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Unicellular "Enigma" Changes From Predator To Plant and Back
SilverEar writes "Imagine a creature that swims and preys on others, but once it eats a certain kind of plant, that plant grows inside it, causing the predator to lose its ability to prey and start using sunlight to make its food. Its preying mouth is replaced by an eye that is needed to find sunlight. This is the Hatena ('enigma' in Japanese). The kicker: when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth."
How do you know he's human? All I see is text on my screen.
I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum.
You just go on thinking that way; it makes life very easy for us visiting aliens. We can move about doing our jobs, mostly documenting and studying this primitive newcomer species, without the need to take extraordinary precautions against being "discovered". Yes, a few humans do realize what we are, but when they try to tell the rest, they're just treated as insane or stupid. The majority uses the same circular reasoning: They've never seen an intelligent creature that wasn't human, so anything that shows intelligence above some minimal threshold is classified as human. This provides additional evidence to the "only humans are intelligent" belief.
Actually, your descendants will thank you for your obliviousness. You aren't keeping very good records of your own history, as you can easily see by trying to learn about the lives of 99% of the humans who lived only a century ago. Going back 1000 years, you can't even name more than 99% of them. But we have the data, for the use of your descendants when they wise up and realize they want to know about it. And now with the advent of computerized record keeping, your records are even more fragile; the data on the development of computers themselves only a few decades ago is now nearly inaccessible due to near-total loss of the (mostly) computerized records. But again, since we find it so easy to pass for human, we've collected most of that information, for the education of your descendants.
Oh, and good luck identifying the gateways to the galactic network, where we've backup up the data and made it available to the galaxy's historians. You probably also believe that all the computers on the Internet were built by humans, because there's nothing else intelligent enough to build such things. We won't feel insulted if you mistake our comm devices for those made in China or Malaysia; honest, we won't. Again, it makes life easy for us.
And we can even write about it openly in forums like this. I'll probably get a "funny" moderation, and nobody here (except my colleagues) will believe it for a second. If you are one of the few humans who does believe, it doesn't matter, because the rest will consider you stupid or insane.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.