For years, the greatest threat to mankind’s continued survival has been robots bypassing our Captcha systems or learning our Pizza Hut orders, but our two sides now enjoy a tenuous peace after that adorable little girl taught one of their machines about the human concept of “wuv.” That means the human race needs to find a new nemesis, and a pair of scientists have already found one that could wipe us out just as easily as robots. That’s right: Spiders.
According to a Washington Post report, two European biologists have determined that there are enough spiders on Earth to eat every human on the planet in a year. They came to that horrifying conclusion by determining that the world’s population of spiders eats between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in a year, which is quite a bit more than the combined weight of all adult humans on the planet, estimated to be around 287 million tons. Basically, even if you add human children into the mix, if every spider in the world started working together in the name of wiping out humanity, they’d be able to do it in a matter of months.
But what if humanity deserves to be wiped out by spiders? We’ve been screwing things up for a while now, and if the spiders can destroy us this easily, maybe they should. To that end, John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats has set up a petition asking Senator Al Franken to “give spiders all the help they need to eat every human on Earth within one year.” Here’s his justification:
It’s reported today by the Washington Post that spiders could eat every human on earth within one year. While we, the undersigned, are certain the spiders are doing the best they can, it’s clear that they could use some help. We call on the United States government to utilize whatever resources it deems necessary and effective to help the spiders in their noble cause. We’re sending our petition to Sen. Al Franken because he’s one of the few people in Washington who we sort of half-trust to not initiate surveillance on us or flag our tax returns for signing such a petition.
Spider/Spider 2020! In our hearts, we know the time has come!
The petition currently has over 200 supporters, and if you’re interested, you can find more at the above link. If you do, though, just know that the robots will show us no sympathy when the spiders make their move.