5 ms·

Hot take, no explanations: - Planets are sentient - Alien Robots outlive Aliens - Photon life makes more sense - Carbon based life is fragile

keithwhor 4y ago
As a hot take I’m not incentivized to respond seriously, but I will say that Carbon-based life as we know it on Earth is seriously antifragile. We’ve found life in the most inhospitable places we can imagine and the kicker is it’s all self-replicating and self-healing. Yes, we’re meat sacks that pop when poked — that’s a very conserved trait of life on Earth — but for the most part, especially with a holistic view like at a species level, we’re ridiculously hardy.
- rendall 4y ago
  > the most inhospitable places we can imagine That "we can imagine" is doing a lot of the work, there. We humans are pretty limited in experience, operating parameters and yes, imagination. On but one dimension, consider the range of all possible temperatures and how narrow the band in which the lifeforms of which we have knowledge can survive. Consider the same along all other dimensions like radiation, gravity, pressure, particulate density, magnetic field intensity, perhaps others we have not even discovered yet. Carbon life that we know about is "robust" only considering the relatively narrow ranges on our own planet.
  - keithwhor 4y ago
    The range of all possible temperatures is theoretically infinite. Life as we know it — without protection — can survive at everything from 0K to 386K (113C). As humans we have harnessed temperatures in the 100s of millions of degrees (fusion) safely and can build machines that reliably extend our operating parameters far beyond their normal bounds. It’s easy to be dismissive, but the reality is that life as we know it is pretty freaking incredible.
- enkid 4y ago
  I don't know, a center of a star seems pretty inhospitable, and we haven't found life there yet.
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    Are we getting a lot of telemetry from our “center of sun” probe?
    - oblak 4y ago
      enkid's people have had a remote outpost near the center for some time now. They have not reported finding any life so far there but can we really trust them after the Saturn 3 disaster?
- buran77 4y ago
  > We’ve found life in the most inhospitable places we can imagine ...on Earth. Take away something as simple as the magnetic field of the planet and suddenly resilient life narrows down to a couple of bacteria, Archaea, or Tardigrades [0] which still die with enough exposure. Anything above 120 degrees C will also cook our goose and every other form of life, again short of a few Archaea [1] which still die a few degrees later. And then there's the most basic of all: water without which some life doesn't die but doesn't exactly "live" either. A handful of spores, spore-like forms, or completely dried forms of bacteria for example can go for eons without water but they're not functioning. And the higher level and complex the organism (thus possibly easier to recognize as life), the higher the chances one of the "subsystems" is more fragile and its failure kills the organism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance#Radioresistance_comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance#Radioresistanc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    I don't think life can be evaluated as a snapshot in a moment of time. Life is a process, and it affects a population. I think even the most conservative definitions may agree on that. Antifragility plays well with this definition: it doesn't describe the state, but the potential and the ability to change. Taking into account the huge populations, and the fact that only a couple individuals must survive hardship in order for life to prevail, I can see the antifragility.
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  5 mass extinctions. Arguably heading for another one (us and everything else).
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    What do you think is occurring that is likely to end our species?
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      For those who down-voted, this was a genuine question, and I'd really like to know.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    5 mass extinctions and it's still going. Seems quite hardy.
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DesiLurker 4y ago
I actually agree with 'QM/EM based life'. My current thinking goes as following.. - Intelligent life develops superfast AI - - then develops even more advanced quantum version of it. - Life slowly starts augmenting its meatspace with advanced replicable machinery - Eventually everything starts becoming very predictable so it start absorbing the advanced AI in our minds, which slowly becomes our essence (assuming consciousness is 'computable' ie.. not some penrose-esq orchestrated reduction) - It then builds a hypercomputer operating at very close to max efficiency and start harvesting all matter/stars to sustain it & migrates to it. there is another path where just like light currently exists as an EM wave packet we discover other stable forms and migrate to that. of course this does not means the pervious iterations of life do not continue to exist, just that they become increasingly irrelevant.
deleted 4y ago
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keithwhor 4y ago

