Chapotraphouse

that is one of the reasons i don't buy the logic of the hive ethic and, after riding the fence in the audience, i've decided the space signal was made with dubious intention for intelligent species (as defined by the ability to perceive complex deep space signals and decode them).

there are a lot of ethical considerations with food and the environment, and being against fruit for "interfering" was very specifically chosen. like other animals, humans co-evolved with perennial fruits. it's a basic mutualism. i'm not saying all fruit production is ethical/environmentally sound, but at a basic level humans and fruits are archetypal proto-agriculture: monkey eats the fruit (itself a product of pollination), monkey shits the seed, plant gets genetic recombination in a fertilizer pile. more, very different fruit later.

when they chose that example (perennial fruit) instead of like wheat and corn and all the other cereal grains and annuals and their pretty remarkable baggage, they weren't just saying "agriculture bad" or "hunting bad", they were saying "gathering bad."

i've read polemic articles "against agriculture" and discussed them, there's plenty of people against "hunting" for obvious reasons, but i have never heard of someone being "against gathering". it's kind of foundational to mammals and really every life form that isn't an autotroph or a decomposer, like fungi.

i don't think the writers made the decision to focus in on fruit lightly. i think it was signal something is fucked with the program. i really think it's an efficient kill switch for unsuspecting intelligent life. it targets the dominant species and has them self-cannibalize to shrink the population and condense its foot print further and further while building the antennae to broadcast the signal out again.

make no mistake, dead human bodies are gnarly for the environment. we accumulate a shitload of heavy metals and forever garbage chemicals, so this would condense all that and magnify it into a smaller and smaller population with a more and more reduced footprint until blip.

it's like a script that recursively and systematically deletes humans.