ABEL\'S UNIVERSE (General)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Thursday, November 17, 2011, 21:44 (4564 days ago) @ Abel

Abel

To understand life, you must understand the concept of equilibrium. Life and death is part of this equilibrium as the suffering that is part of existence. They are not wanted, they are needed to balance an equation.

Not only does an individual organism exist in a state of dynamic equilbrium on a microscopic scale with its' environment trying to maintain homeostasis, but groups of them are in equilibrium with their macroscopic environment as well. Thus you cannot have oxygen producers for long without adding oxygen consumers. You cannot have just plants, without huge fires and potential extinction events, so you add herbivores. But the herbivores, without predators, soon overpopulate the world stripping it of its' vegetation, risking another extinction event due to massive starvation or oxygen depletion. So predators were added to balance the equation. In EM matter, life forms are long-lived by nature, eventually there became a need for predation to keep the population of herbivores in check.

Without predators, humanity needs to address overpopulation and its future needs itself to maintain this needed equilibrium or eventually it will suffer the consequences.

Finally, something I can sink my teeth into, and it just so happens I completely agree with your basic premise(as my screen name implies..). There is a natural order of balance, of homeostasis that must be maintained. Humanity's ultimate failure is not that they must have some form of predation to control the population, it is that they have no sense of the nature of the natural balance.

Your example is flawed though. There is no need for predation to balance the number of herbivores to the number of plants. Supply and demand would take care or that in the long term. As herbivores stripped the country side of vegetation, they would move on allowing time for the plants in the area to regrow, fertilized by the waste of the passing herbivores. Any group that did not move on, would starve. Eventually, if the number of Herbivores were too large, they would die off in droves, and the plants would naturally repopulate while the number of herbivores was depleted. There is no need for predators in that simple simulation.

--
What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.