Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 253 posts

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

#51

Post by Jach »

onionisafruit wrote: post #15
wdh505 wrote: post #5

I'm having visions of old people freezing their bodies and inducing "dormancy" so they can wake up when the world is a better place. I would invest in that company.

The real trick is being somebody that a future generation will go to the trouble of defrosting.

If we found a crypt of a hundred well-preserved mummies from a few thousand years ago who for all we could tell were basically peasants in their lifetimes, not grand or interesting people, and we had the ability to revive them into the modern world, I still think we would. The "interest" factor of future generations reviving cryonics customers when it's possible to do so is like the weakest factor in trying to predict whether cryonics will work at all.

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

#53

Post by galaxyLogic »

WalterBright wrote: post #10
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #2

> Karla Helena-Bueno discovered a common hibernation factor when she accidentally left an Arctic bacterium on ice for too long. I love how this story follows the magic pattern of so much of innovation and discovery - an accident. It's refreshingly human and not a mode of discovery that machine learning is going to completely take away from us.

I've been reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". But it's really about the process of discovery in nuclear physics. And most of the discoveries were made by accident.

But if you don't study the math and physics hard, you will not be able to understand that you may have found something, valuable. It would be like Pearls Before Swine.

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

#54

Post by xyst »

therein wrote: post #30
wayoverthecloud wrote: post #25

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

[flagged]

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

#56

Post by yread »

begueradj wrote: post #22

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... )

That first article from BMJ 1900 reads a bit like Gulliver tales. The second article is about hominids 400k years ago, quite long ago

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

#57

Post by Sharlin »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #49
surfingdino wrote: post #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.

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.

People literally die if they go long enough without sleep, and of course everybody knows the cognitive impairment that even a moderate amount of sleep debt causes.

That said, saving energy is certainly one part of it – and what else could a diurnal species do in the darkness anyway? (And similarly for animals adapted to night or twilight activity).

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

#58

Post by rvnx »

xyst wrote: post #54
therein wrote: 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

[flagged]

No, probably no Bible bots (though there are plenty of bots here, whose end goal is to collect karma to sell upvotes).

However, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

Trends and themes often resurface on Reddit, where discussions can cyclically return to religious topics or quotes.

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

#59

Post by xyst »

To me, seems like this is what we describe today as a “comatose” state. Is the individual “brain dead” or did the person sustain so much damage that it required an “emergency brake”.

The body and mind is healing itself but today’s scientists and doctors cannot fully quantify it. Only using “primitive” tools (EEGs, CT, MRI) which only allow us to see through a tiny keyhole of what is a vast number of possibilities.

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

#60

Post by MikeTheGreat »

xyst wrote: post #54
therein wrote: 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

[flagged]

What is the reddit fallout that happened last year?

(I don't follow or read reddit, unless a search for something specific leads me to a particular page, so I'm clueless about this and curious to know more)

Post reply on HN