Monday, October 08, 2007

exoskeleton

To expand on the last post, whilst simultaneously diminishing it for a few cheap jokes, it’s probably going to be a straight fight. Us, the rats and the cockroaches. We’re everywhere, clever, ruthless and adaptable. The rats are everywhere, clever, ruthless and resilient. The roaches are everywhere, turn over a generation a month, eat anything and are driven by a single-mindeded, unsentimental survival instinct that your average tyrant can only envy.

My money’s on the roaches.

The high turnover rate allows fast roach evolution, thus they can respond quickly to selection pressure with change, even if millions of them don’t make it through the field testing. There’s plenty more where they came from. We tend to respond through engineering. It’s the opposable thumbs, I suppose. We don’t like somewhere, we knock it through, fit some fire and start making tools. The rats just move house. And they’ll live anywhere. Especially our houses, if they can get one.

Roaches will find and eat every scrap of food, including each other when comes to it. We’ve become fussy, and deskilled. How many of us would eat rat, even if we knew how to kill and prepare it? The rats have done well on our wastefulness, and will have to find new food sources when all our squander and store has gone, probably by eating us initially. But they’ll get by on soap if needs be.

Roaches are hard to kill. We’ll kill each other for a loaf of stale bread in the right circumstances. Which is about a week after the supermarkets run out, I reckon. The rats are pretty tough too, what with those plague carrying fleas and the ability to live in sewers and landfills.

So, when push comes to shove in the recently flooded, burned and looted cities of the world, back the arthropods, the future has six legs, not fur or those opposable thumbs. I’m still taking outside bets on the rats, though, at an attractive 100:1. Then, you won’t be around to collect, and I won’t be around to pay out.

And the roaches will have eaten the money anyway.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want my money on the feral dogs.

They'll eat rats (and humans) when necessary, plus most other things, including each other. Though not roaches. They're adaptable, they're everywhere (or will be), they have plenty of genetic diversity, and they're organised (better organised than humans, once our top heavy systems break down).

Plus in the unlikely event of the humans coming out on top, they'll be welcomed straight back into the houses.

Okay, so there might be more roaches, but the ferals will make it.

GCU Reasonable Unless Provoked

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