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Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

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41–50 of 253 posts

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fool's errand. The trick is to make sure your body is continually controlled by some kind of computer that will wake you up when a set of conditions is met, so you don't need to rely on future humans. You also need to make sure your cryopod is stored someplace where troublemakers won't find it and turn it off. The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a smal…

"The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a small nuclear reactor or maybe a large RTG." And then hope nothing critically fails for centuries ... Unless we have perfectionized robots by the time you go into the cryopod, you might as well bet on humans. And if we "perfectionized robots", that do not fail all the time, we already would have a very different world.

You could have multiple failsafes, and after a part of them fail, you dehibernate automatically. We have systems that work well with such approach - planes being the most notable example - multiple redundancies, and when sth critical fails, you land asap. Works most of the time.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#42
post #30

When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems eve…

I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

A systematic study of birds would find that many do indeed starve to death.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#43
post #41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a small nuclear reactor or maybe a large RTG." And then hope nothing critically fails for centuries ... Unless we have perfectionized robots by the time you go into the cryopod, you might as well bet on humans. And if we "perfectionized robots", that do not fail all the time, we already would have a very different world.

You could have multiple failsafes, and after a part of them fail, you dehibernate automatically. We have systems that work well with such approach - planes being the most notable example - multiple redundancies, and when sth critical fails, you land asap. Works most of the time.

And then you wake up on the moon in a lava tube too early with a partly failing system and hope that everything else still somewhat works? With current technology level I definitely would rather bet on humans.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#44
post #30

When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems eve…

I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

I'm curious, what does that quote really mean? I can attempt to draw a few conclusions, but I'm not quite sure of either and they can also almost be the opposite of each other.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems an uncharitable view of the reply. The search space is huge, we sometimes find needles in haystacks by accident, isn’t it exciting that we have tools now that can systematically check every piece of hay?

ML search is more about ‘averages’ based on samples. Innovations like these are more about ‘shocks’ that surface fitting cannot capture. Note universal approximation theorem applies only to smooth surfaces.

But the better the mean surface is fitted (in a generizable way), the easier it is to spot outliers.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#46
> Instead of complaining about what we’re missing when we’re asleep, maybe we can experience it as a process that connects us to all life on Earth, including microbes sleeping deep in the Arctic permafrost.

I'm quite happy to know that "microbes sleeping deep in the Arctic permafrost" are asleep. I'd rather not have to think what might happen when they wake up.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#47
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

I'm curious, what does that quote really mean? I can attempt to draw a few conclusions, but I'm not quite sure of either and they can also almost be the opposite of each other.

You have to bust your ass to live while the bird just lives freely with helpings from God, despite man supposedly being made in God's image and stuff.

I think it's a misguided sentiment of its time, we know today that birds also bust ass in their own birdy ways to live. We all bust ass.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#48

This reminds me of the fact that humans used to be able to hibernate ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1117993/ ) and ( https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35033907/early-hum... )

From glancing over, it does not really seem a confirmed fact, but a hypothesis.

"They chose to spend the worst part of the year trying to sleep through it inside of relatively safe caves, and to do that, they sacrificed nutrition and vitamin D from the sun."

Also it does not really matter for your vitamin D levels, if you are outside in winter in the north or in a cave. The sun is too low for the body to produce Vitamin D anyway (only the Inuit for example do not need sun, to produce Vitamin D btw. )

And that they lacked nutrition in winter can also just mean, that there simply was not much food in the winters, which is kind of expected, before humans developed storage and preservation technologies?

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#49

> Instead of complaining about what we’re missing when we’re asleep, maybe we can experience it as a process that connects us to all life on Earth, including microbes sleeping deep in the Arctic permafrost. I'm quite happy to know that "microbes sleeping deep in the Arctic permafrost" are asleep. I'd rather not have to think what might happen when they wake up.

It's an interesting idea, why do humans and other species sleep? Maybe it is simply because they can. If there's no good reason to be awake, then sleep. Save your energy for a better time to be awake. That doesn't answer why we have dreams however.

Re: Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

#50
post #30

When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human. For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems eve…

I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

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