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

https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-life-on-earth-is-dormant-after-pulling-an-emergency-brake-20240605/

by mgl • 2 years ago

300 229 2 years ago

Karla Helena-Bueno discovered a common hibernation factor when she accidentally left an Arctic bacterium on ice for too long.

I love how this story follows the magic pattern of so much of innovation and discovery - an accident. It's refreshingly human and not a mode of discovery that machine learning is going to completely take away from us.

dojomouse2• 2 years ago

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.

grugagag• 2 years ago

Yeah but you missed the point op was making

WalterBright• 2 years ago

I've been reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". But it's really about the process of discovery in nuclear physics. And most of the discoveries were made by accident.

kylehotchkiss3• 2 years ago

Stephen B Johnson's "How we got to now" was enlightening on the topic of discovery for me (https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/how-we-got-now)

galaxyLogic2• 2 years ago

But if you don't study the math and physics hard, you will not be able to understand that you may have found something, valuable. It would be like Pearls Before Swine.

COGlory4• 2 years ago

I'm all for it. People get lucky, then try to rationalize the past with a skill narrative. Then they soak up all the grants.

dghlsakjg• 2 years ago

People get lucky, then try to rationalize the past with a skill narrative. Then they soak up all the grants.

They have to put themselves in the situation to get lucky first. This person got a graduate education, and was competent enough to be selected to be doing research in what is likely a multimillion dollar lab owned by an institution, then she had the knowledge and ability to notice and be able to identify what had "accidentally" happened with a micro-organism that we barely understand.

Luck was the smallest part of this discovery. I would say that the grant money is well spent funding someone so "lucky".

bregma• 2 years ago

Ah, but serendipity favours the prepared mind.

John23832• 2 years ago

People get lucky, then try to rationalize the past with a skill narrative.

This is literally the opposite of the situation put forth in the article. Accidental discoveries are accidental discoveries.

Then they soak up all the grants.

What use does a machine learning model have for a grant? This seems like something that is uniquely useful to humans.

czl2• 2 years ago

People get lucky, then try to rationalize the past with a skill narrative.

Aka "fundamental attribution error" - overemphasizing internal or personal factors (such as skill or ability) while underemphasizing external or situational factors (such as luck or opportunity) when explaining someone's success or behavior. Fun fact: This bias has a tendency to leave stock traders bankrupt.

Karellen• 2 years ago

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

-- commonly attributed to Isaac Asimov

neutronicus• 2 years ago

As a one-time scientist, I think Asimov may have been tricked by extreme selection bias on "That's funny..." utterances. It almost always precedes a crushing realization that you have fucked something up and probably wasted a lot of time.

You're probably days down exploring that explanation before the eventual "holy shit" (that I never really had the benefit of experiencing).

astrange5• 2 years ago

Mid-1900s science fiction writers really seemed to like just randomly saying stuff and having people believe them. This isn't as bad as "Pournelle's Iron Law", but it's just as fact free, and I don't think it's good to believe fiction writers.

Since then, we've moved on and now instead believe cynical standup comedians or late night TV hosts are the ones who know the truth about everything.

atombender• 2 years ago

To date, nobody has found the quote among Asimov's publishing writings [1]. Similar (but not as succinct) wordings have been identified in earlier sources, but nobody has been able to identify the exact origin of the quote.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/?amp=1

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

not necessarily, machine learning can make more accidents faster

ASalazarMX2• 2 years ago

Maybe AI won't forget bacteria in the ice, but like us, it is really good at finding patterns, but at a massive scale. Instead of an accident it could find the hibernation mechanism from another angle.

And if AGI becomes a thing, it might go "Hey, this is funny" in weird ways after it has ingested enough data.

I love the novel Colossus because almost 60 years ago it portayed realistically how a nascent AGI could behave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)

nico• 2 years ago

Very similar pattern to the recent stories about grokking (someone leaving a model training for too long by accident, then discovering something unexpected when realizing the accident)

m463• 2 years ago

I've been using the humble refrigerator/freezer for accidental bacterial science experiments all my life.

