You can run, but can you never escape us.
After seeing It Follows, the idea of a slow predator that never stops is quite terrifying. I would never be at peace again.
We’re the Terminators of the animal kingdom. We’re slow and deliberate, able to stalk our prey for days or weeks at a time, and can often come back from injuries that would be a death sentence for other animals.
But really, what makes us so superior is communication and cooperation.
I like to think it’s my extra strong servos that can crush steel
When you communicate with the extra strong servos that can crush steel to crush the steel you would want crushed, of course.
I believe in nature, humans are regarded as persistence hunters. Which is to say we have incredible stamina and perseverance while hunting. Other creatures can run faster than us, but only for short stints, relatively speaking, as long as we can keep track of them, we can continue to pursue prey for hours or days without significant external assistance (food, water, rest, help from others, etc).
So regardless of what we may be trying to kill, if we continue to keep our focus on it, we can absolutely find and kill it, given a long enough timeframe.
This also explains marathons, quite frankly. I don’t see too many animals just running for dozens of kilometers without a reason to do so. Many can’t run that far, and those that could, generally never would… Unless they’re running from us, I suppose.
Something like the cheetah, is very very fast in short duration, but after a few minutes of running at full speed, it’s thermal regulation tends to fail and it is biologically required to stop or it will overheat and die.
Add to that our intellectual capacity for planning, the creation of tools to assist us, strategy, teamwork, and all the things that are associated with intelligence and we’re basically a killing machine, if we choose to be…
Amazingly, we’re also the only species that we know to exist that feels bad about eating our prey. I’ve never seen a lion have an existential breakdown after killing off a gazelle so it can eat, yet there’s entire subcultures of people who refuse to cause any harm to their food. Have you people not understood the “circle of life”? Did you not watch the lion king?
Whatever. Go live your life. Weirdo.
We are pack hunters. That’s what makes the difference. Cooperation and communication. No amount of running far will ever come close to compete with the power of making plans and communicating them to others.
