this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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I read a science fiction story where the human crew lands on a planet populated by intelligent alligators. The alligators produce hundreds of babies at a time. The Queen invites the humans to dinner and offers them a stew made from her own offspring...
How is that ever going to provide more energy than you put into it? That makes Matrix levels of sense.
Just think how inefficient most of what we do is. Most of our modern society is based on indulgence or complex societal norms (very inefficient from an energy perspective!). It is frankly absurd to think we would do anything only based on its efficiency... Similarly, an intelligent alligator society may just eat their young out of fun or because of societal norms.
Yeah, perhaps the most fitting example here is non-vegetarian diets: Feed plants to livestock. Livestock uses up some energy for its own existence. Then feed livestock to humans.
There is a slight difference in that livestock can ingest leaves, which we cannot, but in industrialized farms, they typically get fed produce anyways, to make them grow more quickly.