In a war between humans and ants , who would win ?

[aneeshm]

Inspired by some comments in the "Other intelligent Species" thread by Pasi , I here aks this question to anyone who claims that we are the dominant species on this earth - if all the ants of the world turned hostile , how long would we survive . One argument used in that thread is that we are the most superior species because we can terminate any other on the planet . Thus , this question . If the supercolony of ants mentioned in that thread by a poster tries to invade Europe and starts marching , how long before Europe does down ?

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

Oh come on. Do you really think that ants could eradicate the human race? At most, they could render some areas of the planet uninhabitable for humans, but nothing more. Technology wins through, no matter what.

 

[insurgent]

I'd say intelligence wins, Pasi.

Although much can be said about the collective intelligence of ants, they are simply not as capable of adapting, they're not creative enough at all. Humans would win the second they realised the danger.

 

[MSTK]

They'd probably evacuate Europe and then deploy some kind of super-Raid...you know, the Bug Spray.

And plus, if you got them Exterminators who wore Ghost Buster gear and plastic contamination suits, they can just kill every ant.

Plus, if things got desperate, we could always evacuate Earth and then blow it up.

 

[insurgent]

That is of course presuming that ants possess the intelligence they possess today. If they actually had the mental capacity to orchestrate an organised coordinated attack on the human race, then that's an entirely different hypothesis.

 

[Riesstiu IV]

It would me impossible for humans to eradicate ants and vice versa.

 

[aneeshm]

If the ants decide to march across eurpoe and kill and eat all human opposition , how could our present technology stop them ?

 

[MSTK]

If the ants decide to march across eurpoe and kill and eat all human opposition , how could our present technology stop them ?

Exterminators "pwn" teh ants.

 

[aneeshm]

I know they can't do it , but this is a purely what-if question .

 

[Riesstiu IV]

If the ants decide to march across eurpoe and kill and eat all human opposition , how could our present technology stop them ?

How about Boiling water, Bug spray, or Pesticides? Some ants are non-posinous and have harmless bites. Army Ants in tropical regions are very dangerous but they're too simple minded to coordinate a mass genocide against humans.

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

Yes, if there was any true danger, we'd just spray mass pesticides from aircraft and automatically win. No species can take us out, and we are rapidly approaching the point where no natural disaster can take us out. We are almost invincible, and the time is coming when we will be.

 

[aneeshm]

I repeat , look at the sheer amount of ants there will be . If all underground and currently-bening ants come out of their nests and attack simultaneously , we have no chance .

 

[Knight-Dragon]

If the ants decide to march across eurpoe and kill and eat all human opposition , how could our present technology stop them ?

An army of anteaters?

Biological control comes to mind...

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

Not all ants are warriors. In fact, very few are. A single human can take out so many ants it's ridiculous.

 

[Perfection]

Well, it would likely be a big problem if they we're coordinated and intelligent. However, they aren't, so you couldn't use this as an example of them being able to destroy us, because ants are incapable of such a level of intelligence.

 

[Colonel]

Nukes, Nukes and more Nukes everyone gets into a big sealed building then nukes every other part of the world then pour massive amounts of bug spray around the building and surronding area, then we goto Mars

 

[Perfection]

Pah, you couldn't nuke ants of the face of the earth!

 

[Halcyon]

WMD would save the day. Giving a few trillion ants myxomatosis would be a bit uncouth, but they did start it. I assume they started it, right? Not that it'd matter..

Anyway, what exactly is antkind going to do - eat everyones' picnics? Join together to form a 90ft tall monster ant amalgamation and crush Tokyo? Numbers they may have, but.. they're ants. Give the kids of the world a magnifying glass each and and a sunny day and any offensive on their part would be doomed. Pretty much the best that the ants could do would be to try to cause enough environmental damage to cause a famine, and even such a simple order as "eat everything" would require more.. tactical capability.. than they possess. My apologies to any ants who may be reading this, but they'd be doing pretty well to take out a village populated by people made entirely out of jam, let alone all of humanity.

 

[Tassadar]

The kind of chemical which are able to killed ants are chlorinated organo chemical, just for your information, most of them are ban because they are more toxic to us then anything else.

So trying to poison ants will only result in a major human comtamination and maybe even our own doomsday.

Do i need to talk about nuking them lol.

In fact, ants use chemical weapon in their own war, like formaldhyde, which is carcinogene for us human, lol.

If all ants on earth make an allience and decide to wage war on us, i think we are done. Their first objective should target our food supply, they could spread some toxic fungus on it, and there we go. If we are short of food, we will even fight within ourself, as usual, lol. We will be outnumbered from everywhere, our house can even fell appart before we know what is going on.

 

[Double Barrel]

Ants could go terrorist and destroy our crops. Maybe infiltrate our nuclear warhead facilities and set off a few missiles, causing a chain reaction that makes humans destroy themselves. What if they formed an unholy alliance with spiders? Brown recluses and black widows could attack us while we sleep, overloading our medical facilities. And they could coordinate a simultaneous attack to go into everyone's nostrils at the same time! That would certainly freak me out.