(I vividly remember as a kid leaving a slice of bread in the refrigerator as a for-credit experiment until it grew interesting green mold to study)

dools• 2 years ago

Dehydrate!

martin82• 2 years ago

Came here to look for this comment :)))

wdh505• 2 years ago

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.

darth_avocado3• 2 years ago

It won't be very useful if you're already old, more practical approach would be to freeze yourself in your youth until they find a way to stop ageing.

Nicholas_C• 2 years ago

You could unfreeze yourself when they figure out how to reverse aging.

gryfft• 2 years ago

I mean, it's been going on for over fifty years[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...

onionisafruit• 2 years ago

The real trick is being somebody that a future generation will go to the trouble of defrosting.

shiroiushi5• 2 years ago

That's a fool's errand. The trick is to make sure your body is continually controlled by some kind of computer that will wake you up when a set of conditions is met, so you don't need to rely on future humans. You also need to make sure your cryopod is stored someplace where troublemakers won't find it and turn it off.

The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a small nuclear reactor or maybe a large RTG.

Jach3• 2 years ago

If we found a crypt of a hundred well-preserved mummies from a few thousand years ago who for all we could tell were basically peasants in their lifetimes, not grand or interesting people, and we had the ability to revive them into the modern world, I still think we would. The "interest" factor of future generations reviving cryonics customers when it's possible to do so is like the weakest factor in trying to predict whether cryonics will work at all.

wruza5• 2 years ago

The real trick is the world being a better place.

bamboozled3• 2 years ago

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

phito• 2 years ago

That's completely different?

TeMPOraL• 2 years ago

Part of life, yes. Just not the part we care about.

shiroiushi5• 2 years ago

Just ask any parent who had worthless kids how well that works out in practice. Sure, you might get lucky and have good kids, but lots of parents don't, and it's not always their fault.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

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

vajrabum• 2 years ago

It's still sci-fi I think but we're getting a bit closer. This came out the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40400591

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

What does science say? I strongly believe what freezes the body will (not just figuratively) pull the plug on the brain.

lukan9• 2 years ago

If too many not so old people would use it, the effects might be not great:

https://xkcd.com/989/

antifa• 2 years ago

I have a feeling most people rushing to be first in line to freeze themselves for non-terminal-illness-reasons are probably not high productivity individuals.

bmitc• 2 years ago

I'd short it.

jimberlage• 2 years ago

What if they wake up and the world is a worse place?

You're making a big bet that people in the far future will look at your preserved body as a resource to cherish, not one to be exploited.

science4sail2• 2 years ago

I recall reading a Jack Vance novel where cannibals used cryogenic sleepers as a convenient supply of preserved food.

begueradj• 2 years ago

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...)

lukan9• 2 years ago

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 Vitamin D anyway (only the Inuit for example do not need sun, to produce Vitamin D btw. )

And that they lacked nutrition in winter can also just mean, that there simply was not much food in the winters, which is kind of expected, before humans developed storage and preservation technologies?

seszett2• 2 years ago

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 producing your own from the sun, or eating things that have produced it from the sun. So they have a vitamin D deficiency, but it's less severe than for most people.

[0]https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/etudinuit/2016-v40-n2-etu...

yread2• 2 years ago

That first article from BMJ 1900 reads a bit like Gulliver tales. The second article is about hominids 400k years ago, quite long ago

rrr_oh_man• 2 years ago

400k years ago is not "quite long ago" on an evolutionary time scale.

piuantiderp• 2 years ago

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

l2p• 2 years ago

Space exploration seems like the obvious candidate to me.

wayoverthecloud• 2 years ago

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 even when there's a simple solution. I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee in the first place.

