They are ants, dammit. A few million tiny scraps of chitin and squishy stuff out of umpteen trillions of other tiny scraps of chitin and squishy stuff. Yes, it's a very nice colony and all that and yes, it's a bit of a shame that it got filled up, but a colony of that size may well have been a danger or a nuisance to anyone nearby. Cool as it is, comparing effectively non-sentient ants and their fairly impressive colony to the human race is silly. Science is more important than a single ant colony. Indeed, scientific advancement as a whole is probably more important than an awful lot of things. People forget that benefits from scientific advances permeate everything, including your life. Quite a lot of you wouldn't be alive without some very unhappy and very dead animals.