Hot peppers anyone?
Isn’t the flavour of cocoa also originally a pesticidal chemical lol
I love this thread.
Colorado River toad: ₍𝄐 ̫͡ 𝄐₎
Humanity: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
She looks so familiar, who is this? Is this from Veep?
Julia-Louis Dreyfuss.
- Elaine from Seinfeld
- Veep
- Some character in the MCU
She was also on SNL.
Sooo actually why land mammals can’t filter out salt from seawater?
Actually if you are on a raft with a limited amount of fresh water, you can mix in some sea water to stretch it out a bit. I think if you use a third seawater its ok, but don’t quote me on that.
PSA: if you’re on a remote island or dysfunctional yet floating ship do not abandon it unless truly necessary - raft will be always more dangerous
Erm, if im on a raft im gonna be quoting you so you better be right.
Aliens would extract our bile and earwax.
My precious bodily fluids!!
Rain water and grain alcohol for me
Goddamn I need to watch it again.
Funnily enough we try to cultivate everything we like, so in a roundabout way they were successful.
I think that’s basically what The Botany of Desire is about, right?
I think the book Sapiens makes the point that wheat has trained us into cultivating it for selfish needs.
(Except that it’s wheat, and that we annihilated 99% of its brethren to pick out the one that we liked so we could effectively clone it. But yes, we are the slaves…)
Sapiens and Homo Deus are both such good books. Lots of little anecdotes like that we’re just so fascinating.
I guess… If you consider factory farmed chickens to be “successful.”
Tbf, this has proven to be extremely effective: Just think of how many tobacco or chili plants are grown today! Domestication really is a two-way-street
Are we farming the plants or are the plants farming us.
I do would like to be an alien’s pet.
They just want to propagate. The best chance a plant has to do that is by being tasty or useful to humans so we cultivate them.
The best bit about the mint and chocolate thing is that chocolate is also poison, so we spice up our poison with more poison.
Poppies kill things?
Onion and leek too btw.
Heroin, opium and morphine are derived from poppies. Too much of any narcotic and you die
Yeah but we need to process the shit out of it. Is anything really going to die from eating some raw poppy seeds?
Well, we are pretty big for insects
People die almost every year overdosing on tea made from poppy seeds.
The potency of the seeds vary so much that you can buy two jars and drinking a tea made from one will give you a decent buzz and the other will kill you if you drink half.
If an animal were to eat a seed pod, it could definitely die.
You can do an extraction on poppy seeds, but the bulbs leak a tarlike substance when cut that is already plenty concentrated
It doesn’t really need to be processed much. Heated plant parts for tea and the sap is ready to smoke after drying. Both of these processes do count as processing but I would not say it counts as "process[ing] the shit out of it. "
To overdose to death on it you need to also purify and concentrate it. Animals aren’t even heating and smoking it.
You don’t need to purify to drink it just extract it. It’s hard to smoke enough opium to OD (which I guess counts as concentration through evaporation but isn’t purified to seperate alkoloids) to death without other drugs but it is pretty easy to over do it with just tea. Like a previous poster said tea extractions will have wildly varying potencies so they can kill even those with tolerance.
statistically no, but its possible to get a random group of poppyseeds that are extra potent. its why for example, South Korea bans it (as they dont even want the chance for them to get collected)
So how do we do poppy seed bagels?
The poppy seeds don’t contain the opiate, the surrounding latex contains it (visual: pomegranate seeds, and the inedible flesh you free it from).
Some of that opiate might get on the seeds, but its mixed into such quantities with other poppy seeds that the potency level is diluted to virtually nothing.
And yet, can still fuck the unlucky in a drug test.
Wow. I guess I need to eat more bagels
Would aliens actually be weirded out by this quality of humans?
I feel like any sufficiently intelligent species living on a planet will have some degree of biodiversity on said planet. And the chances of something being made to be a poison/deterrent for creatures other than the intelligent species is probably a large one, because it’s pretty hard for plants and animals to make a poison/deterrent that kills everything without also killing itself. So if there is a gap for itself, there is a gap for other life to coexist with the toxin. And that’s before accounting for the fact that something can be safe at low levels, provide benefits/stimulation/good feels at low levels, and toxic at high levels.
So I’d think it would be pretty natural for intelligent life to consume things that are harmful to huge swaths of other creatures.
If we were the aliens and came across two worlds inhabited by intelligent life I would probably be more weirded out by the one where nobody uses any mind altering substance like caffeine that are poisonous to other animals.
It is kinda weird that humans are so resilient to so many things though. It’s part of being scavenging omnivores, but alients with a more specialized diet might be weirded out.