As a hot take I’m not incentivized to respond seriously, but I will say that Carbon-based life as we know it on Earth is seriously antifragile. We’ve found life in the most inhospitable places we can imagine and the kicker is it’s all self-replicating and self-healing. Yes, we’re meat sacks that pop when poked — that’s a very conserved trait of life on Earth — but for the most part, especially with a holistic view like at a species level, we’re ridiculously hardy.

rendall 4y ago
> the most inhospitable places we can imagine That "we can imagine" is doing a lot of the work, there. We humans are pretty limited in experience, operating parameters and yes, imagination. On but one dimension, consider the range of all possible temperatures and how narrow the band in which the lifeforms of which we have knowledge can survive. Consider the same along all other dimensions like radiation, gravity, pressure, particulate density, magnetic field intensity, perhaps others we have not even discovered yet. Carbon life that we know about is "robust" only considering the relatively narrow ranges on our own planet.
- keithwhor 4y ago
  The range of all possible temperatures is theoretically infinite. Life as we know it — without protection — can survive at everything from 0K to 386K (113C). As humans we have harnessed temperatures in the 100s of millions of degrees (fusion) safely and can build machines that reliably extend our operating parameters far beyond their normal bounds. It’s easy to be dismissive, but the reality is that life as we know it is pretty freaking incredible.
enkid 4y ago
I don't know, a center of a star seems pretty inhospitable, and we haven't found life there yet.
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Are we getting a lot of telemetry from our “center of sun” probe?
  - oblak 4y ago
    enkid's people have had a remote outpost near the center for some time now. They have not reported finding any life so far there but can we really trust them after the Saturn 3 disaster?
buran77 4y ago
> We’ve found life in the most inhospitable places we can imagine ...on Earth. Take away something as simple as the magnetic field of the planet and suddenly resilient life narrows down to a couple of bacteria, Archaea, or Tardigrades [0] which still die with enough exposure. Anything above 120 degrees C will also cook our goose and every other form of life, again short of a few Archaea [1] which still die a few degrees later. And then there's the most basic of all: water without which some life doesn't die but doesn't exactly "live" either. A handful of spores, spore-like forms, or completely dried forms of bacteria for example can go for eons without water but they're not functioning. And the higher level and complex the organism (thus possibly easier to recognize as life), the higher the chances one of the "subsystems" is more fragile and its failure kills the organism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance#Radioresistance_comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance#Radioresistanc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  I don't think life can be evaluated as a snapshot in a moment of time. Life is a process, and it affects a population. I think even the most conservative definitions may agree on that. Antifragility plays well with this definition: it doesn't describe the state, but the potential and the ability to change. Taking into account the huge populations, and the fact that only a couple individuals must survive hardship in order for life to prevail, I can see the antifragility.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
5 mass extinctions. Arguably heading for another one (us and everything else).
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  What do you think is occurring that is likely to end our species?
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    For those who down-voted, this was a genuine question, and I'd really like to know.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  5 mass extinctions and it's still going. Seems quite hardy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

DesiLurker 4y ago

I actually agree with 'QM/EM based life'. My current thinking goes as following.. - Intelligent life develops superfast AI - - then develops even more advanced quantum version of it. - Life slowly starts augmenting its meatspace with advanced replicable machinery - Eventually everything starts becoming very predictable so it start absorbing the advanced AI in our minds, which slowly becomes our essence (assuming consciousness is 'computable' ie.. not some penrose-esq orchestrated reduction) - It then builds a hypercomputer operating at very close to max efficiency and start harvesting all matter/stars to sustain it & migrates to it. there is another path where just like light currently exists as an EM wave packet we discover other stable forms and migrate to that. of course this does not means the pervious iterations of life do not continue to exist, just that they become increasingly irrelevant.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]