A Midsummer Night's Insect Dream
A friend's posting about a cicada experience leads me to think: Yes, they seem like particularly stupid insects, even as insects go, but...they're above ground only briefly. Did you ever stop to wonder what they're doing down there, all those years underground? They could be building a city. There could be silicate spires down there, inhabited by insect accountants. They could be building nuclear reactors to warm their dwellings during the frozen winter. They decorate their apartments with diamonds and opals. They organize choirs. Their little ruby eyes glow as they sit (or whatever it is you do when you're legless) in rows, listening to their Great Grub Leader rhapsodize about the warm and bright world to come, which they think is the afterlife that they reach if they're very good grubs. For, you know, the change they undergo is so extreme as to be akin to death and rebirth.
They could only be pretending to be stupid, or maybe all their brains get used up during the metamorphosis. Change takes a lot of effort, after all.
Hey, it could happen.
I don't know that a cicada civilization would do a less competent job of preserving the world than we have. Emerging from the dark into an eternal summer to sing (even if we haven't the right ears with which to appreciate their music), eat, and find partners...you know, their priorities could be worse. And if we know what's true, that their individual lives mean little, how ephemeral they are and that this isn't in fact heaven...well, it could be that truth is a matter of scale.
They could only be pretending to be stupid, or maybe all their brains get used up during the metamorphosis. Change takes a lot of effort, after all.
Hey, it could happen.
I don't know that a cicada civilization would do a less competent job of preserving the world than we have. Emerging from the dark into an eternal summer to sing (even if we haven't the right ears with which to appreciate their music), eat, and find partners...you know, their priorities could be worse. And if we know what's true, that their individual lives mean little, how ephemeral they are and that this isn't in fact heaven...well, it could be that truth is a matter of scale.