[HN Gopher] Ant Geopolitics
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Ant Geopolitics
Author : romaintailhurat
Score : 216 points
Date : 2024-02-27 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty
| cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a
| couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone
| has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.
| ssnri wrote:
| I enjoyed that book. After I read it I made my bio on dating
| apps: "Active, creative, hairy; but enough about Portia
| spiders."
|
| My question is: how successful do you think that's been for me
| as a straight man?
| gryn wrote:
| Depends on your metric for success I guess.
|
| - number of matches ? Probably not. - number of fellow fans ?
| Probably.
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| Is sexual cannibalism off the table?
| snapcaster wrote:
| It depends on how physically attractive you are obviously,
| that variable confounds everything people say about dating
| apps and what works or doesn't
| ssnri wrote:
| I go to yoga studios and the instructors hit on me.
|
| Still have a mostly shit time with apps. Not zero dates,
| but going out and doing things in the real world is a much
| better strategy.
|
| Being attractive is probably enough for women, not men
| though.
| lukan wrote:
| "Being attractive is probably enough for women, not men
| though. "
|
| That is valid only for a certain subset of humanity.
| Jemaclus wrote:
| You said "book" (singular), and I just wanted to let you know
| it's actually a trilogy, so there are more if you want to
| read them!
| dmix wrote:
| I'm not sure talking about hairy spiders in your opening
| sentence will work wonders with women.
| Loughla wrote:
| It won't work until it works really well with one specific
| woman.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I'm not sure women are as homogeneous as you're suggesting.
| ssnri wrote:
| I guess I'll have to fall back on my oversized genitals
| tomcam wrote:
| Can't unsee this
| zabzonk wrote:
| not to mention ant-based computers hosting super-human level
| AIs, which seems highly unlikely. but it did work for terry
| pratchet.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for
| permission to build a game inspired by it and received his
| blessing (https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png) :)
|
| (slight spoilers, FYI)
|
| https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my
| first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to
| have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You
| send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting
| the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the
| pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care
| for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue the insanity
| and create personal growth.
|
| I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics
| will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I
| took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a
| bit. It feels very Children of Time-y and some might enjoy
| reading bits of it:
|
| Half-Assed Technical Document:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nx...
|
| Freeform Creative Writing of Scripted Game Intro:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wET9mWaYae_GMqbm8n37UoNF...
|
| ---
|
| Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his
| process for deciding which aspects of an animal's
| ecology/behavior to represent in his fiction.
|
| Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game)
| wrote this article called The Simulation Dream,
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and
| I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for
| creating a rich and engaging simulation is to "Choose the
| minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you
| want to generate."
|
| I would love to know why Adrian chose to give
| ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his
| series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately
| omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other
| behaviors out.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Great idea. Leaf-cutter ants have something like five worker
| castes (soldier, excavator, forager, garbage collector,
| gardener) so managing that distribution might be a fun part
| of a game (tending towards Ant Factorio). e.g.
|
| https://youtu.be/VLBDVXLiWxQ?t=301
| vagrantJin wrote:
| I love Adrian's work.
|
| Take my money.
| ScotterC wrote:
| Re: Ecology in Scifi
|
| The interactions between Ants and Spiders gave me some
| associations with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith's
| Brood). Particularly, I loved how both were painting an
| alternative evolutionary path but 'grafting on' to existing
| notions and understandings of what we know to be true in
| species development. I wish there was more of this! I felt
| Children of Ruin was weaker in this regard, maybe because the
| conflict for the species was absent. The Spiders vs Ants and
| then Spiders vs Humans being conflicts which created a
| fanstatic narrative to explain alternative solutions to
| prisoner's dilemma (spiders choosing to co-opt their enemies'
| strengths or in Lilith's brood, Oankali being a hybrid of
| alien/human). I'd be curious to learn if there's more examples
| in zoology/ecology of species choosing this route instead of
| competition every time - and also, what factors might impact
| this.
| grimgrin wrote:
| I'll piggyback this sci-fi thread to link the beginning of
| Phase IV, because I rather like it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTv4WYHsncQ
|
| The plot: "After a spectacular and mysterious cosmic event,
| ants of different species undergo rapid evolution, develop a
| cross-species hive mind, and build seven strange towers with
| geometrically perfect designs in the Arizona desert."
| romaintailhurat wrote:
| Love all the scifi recommendations in this thread!
