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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'

#81

Post by hyperthesis »

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…

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

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

#82

Post by dojomouse »

grugagag wrote: post #7
dojomouse wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ML is likely to be material to us making many more such discoveries. So much of the current constraint is not in the knowledge to identify the interesting pattern, but the capacity to look for it at scale.

Yeah but you missed the point op was making

Perhaps. I was thinking along the lines of MarkBurns response - ML will allow us to efficiently look in those places we might otherwise only have searched by accident.

If ops point was rather that “accident”/“luck” are uniquely human… I don’t agree. Luck is when probability works out in your favour - and that can happen all the time with any sort of probabilistic search, which is rife in ML.

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

#83

Post by wruza »

js6i wrote: post #73
flakeoil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's interesting how people come and mock without having any framework of understanding the thing. It's almost like a lost language. Consider air - it is immaterial, the spirit/principle/reason/meaning/pattern of things. It's also the vehicle for speech, and when we stop breathing it we die. I don't think the quote (or the broader text) means a single concrete thing - it's saying something about how the world works,…

A purpose of a religious text is to control people. They do that through well-known ways. It says “blah-blah, but look at this fallacy you aren’t aware of, so believe in god”, at different zoom levels. Every one of these is trivially deconstructible cause their main target was uneducated masses which had no scrutiny. Those who had it were religiously “educated” and accounted for. Religions that didn’t do that didn’t survive. That’s the framework of understanding. This thing wasn’t written by “god”, it’s a work of a few scammers, sadly the biggest in our history.

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

#84

Post by soco »

leobg wrote: post #79
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…

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 it's not about the things we have, but about the hope we have. You run away, you change, you survive things because you have hope in a better future. You even work to make a better future for your kids. You have hope. What hope have those people today?

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

#85

Post by wruza »

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.

The real trick is the world being a better place.

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

#86

Post by ReptileMan »

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…

>it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human.

Humans actually utilize quite a big chunk of the biomass.

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

#87

Post by mock-possum »

bamboozled wrote: post #18
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.

You don't need to freeze yourself, you just have children, that is how life goes on.

My concern is more with my life, not life itself.

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

#88

Post by soco »

js6i wrote: post #73
flakeoil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's interesting how people come and mock without having any framework of understanding the thing. It's almost like a lost language. Consider air - it is immaterial, the spirit/principle/reason/meaning/pattern of things. It's also the vehicle for speech, and when we stop breathing it we die. I don't think the quote (or the broader text) means a single concrete thing - it's saying something about how the world works,…

Maybe they do have a framework, allowing them to mock it? There must be a reason why there are so many holy writings on this remote little planet.

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

#89

Post by graemep »

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.

So do people - at least those lucky enough not to be part of a reasonably affluent industrial society.

You do realise that metaphors are never perfect?

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

#90

Post by maxbond »

anal_reactor wrote: post #62
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…

[flagged]

Good luck with that. Try switching to audio. It'll let you close your eyes and properly recline. That's a lot of the battle right there. Something contentless like the sound of a waterfall is ideal, but if you can't do that for whatever reason, even something contentful like a podcast or audiobook is probably better then your phone screen.
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