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

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

#171

Post by leobg »

confidantlake wrote: post #162
leobg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a very similar thought this morning. With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive. My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her eve…

While I agree with what a lot of what you said, there is a lot of survivorship bias in a single anecedote. My Grandma also has a very similar story, born in 1920s, fled from the Russians, no depression. But there is family from the same time period that committed suicide. Then for every one suicide there were 10 people that lived out of the bottle. So even though no one talked about depression it was there.

Is she still alive? I can recommend interviewing her about the past and recording it. There may come a time where you will be glad to have those recordings. Or your children/grandchildren. Also, given the right prompting, you may learn things about her that you have never seen before.

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

#172

Post by leobg »

pwillia7 wrote: post #152
leobg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a very similar thought this morning. With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive. My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her eve…

Maybe this is just because we culturally overvalue the individual. Maybe technology helps us survive and have 'more' on a macro level but causes problems on a micro level, and maybe we are more geared 'naturally' than we believe to sacrifice our micro for a good human macro. I think about ants that sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony, surely without the same reasoning we would do something similar for[1].…

Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe:

Just like the winegrowers, who, living in a garden not cultivated by them, had to understand and feel that they were in immeasurable debt to the landlord, people must also understand and feel that from the day of their birth until their death, they are always in immeasurable debt to someone: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those yet to come; to that which was, is, and will be the beginning of everything. They must understand that with every hour of their life, as they accept life, they reinforce this obligation that binds them to life and its origin, and that therefore, the person who denies this obligation and lives for themselves, in trying to preserve their personal life, ultimately destroys it.

This is precisely what Christ repeated many times.

The true life is only that which continues the past life and contributes to the salvation of the present and future life.

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

#173

Post by js6i »

Chris2048 wrote: post #146
js6i wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the disconnect is that you seem to consider religious texts as a dry statements of fact. That doesn't make any sense, they're clearly not that. Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales that for some reason keep grabbing our attention and we repeat them for generations? That they're just falsehoods because duh, frogs obviously can't talk? Or can they have some deeper meaning? Sta…

> Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor? > That they're just falsehoods because duh per previous poster: "laws and government don’t tell you how the world works" works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts, as much of the contents of the Bible does - bu…

> Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor?

No, I'm not suggesting that. The alternatives to just reporting facts are more than "merely a metaphor".

> works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts

Disagree - I think they distill patterns from the factual and present them in the form of stories, encoded in the structure of the story. If you're a materialist you might say that the story is less true than the factual manifestations of the patterns, I'd say it's more true; and that it's telling something about the world.

> What's the greater message

We're debating if zero even exists, don't ask me about analysis ;)

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

#174

Post by withinboredom »

mistercheph wrote: post #121
COGlory wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can understand why, it's clearly possible. Just look at the galaxies moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Anything is possible, if you work out the magic.

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

#175

Post by AnimalMuppet »

withinboredom wrote: post #174
mistercheph wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many work hard designing and assembling perpetual motion machines

I can understand why, it's clearly possible. Just look at the galaxies moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Anything is possible, if you work out the magic.

But, see, that's the problem. I can't look at them...

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

#176

Post by throwawaycities »

leobg wrote: post #168
throwawaycities wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a lot to unpack in your anecdote about the baker vis-a-vis happiness vs proliferation of depression in modern life. If I had to summarize my own thoughts about it, it’s ownership, community/relationships, and hardships/challenges that can be overcome through hard work. Modern technology counter intuitively gives us very little agency everything is owned by faceless/soulless corporations, technology “…

I agree. Especially the ownership thing. Tangent: I remember my mother, in the 1980s, getting a parking ticket. So she had to go to the local police officer. We were a tiny town, a village almost. But there was a police station. And the officer was in charge of this case. He talked to my mother. She explained. And he ended up saying that in this case, he’d be willing to make an exception. Fast forward to today. I dri…

The opening scene of American Gangster Denzel Washington’s character is the driver/right hand man for Bumpy Johnson. They go into a store and Bumpy has a heart attack, Denzel calls for help, and Bumpy just says “forget it frank, there’s no one in charge.”

And so it is when PayPal or coinbase accounts get frozen, or social media accounts get suspended without notice or explanation, Gmail accounts get hacked or deleted in freak occurrences. Good luck getting any help, there’s no one in charge, the best you can hope for is social media shamming which only works when you already have influence.

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

#177

Post by geon »

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.

They might start releasing enormous amounts of CO2 and methane.

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

#178

Post by dredmorbius »

seszett wrote: post #63
lukan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Vita…

> 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…

Humans cannot synthesise vitamin D, but we can acquire it through diet from other sources, including particularly fresh fish, which are abundant in Inuit diets.

Note that numerous of the sources listed here are fortified (that is, have additional vitamin D added), however it does occur naturally in some sources as well:

https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietar...>

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

#180

Post by piuantiderp »

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... )

High serotonin, cold exposure, low sunlight. Almost makes you think one could hibernate. But then, to what purpose? Would likely shorten the lifespan, increase risk for cancer
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