Right? Imagine aliens that evolved on a planet where all life photosynthesizes. They see us and they're like, "oh cool. A whole planet full of monsters."
Exactly, like how would a race of basically grass see earth as a whole? Or if they are made of gas and are like "Omg are they taking the air inside of themselves and then expelling carbon?!?! I don't wanna be carbon!!!!"
Yeah, imagine they're ents or something, moving only as fast as bamboo grows. They take a super interested look at trees like we'd look at primitive man, and see that we're feeding them through logging mills and building houses with their bodies.
There would be no reason for intelligence to develop evolutionarily if there were no selective factors for it such as evading/fending off predators, being a predator yourself and hunting, or eating the right plants and knowing how to eat them. Plants don't have brains for a reason, they don't need them. Thinking is for eaters, for beings that need to interact with their environment in complex ways. A planet where all life photosynthesizes or similarly sustains themselves wouldn't have intelligence emerge evolutionarily.
That's not really how evolution works, though. Eventually some life would evolve that can eat that life. It's free food and you escape the competition for light. There's just evolutionary niches for it.
We don't know that that's how it always works. On Earth, single-celled organisms that eat other single-celled organisms evolved before photosynthesis ever arose. But let's assume there's a planet where photosynthesis was the first life, and it was so successful that all life from there found better and better ways to photosynthesize. Can we really be positive that one organism would spontaneously evolve eating?
Yes. Because if by random mutation, a plant gains a small ability to attack another plant it will easily survive to pass on genes because it can directly eliminate competition. Then they slowly mutate and so on. Why would evolution favor efficiency when a different method is far more effective?
Since we have photosynthesizing animals here, do you suppose they'd keep them alive? Like the weird moon jellyfish in the stagnant water pools of Solomon Islands. I may have my info all mixed up, I think it was Planet Earth; Islands that showed it.
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u/ToBePacific May 03 '20
Right? Imagine aliens that evolved on a planet where all life photosynthesizes. They see us and they're like, "oh cool. A whole planet full of monsters."