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I really liked Children of Time and Ruin. I could not get
| through Children of memory and its very rare for me to abandon
| a book. It just seemed very different than the prior ones for
| me. Maybe I will give it another shot. With that said I loved
| his Final Architecture series and just finished the final book
| in it.
| bebopfunk wrote:
| If you're interested in ecology in science fiction you should
| give Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez a read. It's not about ants
| specifically, but they play a large roll in a way (I don't want
| to spoil too much and it's been long enough since I read it I
| can't remember what's a spoiler or not). It's a good read.
| fritzo wrote:
| Question for Adrian: All your sentient beings are animal-like:
| they are discrete animals that move around, or at weirdest are
| a ruinous sludge that moves around and assumes the form of
| animals. But might we see mycelium networks as sentient?
|
| Zoubin Ghahramani argues that intelligence is about motion,
| that the sea squirt digests its own brain as soon as it settles
| down. But might there be intelligent communities of static
| individuals that nevertheless form dynamic networks?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| This article seems to be continuing the "genes eye view" of the
| world. That we are mostly vessels for gene propagation and
| socialization. Ants are becoming superior gene propagation and
| socialization vessels and therefor may succeed in reframing the
| worlds ecosystem to their goals.
|
| Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans could
| probably roundly poison them into extinction if we wanted.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> we as humans could probably roundly poison them into
| extinction if we wanted_
|
| We probably could extinct all the ants in the world if we
| wanted to, if we were content to extinct all other life on the
| planet as well.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1217/
| gryn wrote:
| The problem with that is that humans depends on the ecosystem
| making them extinct would probably have very long chain of
| negative effects that would poison us in return if not make us
| extinct too.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Also, lots of our systems depend on people evaluating
| incentives locally and picking their behavior based on their
| interests--humans that all decided to pointlessly try and
| wipe our ants wouldn't be engaging in normal human behavior!
|
| Are we going to give the ants supernatural coordination as
| well?
| ta2112 wrote:
| > Of course that discounts intelligence where in we as humans
| could probably roundly poison them into extinction if we
| wanted.
|
| What is that, irony?!
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I'm not convinced we could drive ants to extinction even if we
| tried.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I think we could, but I believe it would be the most
| quintessential (and likely final) Pyrrhic victory humanity
| has ever known.
| mistermann wrote:
| Our _relative_ intelligence seems insufficient to overcome our
| default behavior as vessels for the unthinking propagation of
| memes though, which has resulted in serious harm to the
| ecosystem of a variety of species, including us!
| xipho wrote:
| Disclaimer- shameless plug involved. Humans are one species, a
| complicated on for sure, Ants are well over 15k species. Of
| course not all are found together, but many species are. As the
| article notes the diversity of their social structures is
| collectively nuts. The combinatorics of all these species
| interacting with a myriad of micro-habitats and resultant
| behaviors emerging is crazy. The sheer number of non-ant species
| that have evolved to look and behave exactly like ants, from
| being drug-pushers to parasitoids, to meme-ready social
| influencers says a lot about how long they've been around and how
| important they are to how natural systems work.
|
| We're happy that AntWeb (https://www.antweb.org/) recently moved
| their data to TaxonWorks and are now building that site of data
| curated there. Data for over 250k individuals, with many more
| coming as we work to aggregate data are there. Check out a wealth
| of data and images there.
| hammock wrote:
| _> The sheer number of non-ant species that have evolved to
| look and behave exactly like ants, from being drug-pushers to
| parasitoids, to meme-ready social influencers says a lot about
| how long they 've been around and how important they are to how
| natural systems work._
|
| Fascinating to me, and thank you for calling it out. Ants
| aren't the only "form" that this happens to in the animal
| kingdom either.