Sometimes we should just trust nature to do it's work. This article was a refreshing read.

therein• 2 years ago

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

exe342• 2 years ago

the heavenly step-dad doesn't care when they die of starvation either.

fire_lake• 2 years ago

A systematic study of birds would find that many do indeed starve to death.

flakeoil• 2 years ago

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.

figassis• 2 years ago

We invented technology and methods to make things that are meant to be difficult, easy (like food, transportation, mating, surviving). So now we have to invent more technology and methods to find an equilibrium for the system that we broke and barely understand, so we continue to break it and abstract away the instability, understanding it less and less. I mean, what is the purpose of the stock market? housing/mortgage market? An upvote? The cookie banner and ad tracking industry?

NilMostChill3• 2 years ago

- Maintaining and increasing high level wealth, also Control

- Control, also profit

- Control, albeit in a less direct form than housing also data and profit

- The pretense of caring about privacy issues, so politics and control

- Profit/control

If you ask, "why?" for almost anything in today's society it'll come down to money/power, which are functionally mostly the same thing.

Exceptions exist sure, but they are called exceptions for a reason.

My perspective at least, i'm sure others think differently.

astrange5• 2 years ago

The point of the housing market is so you can buy a house without anyone except the seller having to like you enough to interact with you. The alternative is a popularity contest, which doesn't work out for unpopular people or minorities, and doesn't encourage production of new houses.

leobg8• 2 years ago

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 even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.

When you bought a roll of bread 40 years ago, you would be entering a shop owned by the baker. You would be getting a roll that was made by hand with local ingredients. And the woman at the counter would be friendly and relaxed, and she would be earning enough doing this simple job to have a normal family. Today, when I want to buy a roll, I enter a shop that heats up rolls that they get from an industrial scale bakery. It costs about 5 to 10 times as much. And the woman standing at the counter is of the lowest socioeconomic status, because the salary she gets for her work is barely enough to afford her some tiny apartment.

I would be able to except that many things just don’t change, and every generation has its problems. But if we believe the mantra that progress in technology makes us happier and wealthier than those that came before, I think we’re kidding ourselves. That, to me, seems more and more like a modern form of organized religion. And I’m not sure who the priests are.

soco2• 2 years ago

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?

WJW2• 2 years ago

With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest <...> generation alive.

Only if you think that wealth is what makes people happy, but we just need to take a look at all the unhappy wealthy people all around us to see that that is not the case. Poverty can make people unhappy of course, especially the stress that comes from uncertainty. But prosperity alone is not sufficient for happiness. Generations of social researchers and philosophers have thrown themselves at this problem.

fardinahsan• 2 years ago

This is overly simplistic thinking. Of Course increases in technology isn't the only factor determining aggregate societal well being or happiness or whatever. But it would be naive and disingenuous to suggest anything other than it being monotonic at the very least.

This also asks for a search for better social technology, as opposed to asserting that we must slow down the search for better physical technology because the social technology isn't keeping up.

kasey_junk• 2 years ago

At least as measured by suicide rates in the US your grandmothers likely generation new quite well what depression was even if the word didn’t matter. Between the 1920s and the end of WW2 the suicide rate per 100000 was lowest at 15 but reached almost 22.

The pandemic rate which caused (rightly) lots of angst and introspection was 14.3.

We should investigate what is causing increased levels of depression currently but we shouldn’t assume it was absent in other generations when we do it.

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...

iamEAP• 2 years ago

But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.

Reminds me of Act 2 from this “This American Life” episode. Sub “Toska” for “depression” and maybe you’ll see things in a different light.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/822/transcript

Chris20482• 2 years ago

It costs about 5 to 10 times as much.

Is that true, the mass produced bread is more expensive?

pwillia72• 2 years ago

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].

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/exploding-ants-sacri...

karmakurtisaani• 2 years ago

I think there are 2 aspects to the anecdote about your grandma.

Firstly, no one spoke about depression, because it as a condition was not recognized. It doesn't mean people didn't feel depressed.

