitely work just not nearly as efficiently as a human nervous system otherwise by that logic a computer cannot cooperate with other computers wirelessly to run a program when in reality they definitely can
if it is for the bees they literally subject wasps to 114*f on average so for a bigger bee with the same amount of heat production per square mm as the smallest bee could definitely smeltal the meltal
Itās been a long time since I last revisited this topic, but I believe that the point regarding ant intelligence has already been addressed. There is a limit to how much information a colony can transfer through itself. While commands, needed for the existence of an āAnd Manā, can definitely be given, there is a limit to the information a single individual and could perceive and therefore share.
Now, regarding the Ant-Man itself, I will be completely honest - I find the idea absurd. It is definitely unorthodox and I doubt how plausible it is. But it sounds like a fun round-about to the issue of the colony being not coordinated enough, so Iāll assume it to be a physical possibility. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will address it and explain if it could actually come to be.
Either way, just because something is a physical possibility, it does not necessarily make it efficiently or likely to occur. An Ant-Man, in order to be able to support itself and still be massive enough to function as a human blacksmith would, would need a very large mass of ants. Thatās all for a single blacksmith. And the quantity of the metal will beā¦ Well, definitely not insignificant, considering weāre talking about ants, but definitely not enormous in scale. This mass of ants could instead be used for something else, something actually useful for the colony, such as warfare or scouting. Ants would have no real pressure to develop metal working, so there would be no need for them to devote so much of their workforce into this complicated structure.
Besides, how would ants know whatās the ultimate physical form for metal working? What would drive them to build up a human, or anything with thumbs?
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reread the ants man part it says exactly how they would know
using insecticide on enemy ant colonies after seeing an exterminator do exactly that would be the advantage for a humanoid form over a regular colony that they would likely be going for
that is the exact same as your sensory cells and neurons but you are intelligent enough to read this so your argument for why the ant brain cannot exist is invalid as it is based on incorrect information
they would be just as coordinated as the cells in your body if given enough time and would use bioluminescence to communicate with each other using different patterns for different stimuli. basically the same as a regular neuron except patterns instead of chemicals
Willow, please think before you share those concepts as if they are even remotely plausible. The idea sounds cool, sure, but it just would not happen.
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no matter the chance of somethin as long as it is above zero it will happen eventually and the chances of ants making mobile hives out of themselves is above zero
The chance of you dying right now is above zero, does that mean you should fear for your life?
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no because the chance of me dying right now is below 0.00001% and it is no matter the chances as long as they are above zero it will happen if given enough time all i have to do is decrease the chances of me dying to 0% which (by the methods i have in mind) is extremely likely within the next 40 years based on the exponential growth of the speed of human advancement
Except it is impossible to reduce the chance of something happening to 0%, you can make it approach 0%, but it will never be a perfect zero.