|
| Homo sapiens used to live alongside other similar species like
| neanderthals etc, and eventually we crowded them all out. Often
| we tell ourselves it's because we were superior to them. Many
| have wondered what society would be like if we still had close
| species cousins living among us. Certainly our own approach to
| geopolitics would be quite different to what it is today
| octagons wrote:
| I am an avid ant hobbyist and use AntWeb regularly to aid in
| identification and distribution of ant species when hunting for
| new queens. I'm glad to hear about this change - the site had
| needed a bit of a refresh for a while!
| xipho wrote:
| At present it's just the data being dumped from TaxonWorks
| and re-integrated into the existing front-end (separation of
| concerns nicely done). In the future we hope efforts that
| wrap TaxonWorks APIs and tooling, "companions", will evolve
| to make things look better. For example it would be trivial
| to wrap AntWeb in TaxonPages (see Github for everything) to
| get a new front end there, though that software is focused at
| the Taxon level. Multiple groups are looking to build out
| similar efforts at the specimen level (perhaps
| SpecimenPages).
|
| We've recently has some amazing success with previously
| "unknown" people contributing to our open-source
| framework(s). These contributions, and hopefully future ones,
| will let us deliver additional features in a more timely
| fashion, for example things like multi-entry and
| "traditional" taxonomic keys. TLDR - there are opportunities
| to chip in to the "refresh" efforts on multiple fronts.
| octagons wrote:
| I'd love to discuss contributing further. Do you have a
| link to a GitHub repository or organization?
| digging wrote:
| How exciting. I'm a huge fan of ants and I didn't know about
| AntWeb. Insects tend to be harder to find identification
| resources for than spiders, which is what I spend more time on.
| However, this site seems to exceed any individual digital
| resource I know of for spiders.
|
| RIP to SpiderID.org, which hasn't had moderation in years and
| now has ads. How would I get started creating a new community-
| driven hub for spider identification in the vein of AntWeb? I'm
| not associated with any research organizations but maybe I
| should be.
| xipho wrote:
| I would first engage, if you haven't, the spider community at
| iNaturalist. It is likely that others are thinking along the
| same lines as you.
|
| We (Species File Group) are trying to build out open-source
| tools (e.g. TaxonPages, 'distinguish') that would ultimately
| help to make these types of projects possible, through GitHub
| pages or other similar approaches. If you wish, we have
| multiple ways to be reached, see 'Events' after doing a
| little sleuthing as to who we are. We are definitely
| interested in facilitating the structuring of communities
| that link people like you to those doing the science behind
| the scenes, this is really important for the long term
| stability of resources like those you're interested in.
| octagons wrote:
| If you found this story interesting, you may be interested to
| know that antkeeping is a rewarding and fairly inexpensive hobby.
| The Global Ant Nursery (GAN) project run by AntsCanada, a popular
| YouTube channel, is a great way to obtain new queens responsibly.
|
| Alternatively, it's fairly easy to find queens on your own.
| AntsCanada offers a starter guide, and there are many other
| resources that teach you when and where to find new queens. I
| keep a few test tubes in my truck year-round, just in case.
|
| Note: I'm not affiliated with AntsCanada in any way.
| ses1984 wrote:
| AntsCanada is a great gateway into antkeeping but I would
| beware about the GAN.
|
| I connected with someone listed on the GAN in my state. As I
| was working out the purchase and delivery, there were a lot of
| red flags, which I ignored because I trusted AntsCanada. The
| person said that they already gave away the species I wanted,
| but maybe I would be interested in other species instead. They
| pushed a species which isn't really known to native to my area,
| but he insisted he found them locally. They aggressively tried
| to upsell me on expensive extra supplies they said were
| critical to the care of this species. When I got my ants, they
| were shipped from several states away.
|
| I reported this to AntsCanada. I'm not sure what happened, but
| I recently tried to get a different queen from GAN and I ended
| up talking to the same person under a different identity.
|
| I'm sure there are some great people on GAN, just beware.
|
| I ended up getting a queen from Atlantic Ants. It did ship
| across state lines, but the species is one that's ubiquitous in
| my region.
| octagons wrote:
| I've also experienced this using GAN. Be wary and use common
| sense. I never bothered reporting it but I'd be willing to
| bet we're talking about the same person. They listed the same
| advertisement in basically every state with a different
| Google Voice number so as to appear local.
