Humans
are pretty lazy. Almost everything we do is motivated by making things easier
for ourselves such that we have ample time to spend looking at our pre-made
sliced bread and wishing that someone would cut the crusts of for us. This
pastime has of course fallen out of fashion recently since crust free bread has
now become available, at the cost of any self respect our society could
possibly have had left.
The oft' referenced industrial capacity of the ant world seems positively burgeoning with energy and enthusiasm by comparison; they use their bodies as building materials, work incessantly for the good of a single all powerful matriarch and never once stop to complain if their personal tastes force them to take ten seconds to cut off the edges of their sandwiches. They might even just eat around the crusts and leave them looking sad on the plate, they simply don't perceive it as too much of a trial. Yet the ants in their autocratic wonderland are, fundamentally, just as lazy as we are. The problem doesn't stem from a reliance on technological solutions or a society of entitled facilitation however. It doesn't even have its roots in some bunch of hippy insectoids claiming that life is too short to cut your own carrots into sticks, like some kind of chump. The real culprit is far more dedicated to the art of the sloth. You have to literally make the course of action you want it to take into the path that requires the least possible expenditure of energy. It's mother Hubbarding physics.
It's reasonable to think that a set of rules which is terribly busy enforcing exactly what should happen in every situation at every time simultaneously would want to take the shortest possible path to its goal. No-one sees water flowing uphill or cake cooking itself by sucking heat out of the freezer because thermodynamically that requires one not only to remove their own crusts but possibly eat them afterwards anyway, like some kind of barbarian playing a sick mind game, and physics simply doesn't have time for that - much less any inclination to be so vulgar. Everything that has ever happened has been the result of that action being the path that thermodynamics thinks is of the least resistance. It's the reason firewood will lay motionless at it burns to death rather than stop drop and roll. It would sooner be incinerated than move. All the while physics sits there in its entropic reclining chair of questionably initiated heat exchanges, flopping its arms over the edge to reach the remote as the last few scraps of cosmic background microwave ravioli slide off its distended belly and onto the carpet. There they shall remain.
So if the laws that govern how our world revolves and our chins hang are based on the principle of laziness then why should we hold ourselves to a higher standard. It'd all be far too much effort. Especially when you consider that at some point in our past, way back when no-one had disposable plates and bread was scarcely pre-sliced let alone de-crusted, the path that caused the least resistance somewhere for even a minute amount of time was to create life. The origin of every species was the course of action which required the minimum possible effort to be made, the ground state of the system. I can't be sure of what else was going on at the time since I was otherwise engaged as a series of mineral deposits across the prehistoric globe, but if everything that lives around us is the result of the easiest path then the other unrealised options would certainly have made for a fine series of postcards.
The oft' referenced industrial capacity of the ant world seems positively burgeoning with energy and enthusiasm by comparison; they use their bodies as building materials, work incessantly for the good of a single all powerful matriarch and never once stop to complain if their personal tastes force them to take ten seconds to cut off the edges of their sandwiches. They might even just eat around the crusts and leave them looking sad on the plate, they simply don't perceive it as too much of a trial. Yet the ants in their autocratic wonderland are, fundamentally, just as lazy as we are. The problem doesn't stem from a reliance on technological solutions or a society of entitled facilitation however. It doesn't even have its roots in some bunch of hippy insectoids claiming that life is too short to cut your own carrots into sticks, like some kind of chump. The real culprit is far more dedicated to the art of the sloth. You have to literally make the course of action you want it to take into the path that requires the least possible expenditure of energy. It's mother Hubbarding physics.
It's reasonable to think that a set of rules which is terribly busy enforcing exactly what should happen in every situation at every time simultaneously would want to take the shortest possible path to its goal. No-one sees water flowing uphill or cake cooking itself by sucking heat out of the freezer because thermodynamically that requires one not only to remove their own crusts but possibly eat them afterwards anyway, like some kind of barbarian playing a sick mind game, and physics simply doesn't have time for that - much less any inclination to be so vulgar. Everything that has ever happened has been the result of that action being the path that thermodynamics thinks is of the least resistance. It's the reason firewood will lay motionless at it burns to death rather than stop drop and roll. It would sooner be incinerated than move. All the while physics sits there in its entropic reclining chair of questionably initiated heat exchanges, flopping its arms over the edge to reach the remote as the last few scraps of cosmic background microwave ravioli slide off its distended belly and onto the carpet. There they shall remain.
So if the laws that govern how our world revolves and our chins hang are based on the principle of laziness then why should we hold ourselves to a higher standard. It'd all be far too much effort. Especially when you consider that at some point in our past, way back when no-one had disposable plates and bread was scarcely pre-sliced let alone de-crusted, the path that caused the least resistance somewhere for even a minute amount of time was to create life. The origin of every species was the course of action which required the minimum possible effort to be made, the ground state of the system. I can't be sure of what else was going on at the time since I was otherwise engaged as a series of mineral deposits across the prehistoric globe, but if everything that lives around us is the result of the easiest path then the other unrealised options would certainly have made for a fine series of postcards.
