3 ms·

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that pr

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.

duckmastery 3y ago
Well if you think about it. The microscopic scale inverted in the other direction is more like getting to mars and the complexity is the same as creating a self sustaining colony there.
lm28469 3y ago
On this forum people very often take computers as an analogy to the brain/body but it's like comparing a wooden spear and a heat seeker missile. I think we're just blind to how insane nature is compared to our mere half assed copies of organic processes
HL33tibCe7 3y ago
You’re not thinking hard enough
inglor_cz 3y ago
Individual science disciplines advance at a very uneven speed and with different start points in history. We have always (OK, at least since Ancient Egypt) known more about mathematics than about physics. We have always (...) known more about physics than about chemistry. We have always (...) known more about chemistry than about our bodies. The available technology mirrors that.
- grishka 3y ago
  And biology in particular is unique because it requires other fields to progress pretty far for the tools necessary for comprehensive biological research to become possible. As in, a microscope is a prerequisite for the discovery of cells and microorganisms.
kmeisthax 3y ago
So, I'll put this into terms that a sysadmin can understand: imagine if all the Ethernet or fiber going to a datacenter rack was bundled up, and I cut that bundle up. Now you have to splice them back together so that every port is still connected to the same port it was before I cut the cables. Oh, and also, the cables are microscopic, incredibly fragile, and we don't know how to actually repair them. We sort of just hope they can grow back in place.
- avg_dev 3y ago
  Very clear mental image there. Thanks for phrasing it that way.
- p1esk 3y ago
  The fact that they grow back in place makes the whole thing 1000x easier, no?
  - waste_monk 3y ago
    Imagine that the bundle of cables were all completely identical and unlabelled in any way. Even if you could surgically reconnect the nerves perfectly, you don't know which nerves should be connected to what on the other side. As another commenter posted, there are 31 "bundles" of nerves carrying a total of a few hundred thousand individual fibres. The odds of re-connecting a human spine correctly are simply incredibly small.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Only if it grows back correctly! Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your plans).
    - garba_dlm 3y ago
      here's the kicker it's all connected to an organic deep neural network which means that the specific arrangement of the physical wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period in which the neural network literally learns to control the body anyways
finite_depth 3y ago
It might help to remember that a human body has more cells than there are people on Earth by around three orders of magnitude, and that you're engineering things on the scale of nano- or micrometers. A typical human cell is on the order of 10 micrometers. If you need to bridge even 1 cm of that, you're bridging ~a thousand cell-widths. If you think of a cell as the somatic equivalent of a house in a city, that's the equivalent of an infrastructure project spanning (based on a quick count of the number of houses on each block in Oakland) the equivalent of around six miles, or roughly from downtown Oakland to El Cerrito on a map of the Bay (~4 BART stations). And you have to do that on a scale where precision manufacturing is incredibly hard, where you're dealing with extremely difficult problems of chemical synthesis, in a living body, without provoking the body's defense or repair mechanisms to stop you. And that's assuming you even know what you're trying to do, which requires an understanding of the machinery of those cells that we often don't have.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Some neurons can be extremely long though (up to 1m). https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/neuron-nervous-system/a/overview-of-neuron-structure-and-function https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/ne...
havnagiggle 3y ago
Some things turn out to be hard to do.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Yes, and a lot of those things are done. It's just interesting the way we've progressed.
carabiner 3y ago
These seem completely unrelated. One is about travel distance the other is about forming tissue connections. We can easily travel the distance between brain and a foot, it's around 5 ft.
tibbydudeza 3y ago
Ever tried splicing fiber optic cable by hand compared to say telephone wire ???. How does the bus protocol work - it is not like it is 5V/-5V , it is insanely complex ???.
renewiltord 3y ago
Is that interesting? It seems natural. Precision has always been quite hard. Most people can kick a ball 10 m more easily than they can kick a ball 1 m but to center the hit at a 1 mm spot. I can carry a pile of sand 100 m easier than I can move 1 grain of sand precisely 1 cm without disturbing the others around it.
root_axis 3y ago
I don't see what's incongruous about it, those two tasks are completely different, making a comparison with respect to distance isn't meaningful.
xwdv 3y ago
The class of problems that falls under the category of movement of matter is fairly trivial. Repairing severed nerves is more like an entropy-reversal class problem. I don’t think we could even put a sufficiently broken tea cup back together exactly as it was.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throw1234651234 3y ago
People think medicine is way more advanced that it actually is. We can't add back some crystals on a tooth. We can't re-attach a nail to a nail bed. We can't fix cartilage. We can't physically repair arteries (short of donor material) or varicose veins. List goes on and on.
grishka 3y ago
Given enough curiosity, anyone can understand how and why a jet plane works in as much or as little detail as they want. Planes were engineered by humans from first principles and we're good at both documenting our inventions and understanding those first principles. Building something to interface with a biological system, though, is another matter entirely. It could as well be alien technology. It requires reverse engineering a lot of extremely complex stuff that was not designed by our civilization. So incomprehensibly complex that we only fairly recently made enough progress in other fields to be able to build tools to meaningfully poke at it.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > that was not designed by our civilization To the best of our knowledge, it wasn't designed at all. It's more like giving a monkey a typewriter and millions of years, with a very crude feedback function (evolution/natural selection) that makes it very hard to backtrack out of a local maximum. It's quite hard to interface with it because it's not designed to be interfaced with and the whole thing works pretty much by accident, and where changing any variable could throw it off.
  - grishka 3y ago
    > it wasn't designed at all Obviously. There is no functional separation between components (some proteins do multiple unrelated jobs), there's no distinct hierarchy (layers just kinda flow into each other), and there's way too much global state that works seemingly something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mwVv5NjhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mwVv5NjhA
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      That was seriously cool! And so much work!

