Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-28826152-20161221223809/@comment-26322120-20170105043046

Eoros wrote: Just one last thing...

Saying that we are "only the most intelligent" animals is like saying "I'm only a billion dollars richer than you". Look where our intelligence has gotten us. We don't need to be stronger than a lion: we are intellgent enough to make a gun, so we can shoot the lion. We don't need to be faster than a cheetah: we invented the car, we domesticated horses. We are intelligent enough to have law and order.

Without human intelligence, you wouldn't be sitting at a computer desk having this conversation, and you probably would have been mauled by a tiger or something a long time ago. Well, maybe not, but you get my point. And yet for all that, we are still quite arguably inferior to a simple Tardigrade. Tardigrades are quite interesting little critters, if you've never heard of them. They outnumber humans a billion to one (Yes, that means that there are more Tardigrades alive at this moment than the universe has been around in seconds, a stat I calculated a few days ago.) Capable of surviving extremes of hot and cold, they have lived thorough all five mass extinctions relatively unchanged, and will likely survive for hundreds of millions of years after the last humans die (Unless we figure out how ti make really good rockets really quickly. They are, for all practical purposes, the ultimate life.