TL;DR. My ideas...

Neither. We are all animals. Life can very easily be wiped out and we exert no actual control on the earth. We cannot protect it.

Earth has the right to us more than we have any right to it.

I personally believe that we both are entitled to the earth, however we shouldn't treat it the way we do. Animals treat it far better than we do and they balance out the eco system and contribute to the well being of the Earth. Instead of only one having rights to the Earth, animals and humans need to share the Earth equally, leaving enough space for animals to prosper and enough space for us to live.

I think its funny that people exclude us from the animal kingdom. Last time I checked we're animals too, albeit semi-civilized animals. I also believe that there is no such thing as rights and we just invented the term as others have said. If you don't believe we don't have rights then go to wikipedia and type in "Japanese Americans 1942" and you'll learn a lot about rights.

Put simply, if it's smart (and sane) enough to develop the technology required to ensure self-sufficient and expandable colonies in outer space, then actually go out into the galaxy and spread life to other worlds, then it "deserves" the Earth. If we have to get rid of every koala, panda bear, and penguin to ensure that the life that developed on Earth will actually survive the next tens or hundreds of billions of years into the future, then I'm all for it. If we have to die out, so something more sane than us can evolve and go into space, then so be it.

Of course, it's not as black-and-white as that in reality, but I'm just answering the OP as directly as possible.

Life aims to reproduce, and it can't reproduce when its home planet is fried up by a supergiant, can it?

Let's remember that humans ARE animals. Our cognition means only that evolution is progressing, and we may not end up being the only cognitive children of the evolutionary chain. While we may give ourselves the 'right to the earth' by default because we 'think, therefore we are' and can recognize that one may have the right to this or that (which really is ridiculous), and an animal has no ability or care to think about that kind of thing, that could all change a few hundred thousand or million years from now. Fact is, everything has the right to the earth. We are all a part of a balanced ecological system that, when pieces are wiped from it, begins to deteriorate. Human presence is greatly speeding this disintegration of life from the planet, but we are all made of the same stuff. Animals, insects, bacteria, water, every bite of food you eat, and every strand of hair on your child's head were all built from the remnant of a supernova; star dust. It built the earth and everything in, on, around, near, or far away from it. Who gives anyone more right than anybody else? We may have done a lot of 'good' for the world and done a lot to hold our place as dominant species on the earth, but we're only dominant because of our cognition. We're one of the weakest, slowest, dumbest animals when it comes to other wildlife and the survival instinct. We're destroying every other animal here, so why fuss about rights now? Everybody else has already lost theirs, that's why so many species are going extinct.

As the movie Planet of the Apes and, the upcoming, Rise of the Planet of the Apes obviously monkeys and gorillas are stronger, faster and are only a quick brain mutation away from killing and enslaving us all so glory to our monkey masters and all that.

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But no. I don't really think there's a specific 'right' for either side of the humanity vs nature argument. Sure humans have refined materials into marvels within our short reign upon this earth but in doing so we've done plenty of damage to it in the process. And can we even say there's a balance in nature? Everyone out there is constantly vying for power, trying to kill off certain creatures just because they can. The only reason birds aren't ruling over the planet is cause we staked our claim first dammit! Their poop doesn't count!

And I've heard quite a few people, perhaps not here but in other places, always complain about what humans do is unnatural or inhumane or etc etc to the planet but the very fact we were created by nature means anything we do is therefore natural to our species. That includes destroying everything else for the betterment of our own lives!

Perhaps this was more of a rant than an intellectual snippet from me but I live in Vancouver; people are always talking and complaining about nature 24/7. I'm not here to discuss my concerns. I'm here to exclaim my frustrations as illogical as they may be!

I believe in nature conservation and all that, but this debate is inherently idiotic. Animals or humans? Humans ARE animals. We are nature. Just a very advanced species of animal. Nature is all about survival of the fittest, it's all about taking things by force, predators and prey. Nature is violence and destruction. We are the dominant species ontop of the food chain because of our natural abilities and evolutionary inventiveness, and that is the natural way of things for the time being.