duckmastery 3y ago

Well if you think about it. The microscopic scale inverted in the other direction is more like getting to mars and the complexity is the same as creating a self sustaining colony there.

lm28469 3y ago

On this forum people very often take computers as an analogy to the brain/body but it's like comparing a wooden spear and a heat seeker missile. I think we're just blind to how insane nature is compared to our mere half assed copies of organic processes

HL33tibCe7 3y ago

You’re not thinking hard enough

inglor_cz 3y ago

Individual science disciplines advance at a very uneven speed and with different start points in history. We have always (OK, at least since Ancient Egypt) known more about mathematics than about physics. We have always (...) known more about physics than about chemistry. We have always (...) known more about chemistry than about our bodies. The available technology mirrors that.

grishka 3y ago
And biology in particular is unique because it requires other fields to progress pretty far for the tools necessary for comprehensive biological research to become possible. As in, a microscope is a prerequisite for the discovery of cells and microorganisms.

kmeisthax 3y ago

So, I'll put this into terms that a sysadmin can understand: imagine if all the Ethernet or fiber going to a datacenter rack was bundled up, and I cut that bundle up. Now you have to splice them back together so that every port is still connected to the same port it was before I cut the cables. Oh, and also, the cables are microscopic, incredibly fragile, and we don't know how to actually repair them. We sort of just hope they can grow back in place.

avg_dev 3y ago
Very clear mental image there. Thanks for phrasing it that way.
p1esk 3y ago
The fact that they grow back in place makes the whole thing 1000x easier, no?
- waste_monk 3y ago
  Imagine that the bundle of cables were all completely identical and unlabelled in any way. Even if you could surgically reconnect the nerves perfectly, you don't know which nerves should be connected to what on the other side. As another commenter posted, there are 31 "bundles" of nerves carrying a total of a few hundred thousand individual fibres. The odds of re-connecting a human spine correctly are simply incredibly small.
- itishappy 3y ago
  Only if it grows back correctly! Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your plans).
  - garba_dlm 3y ago
    here's the kicker it's all connected to an organic deep neural network which means that the specific arrangement of the physical wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period in which the neural network literally learns to control the body anyways

