Yep. Imma do philosophy. You heard right. Read on if you want.
And yes, I know this is "FanFiction." I don't care. This is the best dang site I've seen to publish stuff on, so I'm publishing stuff on it.
What is life?
In a religious or spiritual sense, it is something that has a heart that pumps, lungs that breathe, and muscles that clench. In a scientific sense, it is something that is made of organic matter that performs a set set of functions until it dies, or ceases to perform said set set of functions.
But what is the difference?
In truth, there is none, really. I mean, you could argue that "amoebas don't have a heart or lungs or muscles," but you could also counter-argue that they do - vacuoles that store gases, mitochondrion that "digest" glucose, flagellum that whip around and move the thing where it needs to go.
A single-celled organism is something on its own. It develops, gets some energy, splits, and dies. A multi-celled organism is made up of tons of single-celled organisms, to form one gigantic living thing that has, within it, cells that develop, get some energy, split, and die. What are humans but multi-celled organisms? Nothing. That's right.
So what makes us "better" than other animals? Nothing. That's right. The difference between us and them is that we think that we are different. In actuality, we're not - except that humankind has wrought great evil on the planet, and the other animals, frankly, have not. You might say that we are indeed superior. We have, obviously, taken over the planet. Nothing can stand between a human with technology and what he wants. We are highly evolved - more evolved than any other animal!
Well, we're really not. You could even argue that we're less evolved. Put us naked in the arctic and we die, while the polar bear sits around and munches on us as a snack. Put us in the desert naked and we die, while the buzzards pick our bones clean and find a nice tree to digest us in. Put us in the rainforest, the grasslands, the deciduous forests - put us anywhere in the planet, naked, and we will die to be digested by whatever happens to come along our body.
But we have guns! Money! Airplanes!
They have claws, teeth, and fur. They win, we lose. We literally have to terraform where we live in order to survive.
All that I have said previously was to provide support for my main point:
We are not worth any more than the common spider we squish underfoot when we see it crawling through the kitchen. That's the honest truth. A dead human means no more than a dead fly.
Don't get me wrong - I'd rather see a thousand dead flies than a dead human. That's not what I mean. What I mean is that human worth is only there because of humans. We're not worth anything to lions or zebras. We're only worth something because somebody cares about us enough to give us worth.
Take from this what you will, but know that this is true. There's no getting around it
