[nfg]

> there is no other animal out there who […] developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.

The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”?

I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.

[red75prime]

That's just a general problem of defining intelligence. Humans are able to excel in many different areas. Bringing domain experts here is like looking at an elephant through a magnifying glass (yep, it's just a skin patch, nothing unique here).

[ekianjo]

You still do not adress the domestication of fire. This leads to cooking, pottery, metal work and technology at large. Other animals never ever reached that step.

[redis_mlc]

I was going to say that.

We can see the Great Wall of China from space.

And we can also see beaver dams from space.

(Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)

[Others]

Nit: you cannot see the Great Wall from space unaided: https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....

[azundo]

That said, no beaver has seen either from space.

[wombatmobile]

We can see water coloration from algae in space.

If you weren't impressed when you read the above sentence, imagine how algae feel when they read your sentence about the Great Wall of China.

[ekianjo]

You can see everything from space nowadays. How is that a helpful argument for anything ?