finite_depth 3y ago

It might help to remember that a human body has more cells than there are people on Earth by around three orders of magnitude, and that you're engineering things on the scale of nano- or micrometers. A typical human cell is on the order of 10 micrometers. If you need to bridge even 1 cm of that, you're bridging ~a thousand cell-widths. If you think of a cell as the somatic equivalent of a house in a city, that's the equivalent of an infrastructure project spanning (based on a quick count of the number of houses on each block in Oakland) the equivalent of around six miles, or roughly from downtown Oakland to El Cerrito on a map of the Bay (~4 BART stations). And you have to do that on a scale where precision manufacturing is incredibly hard, where you're dealing with extremely difficult problems of chemical synthesis, in a living body, without provoking the body's defense or repair mechanisms to stop you. And that's assuming you even know what you're trying to do, which requires an understanding of the machinery of those cells that we often don't have.

ethbr1 3y ago
Some neurons can be extremely long though (up to 1m). https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/neuron-nervous-system/a/overview-of-neuron-structure-and-function https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/ne...

havnagiggle 3y ago

Some things turn out to be hard to do.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Yes, and a lot of those things are done. It's just interesting the way we've progressed.

carabiner 3y ago

These seem completely unrelated. One is about travel distance the other is about forming tissue connections. We can easily travel the distance between brain and a foot, it's around 5 ft.

tibbydudeza 3y ago

Ever tried splicing fiber optic cable by hand compared to say telephone wire ???. How does the bus protocol work - it is not like it is 5V/-5V , it is insanely complex ???.

renewiltord 3y ago

Is that interesting? It seems natural. Precision has always been quite hard. Most people can kick a ball 10 m more easily than they can kick a ball 1 m but to center the hit at a 1 mm spot. I can carry a pile of sand 100 m easier than I can move 1 grain of sand precisely 1 cm without disturbing the others around it.

root_axis 3y ago

I don't see what's incongruous about it, those two tasks are completely different, making a comparison with respect to distance isn't meaningful.

xwdv 3y ago

The class of problems that falls under the category of movement of matter is fairly trivial. Repairing severed nerves is more like an entropy-reversal class problem. I don’t think we could even put a sufficiently broken tea cup back together exactly as it was.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throw1234651234 3y ago

People think medicine is way more advanced that it actually is. We can't add back some crystals on a tooth. We can't re-attach a nail to a nail bed. We can't fix cartilage. We can't physically repair arteries (short of donor material) or varicose veins. List goes on and on.

grishka 3y ago

Given enough curiosity, anyone can understand how and why a jet plane works in as much or as little detail as they want. Planes were engineered by humans from first principles and we're good at both documenting our inventions and understanding those first principles. Building something to interface with a biological system, though, is another matter entirely. It could as well be alien technology. It requires reverse engineering a lot of extremely complex stuff that was not designed by our civilization. So incomprehensibly complex that we only fairly recently made enough progress in other fields to be able to build tools to meaningfully poke at it.

Nextgrid 3y ago
> that was not designed by our civilization To the best of our knowledge, it wasn't designed at all. It's more like giving a monkey a typewriter and millions of years, with a very crude feedback function (evolution/natural selection) that makes it very hard to backtrack out of a local maximum. It's quite hard to interface with it because it's not designed to be interfaced with and the whole thing works pretty much by accident, and where changing any variable could throw it off.
- grishka 3y ago
  > it wasn't designed at all Obviously. There is no functional separation between components (some proteins do multiple unrelated jobs), there's no distinct hierarchy (layers just kinda flow into each other), and there's way too much global state that works seemingly something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mwVv5NjhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mwVv5NjhA
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    That was seriously cool! And so much work!