this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Imagine you were reborn as a female queen ant with an expected lifespan of about 15 years (worker ants live about half a queen's timespan), and had the ambition to make the most of your tiny new life. And you got to keep your current intellectual capacity and knowledge.

How much could you achieve as an ant?

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[–] AceSLive 21 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Depends on whether I also get the knowledge on living as an ant, as a queen, in a colony.

Hardest thing would be predators.

I suppose the best I could do would be to find something to write with, like dirt or ink, and a scrap of paper, and "walk" some words along a page, hopefully notify a good human that I was an intelligent/human ant - and from there I'd be at the mercy of capitalism...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What on earth would you write?

[–] AceSLive 1 points 3 weeks ago

I feel almost anything would be good, at first - just to show I had human like sentience..

One small example would be "Don't kill me. I have something to tell you"

Or if I had plenty of time

"Hello, I am the ant you can see. I was once human. To prove it, ask me a question and wait while I write the answer..."

Something like that

Once I'd been proven an "ex human" I'd probably demand to see my lord and saviour, Sir David Attenborough

[–] Meltrax 14 points 3 weeks ago

15 years seems like more than long enough with a human's brain to assimilate all other ant colonies and do some hilarious levels of damage to the most ecologically destructive human buildings and apparatuses.

[–] j4k3 11 points 3 weeks ago

Agriculture and seed cultivation as a learned behavior for colonies. Then spend the rest of my time hitching rides and expanding range across continents.

- I could massively impact Earth's biome in coming centuries due to the population size of antkind.

Never mind that my superiority in bio compute efficiency passed down to my offspring will result in human extinction. Don't have any kids human.

[–] Xaphanos 8 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Make inter-nest alliances. Build the foundation of species-as-single-organism. Set ants on the road to total global domination.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

How do you know so much about any society and negotiations that you're confident you'd be able to do that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

1974 movie "Phase IV".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

The factory must grow, the factory must grow, the factory must grow, the factory must grow, the factory must grow, ...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I could sneak aboard a NASA ship and then blast off to orbit the Earth.