Living is not a right. It is a fact. Humans are evolutionarily more prepared to take advantage of our environment. Humans are animals, we aren't super beings, blessed with immortality. We are frail biological creatures who live and die like every other animal on the earth. The question is not who has the right to the Earth, it is what would Earth be like without humans. Nothing.

Just another planet in the universe with no intelligent life.

OutOfLocke wrote:Living is not a right. It is a fact. Humans are evolutionarily more prepared to take advantage of our environment. Humans are animals, we aren't super beings, blessed with immortality. We are frail biological creatures who live and die like every other animal on the earth. The question is not who has the right to the Earth, it is what would Earth be like without humans. Nothing.

Just another planet in the universe with no intelligent life.

I protest. Several non-human species are incredibly intelligent. Read about Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Bottlenose Dolphins. Even pigs are incredibly intelligent. Life itself is pretty amazing, too. We're the only planet we've found that has any life at all to the best of my knowledge.

Sciamancer wrote:

OutOfLocke wrote:Living is not a right. It is a fact. Humans are evolutionarily more prepared to take advantage of our environment. Humans are animals, we aren't super beings, blessed with immortality. We are frail biological creatures who live and die like every other animal on the earth. The question is not who has the right to the Earth, it is what would Earth be like without humans. Nothing.

Just another planet in the universe with no intelligent life.

I protest. Several non-human species are incredibly intelligent. Read about Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Bottlenose Dolphins. Even pigs are incredibly intelligent. Life itself is pretty amazing, too. We're the only planet we've found that has any life at all to the best of my knowledge.

When I said just another planet with no intelligent life, I meant sentient. I completely agree with you as far as intelligent animals go, they are pretty impressive in a lot of cases. And I also agree with your statement that life is amazing. It is amazing, it is fascinating.

As far as not discovering any life so far goes....

The universe is so massive its uncomprehendable, and we have barely scratched the surface of exploring it. It would be irrational to assume that we are the only sentient life forms in the galaxy, let alone the universe.

And some non-human animals are sentient, too. Perhaps none quite so sentient as us, but I'd argue that some of those I just listed- Chimpanzees and Bottlenose dolphins- show definite signs of a high level of sentience. Both show self-awareness via the "mirror test" and both show great amount of empathy, even cross-species empathy. That's not just intelligence, though it is a factor. They're essentially people.

I agree that there is probably more sentient extra-terrestrial life out there. Probability just has it so that it is so very, very far away that it is practically impossible for us to contact them. By the most conservative of estimates, there are a billion billion planets in the universe. Even if there is a one in a billion chance of sentient life on a given planet, there would still be a billion planets with sentient life.

Lukisod wrote:How do you think Humanity got to where it is today? By killing every animal bigger and strong than ourselves that got in our way. Within a couple hundred years of developing tools, almost all large animals living on the continent of Africa died out. That was just with rocks and sticks! If there's one thing we're good at it's killing things. Why deny our natural talent?

Besides, if something isn't directly aiding us, it's probably competing for the same things we need or want. So why not remove them from the equation?

As for the warehousing cows bit, we've already figured out how to grow artificial meat. Just a matter of time before we're all eating a mass of muscle goo that's been toughened by passing current through it all day. So soon enough we wont even need livestock. I think it's perfectly in our best interests to kill every competing organism we come across to ensure our own survival.

Humans are not the strongest creatures on the planet. It is only through our inteligence and in our abilities to construct weapons to aid us in combat that we are able to best other creatures. And still, humans are killed, everyday, by animals both as strong as lions or bears, and as weak as dogs, bees and scorpions.

Humans are frails creatures, to say the least, and it is this frailty, I believe, that has led to this.. need.. to kill other creatures; in order to prove, to ourselves, that we are superior. Yes, we also kill for food and in order to expand our domain, but we kill just as much for pure sport. As you said, youself, we're more than capable of nourishing ourselves through other means, so why must we kill in excess?

