this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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We survive because they're tiny. If my cat were lion-sized, I'd be dead or at least missing an arm or two. It also helps that she's opposed to firearms ... and anti-nuke.
Possibly not. Unlike the housecat, lions aren't domesticated. If you took a housecat who already knew and liked you and made it lion-sized, you might be okay...depending on the cat and whether you kept them well-fed.
If your cat likes roughhousing with you, though, yeah, you might be in trouble.
Case in point:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oEEY_c9KunA
They do hurt him, but it's more of a case of being too enthusiastic about greeting and playing with him than wanting to cause him harm because they are wild animals.
The wild animal part means they are unpredictable, not automatically homicidal. All of our domesticated animals descend from wild animals, so at one point they would have been relationships between humans and wild animals. There might have been different levels of bonding as they were bred for sociability, but given the guy in the video's bond with lions and knowing that he is far from unique in that with big cats, I'd say there were probably some humans early on that befriended wolves or wild cats with strong bonds.
And there were also likely many that were killed by wild animals they had bonded with or were trying to. And that might still be the future fate of that guy in the video and it might even be over before he realizes it's any different.
I read or saw this so long ago and it just stuck with me, humans are built pretty terribly. Like yes we can get strong but even a pro weightlifter would get annihilated but a gorilla. However we can nuke that gorillas home or shoot it with a rifle cus our strength is intelligence. Also humans pretty much have an infinite stamina glitch so as long as whatever is hunting us isn’t able to catch up we can just kind of keep walking
Big brain + infinite stamina = world domination
Opposable thumbs and ability to vocalize a wide range of sounds also helped. Though with the brains, we probably would have figured out a way to communicate with more complexity than other animals regardless of the 2nd one.
And the mechanism for that infinite stamina also enabled our hands to be even more useful (and if I had to guess, bipedalism probably arose as a result of our ancestors wanting to hold things while they moved instead of that being an extra bonus).
Pretty much
And yet I have neither :|