Alien Invasion ? :doh:

[Moontanman]

There have been several, well a couple at least I am sure of ways aliens could conquer the Earth discussed here, everything from dropping asteroids on us to disease to kill us all off but how about kindness? Yes, simple kindness would be sufficient to destroy us, especially if they had a few thousand years to wait on the results.

 

All they would have to do is give us an inexhaustible supply of food.... Yes, possibly a bio engineered plant that grows like a weed every where on the earth from the poles to the equator deserts to rain forests, this plant would produce enough food year round to feed everyone with little or no effort on the part of humans. Lets say this stuff grows every where even in pots on apartment balconies and it supplies us with total nutrition to make humans totally healthy, it could even cure all diseases if you want to be really perverse. all they would have to do is listen to us thank them profusely and come back in a few tens of thousand years to find humans evolved into cattle like animals instead of the intelligent advancing creatures we are...

[CraigD]

Cattlehood, self-actualization, or Valhalla?

 

There’s the kernel of a neat SF short story in this idea (and an obvious title: “Killing Us With Kindness”). However, the scenario – let’s name it after and name the all-hunger-and-ills-curing plant, the “manna plant” – could go two very different ways, or a third way, changing us little at all. These ways express the views of opposed philosophical schools of the nature of humankind.

 

Moontanman’s scenario outcome – relieved of the necessity to struggle to obtain food, humans evolve into stupid cattle-like animals – expresses the “necessity is the mother of invention” / “that which does not kill us makes us stronger” (and its corollary, “the absence of that which could kill us makes us weaker”) school of thought on human nature.

 

The other school of thought is “leisure is the basis of culture”, an idea expressed by lots of philosophers and anthropologists to explain why, for hundreds of thousands of years, anatomically and presumable neurologically modern humans lived “just like the animals”. Despite lots of struggling to find food and survive that which would kill us, pre-historic humans didn’t become “intelligent, advanced creatures” until we established society and technology that allowed some of us to stop focusing on the immediate need for food and other basic physical needs. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, perhaps one of the best know theories informing this question, explains this in clear, diagramed terms: before a human can address “advanced”, science-y stuff (at the 2 topmost levels of the HON pyramid: “esteem” and “self-actualization”) he must meet the lower 3: “physiological”, “safety”, and “love/belonging”.

 

The manna plant scenario outcome from the LITBOC school perspective would be something like: Freed of the need to struggle to meet basic needs, humanity went having a small elite sometimes free to focus on higher goals to having nearly everyone constantly free to focus on them. The progress of science and technology accelerates, and within a few hundred years, we greet our would-be killers-with-kindness as peers or superiors.

 

Both positions, however, ignore an important human trait: our ability to fight with and oppress each other even when there is no shortage of what we’re fighting over (which, in the final analysis, is land, and equivalently, food). If this trait is given primacy, the forces of oppression and control would spring into action when the manna plants appeared. Unlicensed private ownership and consumption of them would be illegalized, punishable by the most draconian penalties, and an crash program to license and control their harvesting and distribution launched, with the ultimate goal of preserving the status quo, hunger, disease, war and all.

 

Even if this didn’t happen, the manna plants meeting 100% of the nutritional (lets assume manna plants somehow satisfy water needs, even when there’s a shortage of it where they grow) and medical needs of 100% of humankind wouldn’t solve our other problems, such as the need for shelter, or our growing population. Reproducing unchecked by limited food and water or disease, we’d soon be challenged to find space enough to stand or lie down. Perhaps the manna plants need to have some sort of population-sensing contraceptive function engineered into them.

 

Even with the population problem solved by the manna plants, humans have the ability to invent reasons to fight and kill one another. An unfailing supply of food and effective immortality from disease sound a lot like the Norse myth of Valhalla, where every day until Ragnarök is spend partying all night and fighting to the death all day, to be resurrected each evening to begin the cycle again. Whether you consider this state to be heaven or hell, it’s certainly not the state of human cattle.

[Alpine]

I have to say, this has to be one of the weirdest threads ever. :o

I'll say, they'll just sit back and enjoy the ride. Why should they do any work when we are already planning our own demise.

 

But, I'll think about this a little more and let you know.

[Moontanman]

Quite possibly the most powerful people would take great pride in saying they had never had to touch the "manna" plant but if food didn't limit our numbers in some way I think the effects would end up being mostly harmful. Much of our technology and economy and culture is tied to procuring, storing and selling food, (then there is the medicinal aspects of it as well) at the very least our entire culture would change drastically, maybe leisure time would increase but any incentive to progress would have to at least drastically change direction from where it seems to be headed today. A human could live almost anywhere on the planet with minimal shelter if he didn't have to raise food. Why travel even as far as the store if food was just a step outside your door? Talk about a collapsing economy, incentive to work would change for sure. I envision a world full of people and not much of anything else...

[joekgamer]

For shelter, why not make houses out of it? Depending on the shape/texture of the plant, you could even make modern-style, box-shape buildings. With buildings that not only provide food, but also clean the atmosphere (presumably), farms could be replaced by factories and those factories could be regulated much less than they are now, able to release practically endless amounts of carbon dioxide. Also, farmers wouldn't loose their jobs, instead being employed to pick the fruits off of the plants.