What if ants had human-like intellect?

So…What happens?

This is majorly conceptual because there is no real way of telling exactly what would happen, but based on my research I have a decent guess. I do not believe that ants would emerge victorious in this battle. In fact, I don’t think it would reach a conclusion. There is no real feasible way ants could cause real, widespread damage to humans, and there is no real way for us to kill 20 quadrillion ants without killing ourselves in the process.

Ants would have no real way of harming us on a large scale directly, no matter how smart they are. If given enough time, they could develop the technology needed to do so, but that took us humans thousands of years to do. Just because they are as smart as us does not mean they could understand our language or much less our writing, so it is not like they could learn from our existing technology through writing or communication. 2.5 million ants per person sounds like quite the large amount, but it really isn’t. That mass of ants would weigh about 15 pounds, and take up the space of a watermelon on the larger side. Now they could certainly kill a human, as ants have been known to attack the sensory organs of their opponents. They would likely target the eyes of humans, and it would be incredibly coordinated through their increased intelligence. But humans could an incredibly large amount of ants very quickly without weapons, and a simple can of bug spray would deal even more damage to an army.

Ants do not have a real way of harming us indirectly, either. At first I thought they would simply target our food supply and starve us to death, but that would take far too much time before we would retaliate. See, the average ant eats around 1mg of food a day, but we produce over 10 trillion kilograms of food globally. In other words, it would take ants hundreds, or even thousands of years to eat this amount of food. Their more serious threat would therefore be disrupting food production and distribution rather than literally eating humanity’s food. That said, insecticides could be produced on a global scale once we become aware of what is occurring, and I predict that their plan would likely be shut down moderately quickly. But then I thought they could infiltrate our digital system. They may get inside computers, radio system, or possibly even sabotage power grids. But even if assuming they could figure out what those were and how they work, this would not spell the end for our species. We are fully capable of surviving on an analog system, though it would be incredibly inconvenient and likely devastating to the economy. Even then, we would likely develop countermeasures to these attacks by ants, which we technically already have. Some ants are already attracted to electromagnetic fields, so this is an existing problem today that we have developed solutions for via chemical-infused plastic compounding, which is basically insect repellant on the hardware.

Now, on to why it would be a stalemate. Humans would be capable of causing mass destruction to the ants. We would likely develop much more powerful insecticides, especially aerosol cans like existing bug sprays. Perhaps we would even use flamethrowers, but that may do more harm than good. Regardless, we don’t have a way to combat them underground. It has been suggested that a large amount of ants live underground, likely much more than the estimated population we have now. We have bombs or chemicals that could kill them, but that would destroy our lands and likely our food supply too because that is where many of them would be likely to live. Then there is just the sheer number of them. They quite literally cover the Earth, living in every continent except Antarctica. They could live in the very walls of our homes and we would have no idea. The point is, any technology we could develop to deal damage to these ants or even completely eradicate them would do considerable damage to us, too. Also another factor we must consider is the change in mindset these ants are going to have. With human intelligence, we can only assume that these ants are going to be conscious and in turn capable of thinking for themselves. Would they even want to risk trillions of lives just for world domination? Human intelligence does not guarantee human morality with it, and it is very possible for the ants to retain their “protect the colony at all costs” mindset that they have suggested to posses. This scenario only works if we assume that is what they want, the protect the hive. But in a real scenario, it is entirely possible for the ants to fear death just as much as we do now. Under the assumptions of this scenario, a prolonged stalemate appears more plausible than total victory by either species. There is no gain from either side in waging war, because the losses outweigh the benefits on very large scales. Maybe this would even cause world peace for humans, because we could start hating another species instead of each other. But then maybe we become friends with the ants. Like I said, there really is no way of telling what would truly happen.