Comment by throwup238
4 days ago
Are you thinking of Agent Smith in the Matrix?
> I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
Great monologue, shaky biology.
Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.
Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.
As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.
Agent Smith is way off on this one ...
The bit about mammals is wildly off base too. Boom and bust dynamics are built into most animal populations (i.e. red tailed deer in the northeastern US). Pretty much the only examples I can think of that don't experience those cycles live in very isolated environments like caves or have very long lifespans and large parental investment but even then the dynamic is only dampened, not eliminated entirely.
no, i remembered it being a quote from some famous scientist, and googling a bit now I see it was stephen hawking:
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Interesting that he would consider software a new life form. I think our organizations are really the higher life form above Apex humans.
When we have computer systems acting as corporation owners, and we begin to thrive in working for those corporations… That’s really going to change the picture.
That’s fun! Looks like he said it at the 1994 Macworld Expo. I wonder if that inspired the Matrix quote a few years later.
perhaps, though also "humans are the plague" is a popular trope in science fiction. e.g. this one is from pratchett, in a conversation between rats in "the amazing maurice and his educated rodents":
You will have worked out that there is a race in this world which steals and kills and spreads disease and despoils what it cannot use, said the voice of Spider.
'Yes,' said Dangerous Beans. 'That's easy. It's called humanity.'