War is the competition for control over resources, a battle every form of life partakes in.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Oh, so that's what it's good for.
Which would make humans the least likely to participate, but here we are.
Why would it? We are the best at it of the larger forms for life. We control an entire planet and can physically stand on other worlds.
We fight over which god is real, which skin color is best and artificially restrict access to "resources". We can choose to not wage war but don't.
There's this fantasy book where a badass warrior monk flashes back to when his teacher taught him how to fight:
A master monk is preparing to teach his young students the martial arts so he takes them out to the forest and says there is a war happening all around us. Who can tell me what it is? Finally one of the kids realizes and shouts it's the trees!
And the monk says yes and explains the resource competition and how all the trees fight to secure their place in the sunlight. Then he says "Today children, I will teach you how to war for space". And the chapter ends.
Shit was so cash. The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker
Also, apes doing inter-generational genocides in the wild...
I remember when the frontline of the Argentine ant invasion passed my house. It resulted in the local extinction of a species of horned lizard, which could not survive on the non-native ants. The lizards had previously been ubiquitous, and since their defensive measure against predators was to freeze in place, they were very easy for children to catch and play with.
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
The Judge, Blood Meridian or Or the Evening Redness in the West
Whole quote:
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.
My trade?
Certainly.
What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it aint yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
Do bullet ant bites hurt other ants that bad too?
Scientific study on insect pain
Scientists disagree on whether an ant can feel pain, but studies are opening new doors into understanding. Two scientists from the University of Sydney, Associate Professor Greg Neely and Dr. Thang Khuong, completed research on pain in fruit flies (Family: Drosophilidae). Their eye-opening study proved that insects experience chronic pain after an initial injury has healed.
The researchers damaged a nerve in one leg of a fruit fly and gave it enough time to heal. They determined that the fly’s other legs were now hypersensitive. “After the animal is hurt once badly, they are hypersensitive and try to protect themselves for the rest of their lives,” said Associate Professor Neely. “It’s almost like an anxiety-like state, where once they’ve been injured, they want to make sure nothing else bad happens.”
Neely explained further, “The fly is receiving ‘pain’ messages from its body that then go through sensory neurons to the ventral nerve cord, the fly’s version of our spinal cord.
While their research was not completed on ants, we can compare an ant to a fruit fly. They are both invertebrates and insects. An ant’s brain has 250,000 neurons and a fruit fly has 200,000 brain neurons. As scientists explore the world of insects with new technology, we will have a more detailed answer as to whether they feel pain or just sense a danger to their survival.
Thats actually really sad
Side note, imagine how crazy the planetary-scale battles between all the various Warp Demons and the Tyranids.
Its gotta look like the most insane battlefields: an endless wave of billions of insect-like sentient organisms that have an insatiable hunger to kill and consume ALL life in the entire fucking UNIVERSE swarming whole solar systems, blotting out the sun from their enormous fleets of hive/colony ships, against another seemingly endless wave of billions of trans-dimentional literal fucking demons from the actual troubling chatic reality of Hell itself, all fighting the most horrifically savage, gory, bloody, violent battle a person could ever imagine.
5 on the yellow ones that are wrecking Christmas Island crab population