Sunday, March 29, 2009

Man; Dogs' Bitch

This came from a discussion I was having this morning about what Aliens would perceive to be the superior life, would it be humans or something else?
They would have some criteria to make their judgment of superiority. They may look at intelligence or size or how things have changed over history and ask if they are in a better state now than its predecessors. Intelligence and size are very human perceptions of superiority. Perhaps a good unbiased metric of which species has advanced the most might be the amount of energy it must output in order to survive and a comparison of how this has changed over the spices development. So the superior species would be the one which has optimized its energy outputs most effectively in order to achieve the same or better than its predecessors.

Humans would like to feel that we hold the leash over our development and the development of many other species but this is our view of things. At some point man found that it was good to have a dog by his side, and we like to feel that we have now domesticated dogs. How about looking at it the other way round.

Some humans where better suited to dogs and the dogs could scavenge from these types of people. These dog friendly people then had an edge over other dogless folk and so began the process of the dog selecting for more and more dog friendly people. This is not where it ends. The dog has now effectively out sourced nearly all of its major energy expending activities to mankind. We provide food, heating and couch.

An alien may judge what we see as our pets to be the masters of us as we still have to do the actual energy outlay.

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