2 ms·

It's a feedback loop. I've always felt that the most important part of engineering was feedback loops. Maybe nature is the greatest engineer ever?

• 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  The most important part of engineering is problem-solving, which feedback loops don't necessarily do. The reason we are here as engineers is: 2.5 billion years ago, the earth made cyanobacteria, which flourished, then flooded the earth with toxic oxygen, killing almost all life on the planet. The initial feedback loop didn't solve a problem, it destroyed a use case. That's not a solution to a problem that an engineer would choose, even if those organisms that came after were pretty happy about it...
  • Jerrrrrrrry 7mo ago
    Systems emerge in times of abundance, and are whittled in times of scarcity. The great oxygenation was a time of near catyclismsic scarcity for most complex organisms, as resources scale to food/energy requirements imply the most complex organisms were the most dependent on the environment, and were most impacted by changes. Inversely, oxygenation was our most crucial abundancy pre cursor, as it provides a large substrate chemically for life to exhibit
  • Pausanias 7mo ago
    This process worked so spectacularly well that it eventually created human consciousness and the very concept of engineering... but I would never design a system that way because it killed version 1.0.
    • NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
      Give hydrogen a few billion years and it starts wondering where it came from, and how it'd make v 2.0 better :)