|
| I was under the impression that we would be meeting because
| they were local, which is how GAN is intended to
| operate.?Instead, they shipped the queen to me without any
| USDA permits. The queen also died within a few weeks of
| arriving. They started a web store not longer afterwards.
|
| That said, I've had plenty of good experiences with GAN. This
| was one bad actor out of many good ones.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It's truly easy and inexpensive to get into- all I had to do
| was forget to do the dishes one night!
|
| ....my apologies, I don't mean to ridicule your hobby, it's
| just I couldn't imagine wanting more of them in my house on
| purpose.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Asking because it isn't spelled out in HN Guidelines. What are
| the actual automated rules for posting 'dupe' stories?
|
| This is a dupe from 10 days ago.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39400770
|
| When I submit something that is a dupe, it gets labeled as dupe
| and not posted. But this post was dupe and did get posted.
|
| What are the automated rules?
| pegasus wrote:
| There's a somewhat recent post by dang saying that (if I
| remember correctly) moderators sometimes manually look over
| rejected posts and give them a second chance if they feel it's
| worth a shot.
| romaintailhurat wrote:
| Weird because the app i used for posting this story usually
| points me to a dupe when there is one, i'm not sure if it's
| part of the HN API and why this mechanism has not worked as
| intended.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| ah. thank you. that might explain it.
|
| I'll try the app next time, maybe that bypasses some check.
|
| Or better, next time I submit, I'll use website regularly,
| and if it flags as dupe, I can switch to app and see if it
| bypasses the check.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| After reading the article, I really want a bug/ant RTS game.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| There used to be SimAnt.
|
| The game worked great when you simply let it run itself without
| actually playing it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'd play the heck out of an updated version that taught you
| more about ants while you played it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Not sure about the teaching, but there's Empires of the
| Undergrowth and soon Empire of the Ants ?
| binarymax wrote:
| Zerg vs Protoss is pretty close, but we need something new!
| derekja wrote:
| I've been really enjoying the AntsCanada youtube channel lately.
| He stages ant wars in a controlled environment and films them
| really well.
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCONd1SNf3_QqjzjCVsURNuA
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Found AntsCanada a few weeks back when his new build blew up on
| youtube. Its now a Sunday morning staple for my partner and I.
| make3 wrote:
| I think it's fascinating that, according to Wikipedia, Argentine
| ant colonies attack one another in their native range because of
| the increased genetic diversity (which they detect by smell). The
| mega colonies would only be a consequence of the inbreeding that
| follows rapid expansion.
| ysofunny wrote:
| if ants were mammals they would be humans
|
| equivalently
|
| if humans were insects we would be ants
| kevinwang wrote:
| Well we're social but we're not really eusocial like they are
| mullingitover wrote:
| I can't believe this article doesn't mention the slave maker
| ants. They're fascinating. These ants live in colonies so small
| they fit inside an acorn. They raid other acorn ant colonies,
| kill adult ants indiscriminately, and abscond with their pupae.
| They then raise the pupae in _their_ colony. The enslaved ants
| feed and care for their captors and their young, and even help
| their captors on future slave raids. However, the enslaved ants
| opportunistically kill the queen pupae of the slave maker ants.
| It 's an ongoing evolutionary arms race.
|
| There are other socially parasitic ants in this vein: some will
| infiltrate a colony, kill only the queen without the colony
| realizing it, and lay their own eggs which are raised by the
| slowly replace the entire colony. There are also 'cuckoo' ants
| which simply sneak into the colony, lay their eggs and leave.
| permo-w wrote:
| >However, the enslaved ants opportunistically kill the queen
| pupae of the slave maker ants.
|
| I'm guessing by this you mean the species of ants that tend to
| be enslaved, rather than the enslaved ants themselves?
| mullingitover wrote:
| The enslaved ants which grew up in the slave maker ant colony
| kill the slave maker ant queens (along with other pupae, but
| they kill the queens at higher rates) in their pupal stage.
| They're basically in rebellion. Researchers think that this
| behavior is selected for, as it reduces the effectiveness of
| the slave maker ants and increases the odds of survival of
| the enslaved ant species.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| What's this, an geopolitics article for ANTS?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| And then we have social media for Ants
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(page generated 2024-02-27 23:00 UTC)