Ant Politics

Do you suppose ants bicker?
  I have a fire ant mound in my front yard* and every so often I'll watch the ants going about their ant business.  They're oblivious to me, I think I'm on a scale that's almost incomprehensible to them, but then they're almost incomprehensible to me.  As I watched the other day I saw two ants bump into each other - more or less - back up, go forward again and bump again.  They did this a couple of times before they figured out to go around each other.  After that incident what did those two ants think of each other?
   'I saw Eduardo today,' one would complain to his ant friends at the ant country club.  'Bastard wouldn't get out of my way.  Who does he think he is?'
   'Stupid Dave was in the middle of the ant highway again,' Eduardo might say to his ant buddies, over a round of cheap ant beer.  'I swear, it's like he thinks he owns it or something. That ant highway is for all of us, not just him.'
   Such teeny tiny problems from such teeny tiny creatures.
   Which got me to thinking, of course.  Given the incredible vastness of the cosmos - truly unimaginable objects on colossal scales so large that they have no meaning to us - aren't all our problems really just a variation on the theme of ants bickering?
   I mean, think about it.  We're several billion people on a pretty small planet orbiting a fairly average star in a galaxy that contains over 200 billion stars.  That billion with a captial 'B.'  And that galaxy is one of about 170 billion that we know about so far.  Again, billion with a capital 'B.'
  Those kind of numbers drive you insane when you think about them even for a little while.  They let you know just how truly, incredibly vast the universe is, and how small we are.  Ants.  Bickering ants slowly murdering the planet that's their only home.
  Now, I know it's not in their nature, and I know this is just hyperbole, but what would happen if the ants in my front yard got together with the ants in my neighbor's yard?  What kind of ant community would they have then?  There are a whole lot more of them than there are of us.  And if the ants in my cul-de-sac got together with the ants in the next cul-de-sac over... well, that's actually kind of frightening.  But it would be kind of cool to see what they come up with.
   Same thing with us.  We're in control of the planet, undeniably, but in the grand scheme of things we're just larger ants, all our striving and scheming and plotting as inconsequential to the universe as the ants' bickering in my front yard is to me.  But... what if we started working together?  There are seven billion of us on Earth.  If we could get one billion of us - that's about 14% - all pointing in the same direction, trying to accomplish the same thing... we could, literally, move mountains.  We could change the course of human history forever.
   That would be kind of cool, don't you think?



*  which I am in the process of exterminating.  With all apologies to Nature and PETA, I can't have fire ants around the house.