Originally posted by ray gower
If that means destroying humanity, well no sweat and there is nothing more personal in it than you shooting all them aliens in Doom.
So, you see it only as Evolution in action; Survival of the Fittest?
Doesn't the fact that they are Human (and I'm assuming that you are Human too) have anything to do with it?
I think the writers are rather hoping that it would
Originally posted by ray gower
But our human types. It is very personal and very nasty.
None of them are exactly cream of the crop. More like the evil smelling stuff underneath when it all goes sour?
That's Humans for you!
Surely you've met some Humans like these before. Humans are pretty nasty and evil in real life too! Genocide and War, Persecution for religious and political beliefs, allowing famines and plagues to continue when action could be taken to prevent them. And that's just those Humans in charge. Not many ordinary Humans are as altruistic as you would hope them to be. Generally, it is "What's in it for me?" first.
When a natural disaster occurs, while most people will pull together for the good of everybody, some go off looting shops and robbing the dead bodies.
On a separate tack, there was a march yesterday in Oxford to promote animal testing. This was to counter the anti-vivisectionists who what to stop all animal testing. Personally, if I, or a member of my family, or a neighbour, can be cured of cancer, alzhiemers (sp), but an animal must first be experimented on, then my choice is easy. But I can see where the anti-vivsectionists are coming from (though not their methods.)
I would be quite happy for someone to remove the Foxes in my garden, (who dig it up and cry all night) but as wild animals they have as much right to it as me.
So it is no surprise that if we treat animals as less than humans, we would do the same with aliens, and certainly with machines like the Toasters. Issac Asimov's Robot books cover this issue.
There are some people who see a hierarical structure to life with Humans at the top, there are others who see all life as equal and how we define ourselves is how we treat others. But what happens if we ever meet our equals or betters?
We are very Xenophobic, even just with foreigners never mind other alien species that we might meet or robots we might build. I think it is a inbuilt genetically programmed tribal thing. In the past we tended to join genetically similar tribes, today we make groups of like minded individuals. It is a attempt by our genes to keep the genepool coherent. Look at the way our society has treated the disabled as an example.
While we should rise above this programming because we know that it is wrong on a moral level, it probably does make our genepool weaker, and hence less fit to survive.
The advantage of the Toasters is that they are all alike.