If we were stripped of our tools and left only with our bodies as a defence against the wilds, I strongly believe that we, as a species, would be the ones threatened. Would you, then, still hold the same beliefs that you do, now?

I answered with "both".

I don't think one can live without the other really.
Many would kill the human populace to save the planet but without the human populace what good is the planet?

Nature is destruction, birth and death.
I am not arrogant enough to think the system could not be worked on some.
But let's be real in how to save the planet, animals, and yes ourselves.
You can't kill every plant/ animal on the planet and expect to survive.
At the same time though if you narrow the human populace to accomodate everything except the people they will take over as bears have done in campsites, scorpions and rattlesnakes have done with deserts, and we have done with our cities.

The answer ,as with most really good questions, lays in a middle ground somewhere.
The answer to where that middle ground is, as most truly brilliant answers are, is probably really simple and sitting right under our noses.

Not so much a statement one way or the other by me but just a viewpoint. Something to think about.

I don't know who should but I personaly can't wait for the zombie appocalspe

In my opinion...Animals do. They were here first. Humans can live on earth, as long as they live like the natives, in companion ship with the animals, and killing only out of survival. Humans have utterly destroyed this planet and animals are in danger of going instinct. It's not fair! They were here first. The natives had the utmost respect for the animals that they shared a home with. It's not fair that we took over.

The question is nonsensical. Humans are animals. The main reason humans act cruelly toward other lifeforms and destroy their habitat with little thought, is because we make this false division in order to objectify the living world. Therefore, the poll itself contains within itself the very core of the problem it seeks to address.

In a way I would say neither really have the right to earth. The idea of ownership is really something of our creation given that they only thing that is truly our is our own mind and body. Humans also tend to have this idea that they are special in the universe or that the earth would care if they were to be extinct. Both animals and humans (although technically humans are animals also but I understand what you mean) don't have the right to earth because they were thrown into it without their own choice and their existence doesn't matter to the universe. We cling to our belief of ownership and territory and justify all our actions that have a negative impact because we have higher sentience. But we are not objectively valued more or less than animals, and neither really have the right to an earth that never actually belonged to them.

For those of you interested in a read, something I was inspired to write recently:
For those of you not interested, we can move asteroids. Nature is running out of ways to kill us :)

Life is a thin film on the thin skin of a small ball of rock. 65 Million years ago, a 6 mile wide asteroid wiped out 75% of everything alive on the planet. Not for the first time, but perhaps for the last. In 2004 we observed 99942 Apophis. It is an asteroid approximately 250m across travelling 30,000km/hr. We know it's path down to a certainty about the size of our own planet. We know that a certain point within this zone, if Apophis were to travel through, it would continue it's orbit and impact the earth when it came around again, April 13, 2036. We even know that if this asteroid were to hit earth, it would strike somewhere in the Pacific ocean can cause billions of dollars in damage to the coastlines on all sides. It would not destroy life on the planet, but it would be the most catastrophic event humanity has faced to date.

And it need not happen at all. Humanity, a relatively young species in the history of life, now has the intelligence, the technology and the industrial capacity to physically alter the course of Apophis. We can launch a spacecraft, from the moving earth, and park it next to Apophis, another moving object, hundreds of thousands of miles in advance of it's impact, equivalent to firing a bullet, from a bullet, to hit another bullet. We can then literally tow this rock, by virtue of gravity and precise, gentle thrust and essentially put this asteroid wherever we choose. We could even coax it into orbit around the earth if we so choose.

We are the first species in the history of this planet to have any control over celestial bodies, and to have a real choice, about what catastrophic events occur to our home. Nature has tried to kill us at every turn of our existence. The cruel and persistent tormentor to ensure only the most worthy inherit a slice of this thin skin on this small ball of rock. Humanity has endured under the shadow of ever present oblivion.

Now, we, as a species can move asteroids.

Nature can go f--k itself. For this thin film of life has a choice.