Dogs can eat rotting meat and lick unwashed balls and ass but die from fucking grapes. 🤷🏼♂️
Humans can fuck grapes with impunity
I… I don’t think I can.
Not with that attitude
I just can’t see it ever happening.
I don’t mean any disrespect, and I don’t want to kink shame, but that kinda thing is just not my bag, baby.
C’mon David. They want you to. Do it for them, buddy.
The grapes? I can never tell when a grape wants some action. My whole life, I’ve missed every single signal. Well, that, or the grapes just don’t find me attractive, like, EVER.
Seems like a skill issue to me.
nothing worse than getting a grape seed stuck in your peehole…
Sounds painful. Like gallstones, but backwards. On the plus side, probably less scratchy. On the minus side, maybe more citric acid.
Dude, I don’t mean to boast, but honestly, I think my dick is just WAY too big. Like, I would DESTROY that grape instantly if I tried. It’s not just a trick of the camera angle, it just is that big. Honestly, I don’t even need to get out a measuring tape to tell you that even with a massive grape, it’s just not going to fit.
You’re not being creative enough. You could have a bowl/cup of grapes, and use that. Or maybe alternatively you could blend/mash them up, let them dry out a bit to stiffen up, then use that.
I know it’s just a typo, but the image “alients” conjured in my head is pretty funny. I have less than zero artistic talent or I’d share it with you all. Hopefully the mental image is enough.
Aliens tree people is an interesting picture indeed.
Potentially. But think of it this way, there are somewhere around 400,000 plant species out there.
https://news.mongabay.com/2016/05/many-plants-world-scientists-may-now-answer/
Based on this list, something on the order of like 99.5% of plants are either not safe, or not useful/beneficial. If other species on our planet share a similar rate without complete overlap, then it’s practically a guarantee that there will be thousands of plants that are safe and useful for us but not for other species. That doesn’t feel particularly strange or unlikely. So even with a specialized diet, I don’t think the numbers would be much different.
It also could be the case that being scavenging omnivores is a strong precursor to becoming intelligent. If your species is on the rise in terms of intelligence, you’re probably using that to expand your food sources wide and far.
That’s based on species though, so it would overrepresent unlikely encounters. I can go eat pine bark or grass on any continent and probably be A-OK.
I do wonder how that data compares with other mammals though. Is it just average, or is it significantly higher?
That’s based on species though, so it would overrepresent unlikely encounters.
That is fair, but also consider that an intelligent species isn’t going to be limited by chance encounters. I regularly eat bananas, but I don’t live in India. I regularly eat pineapples, but I don’t live in Costa Rica. Very little of my diet is comprised of food that is native to my area. As an intelligent species, we farm food en masse, ship it around the world, and plant things outside of their natural habitat.
I do wonder how that data compares with other mammals though. Is it just average, or is it significantly higher?
Purely speculating, I’d wager slightly above average as a result of the thing I said about omnivores being a precursor to becoming intelligent.
an intelligent species isn’t going to be limited by chance encounters.
That’s actually a fantastic point, we change our environment to be more suitable to ourselves, including cultivating unique yet safe species. I’ve never heard of a poison dart frog farm, nor a field of death caps.
For mammals we are, sure, but there’s loads of things that’d kill humans that other animals chow down on perfectly happily, especially when it comes to microorganisms, mushrooms and the rotting things they’re often found in/around
I don’t think scavenging is right also given that humans used to mainly pick fresh fruits and persistence hunt, both of which are very fresh food which is not overlooked or left by others… Given the fact we picked fresh fruits and hunted for fresh meat, being resistant to berry and fruit based poisons was more important than microorganism based ones, so it makes a lot of sense that so many of the non-intoxicating poisons we like are from fruits and berries
Scavenging carcasses and chasing predators away from a kill is definitely a behavior we had in the past. Particularly during droughts and famines, scavenging would be an important food source on the Saharan scrubland. IIRC, this would’ve been before persistence hunting was a thing, back in the H.erectus days, maybe even as far back as some Australopiths.
We would also scavenge fallen fruits and berries that were at least partially decayed. It’s most likely how we discovered the intoxicating effects of alcohol.
Works best with the Earth-is-a-deathworld trope
Level 12 Deathworld.
Nicotine, THC, and cocaine are also insecticides. And psilocybin might be an insect repellent.
Thanks poison!
Drugs - natures mosquito repellant
So that’s the reason I’m not stung as badly as my friends!
Mosquitoes are such squares!
Capsaicin is a fungicide, which is extremely useful in the environments where spicy peppers grow.
