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

quantamagazine.org

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

#121

Post by mistercheph »

COGlory wrote: post #24
dghlsakjg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People get lucky, then try to rationalize the past with a skill narrative. Then they soak up all the grants. They have to put themselves in the situation to get lucky first. This person got a graduate education, and was competent enough to be selected to be doing research in what is likely a multimillion dollar lab owned by an institution, then she had the knowledge and ability to notice and be able to identify wha…

Everyone in science works hard. Only a few get lucky. People get scooped every day. Source: spent years looking hard for hibernation promotion factor in P. aeruginosa ribosomes via cryo-EM. Got a PhD and worked a whole lot of 16 hour days. Never got lucky.

Many work hard designing and assembling perpetual motion machines

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

#122

Post by Modified3019 »

fire_lake wrote: post #42
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

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

And quickly too, the small ones live on a metabolic knife edge and can go down in as little as two days.

Here in the valley of Oregon, we don’t get snow often or for very long, but one late winter/early spring we suddenly got 1-2 feet snow cover for at least 3 days. I’ll never forget the few dozen birds I saw dead on the side of the roads because they couldn’t get to food.

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

#123

Post by shusaku »

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]

You should consider the commenting guidelines

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

And adhere to that culture before complaining about others

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

#125

Post by ffsm8 »

WJW wrote: post #100
ffsm8 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or phrased differently: she struggled for her survival. It's a very physical one-off challenge that you can master (or not). That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking. None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten wo…

Historically, the people taking up arms certainly did NOT distribute wealth if they won. Rather, the leaders of any successful rebellion just became the new elite and the poor remained the poor but with new leadership.

You're looking at it very 1-dimensionally.

The war leaders certainly didn't literally distribute wealth to the conscripted people. Instead you had plundering, with the winners simply taking things and the dead were ... Well, outta the picture, consequently the survivors had the opportunity to become skilled craftsman and marry after their return, as most didn't survive (even if their side won).

Let's say a farmer family's children were all conscripted. 5 left and 2 returned. Before the war, 4 had few prospects. After the war, both will have prospects, one to succeed the farm and the other one as the husband to another farm that didn't have anyone return.

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

#127

Post by lukan »

shiroiushi wrote: post #95
lukan wrote: 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.

Robots? We're talking about cryopods here, not something that needs a robot where you need to operate accurately in 3D space. It just needs an electronic control system to monitor conditions and control some machinery, similar to a washing machine or microwave oven. We already know how to make redundant computer control systems, like for aircraft. It's not that hard. They don't "fail all the time" either. Sure, your…

And you would trust that thing "similar to a washing machine" to run perfectly well for centuries?

And not that hard? Are you aware of Murphy's law?

Basically, give anything enough time and all the possible things that can go wrong, will go wrong. So your windows powered cyopod breaks after 1 year at most. And your embedded tiny verified OS manages 100 years, hurrey. But dead is dead.

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

#128

Post by yread »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #120
yread wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

400k years ago is not "quite long ago" on an evolutionary time scale.

Sure, when you're looking at bacteria vs humans these guys are like our twins. But these non-homo hominins were not even our ancestors, they are close to Denisovans

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12788

Our last common ancestor was ~990k years ago (table 1). That's quite long ago in human development

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

#129

Post by amenhotep »

hyperthesis wrote: post #81
seszett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only the Inuit for example do not need sun, to produce Vitamin D btw As far as I can tell, they need vitamin D just like any other life form and can only synthesise it from the sun, just like all other lifeforms on Earth. They might have adapted to reduced amounts of available vitamin D though[0], because they don't have much of it available to them in the first place and because there's really no other source than…

Don't they (traditionally) also have a much higher meat intake than average, which supplies vitamin D?

They particularly prized whale and seal blubber - very good vitamin D sources. Also present in the livers of the fish they'd eat raw.

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

#130

Post by lukan »

freilanzer wrote: post #102
brg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this story were at all true, then you know very well that not everyone in science works hard. In my graduate cohort, those who did the sets first year, set themselves into research, and worked hard graduated. Those who did not left with a masters, although many found success in other fields. It was quite clearly delineated.

Are you saying that people with a masters degree don't work hard?

I know some worked very hard, to not work very hard anymore.
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