Em Adespoton

I had kids so that others don’t have to.

I like my kids, but I don’t like most other people’s kids. So yay, DINKs!

It’s not. But being an apex predator, there weren’t a lot even when their range covered most of Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Your scale is off; imagine an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with ants with a lion in there somewhere.

Now imagine 39,000 of those pools, each with its own lion and ants.

Humans. Because the lions would be overwhelmed in short order after which the ants would kill each other off.

There are roughly 39,000 lions left in the world, none of which eat insects.

There are roughly 20 quadrillion ants on earth, a significant portion of which will eat live mammals, and almost all of which will kill any ant not from their own colony.

Back in 2016 I was driving along a highway just after a wildfire had swept through the area; was one of the first cars let through.

We had to slow to a crawl because sections of the highway had melted away. Some closed off sections were still bubbling.

Some fence posts at the side of the highway were burned away at the bottom but still present at the top, held up by the fence wire.

Crews were at the side of the road with picks, shovels and rototillers extinguishing the last of the flames, while dark smoke still rose as far as the eye could see before and behind that stretch of highway.

That fire was caused by a stray cigarette. The result was apocalyptic.

Everything I’d want replaced by my insurance goes in a LibreOffice spreadsheet.

Never needed to file a claim using it, but it doubles as the place where I record warranty expiration dates, which has come in handy a few times.

It’s also been useful when buying replacements to see how much I paid in the past.

We have scientifically measured data that indicates our “consciousness” is emergent in the first place, and our actual senses and reasoning faculties feed data to the part of the brain that assimilates it all and creates a story post-facto.

In other words, the consciousness you think you have is really a hallucination that tries to make sense of the world after the fact. It’s a process that has worked well enough to see humanity flourish.

But some of the underlying drivers include feedback from things like gut bacteria that we don’t consciously monitor; the brain assimilates all sorts of inputs that we never really take into consideration.

So of THESE inputs, there could be all sorts that control our body that our mind then creates parallel construction to explain… and we’d almost never know.