&gt; <i>Does not mean that they are not highly intelligent, especially in their home environment which we can only observe through a microscope. At the end of the day there is more of them in us than pretty much what is us... they have got lots of places to hide.</i><p>[citation needed]. There&#x27;s nothing suggesting individual bacteria are anything more than dumb machines that react to external stimuli - or that as a group they do anything more than gradient search through DNA space.<p>&gt; <i>Some citation needed. Just because we extracted chemicals that have been used for millions of years and invented by yet other living organisms that had been battling them for millions of years does not mean we invented a damn thing. And we destroyed those discoveries in 10s of years.</i><p>I&#x27;m not talking about extracting chemicals. I&#x27;m talking about flying, Moon landings and popcorn. Keep in mind we went from nothing to genetic engineering in few thousand years, and arguably all the time but last few centuries were essentially not relevant to those advancements.<p>&gt; <i>Succeed at what?</i><p>Succeed at staying on top of damage done by pathogens, eventually advancing to the point we won&#x27;t have to keep actively pushing that technology forward. Sure, bacteria will try to gradient-search around whatever we throw at them, but we don&#x27;t have to make it easy for them. &quot;Nano particle drones&quot; are definitely not out of the question in the future, given that bacteria themselves are nothing more than dumb &quot;nano particle drones&quot;.