Secondly, this time supporting your argument, perhaps when people go through terrible things in their childhood, they grow resilient towards adversity. If you know things can get a lot worse, you don't really worry about minor things.

j0hnyl• 2 years ago

"With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive."

I actually think we are.

throwawaycities2• 2 years ago

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 “connects us” in unparalleled ways but also isolates us, and while life has and likely will always be hard for the majority there is a feeling of invisible prisons enabled through technology that no amount of hard work can overcome.

confidantlake2• 2 years ago

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.

ReptileMan• 2 years ago

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.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

It depends how you count it, whether you include plants etc. Humans are only 0.01% of all biomass, but humans and livestock completely dominate the "mammals" category.

Funnily enough, the livestock population weighs about twice as much as the human population.

ambientenv• 2 years ago

There's some further thought-provoking discussion in a recent conversation with Daniel Scmachtenberger [1] talking about what you suggest.

[1] Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment - https://youtu.be/tmusbHBKW84

nunez2• 2 years ago

I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee in the first place.

This has come into hyper clarity for me ever since transitioning to minimalist shoes/sandals ten years ago and foregoing all caffeinated beverages this past December.

It's actually quite insane to think about how accessible coffee is and how much of our modern economy relies on people consuming it.

Consulting, big law, investment banks and lots of blue collar jobs (for example) rely on workers pulling 12+ hour days to do what mostly amounts to eye-watering amounts of paperwork. Given that sleep naturally becomes an afterthought when working under these conditions and showing any signs of weakness is frowned upon, coffee, sodas and energy drinks are all but required to function.

Similar deal with shoes. Feet are incredibly complex systems that are designed to withstand lots of abuse. Unfortunately, big shoe companies built their fortunes off of selling shoes that are great for sports but terrible for everyday use. Instead of pushing more minimal shoes that counteract weakening feet while being simpler to make, they push orthotics and shoes with more advanced technology and thicker sole stack.

It's depressing to think about, so I try not to!

lumb63• 2 years ago

+1 for minimalist footwear. I keep telling anyone who will listen, “isn’t it crazy that we don’t have foot shaped shoes?” And then we wonder why we have bunions, knee pain, and tight hips when we sit sedentary at a desk all day in our not-foot-shaped shoes.

I highly recommend reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. It was written in the ‘60s about how technology influences the direction of humanity and all the unintended consequences that come from that, and how we turn to more technology to solve those problems. It was a very prescient book.

digging2• 2 years ago

Caffeine isn't an invention of modern industrial society, we've been boiling every caffeinated plant we could find for thousands of years. I would still drink it if I didn't have to work for a corporate employer. In fact I enjoy it much more on my days off when I get to make art. I don't mean to get too defensive of it, but I find it quite strange when people lump caffeinated drinks in with completely artificial aspects of life.

sgt_bilko• 2 years ago

Makes me wonder if organisms on Mars (if they ever existed) used such a mechanism

surfingdino• 2 years ago

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.

galaxyLogic2• 2 years ago

It's an interesting idea, why do humans and other species sleep? Maybe it is simply because they can. If there's no good reason to be awake, then sleep. Save your energy for a better time to be awake. That doesn't answer why we have dreams however.

Sharlin• 2 years ago

People literally die if they go long enough without sleep, and of course everybody knows the cognitive impairment that even a moderate amount of sleep debt causes.

That said, saving energy is certainly one part of it – and what else could a diurnal species do in the darkness anyway? (And similarly for animals adapted to night or twilight activity).

Moldoteck• 2 years ago

imo microbes/viruses carefully evolved after countless encounters of antibiotics and other stuff that we have now may have the same or greater danger level

geon• 2 years ago

They might start releasing enormous amounts of CO2 and methane.

ssijak• 2 years ago

Cant wait to see what types of bacteria and viruses are dormant in permafrost that is thawing /s

xyst• 2 years ago

To me, seems like this is what we describe today as a “comatose” state. Is the individual “brain dead” or did the person sustain so much damage that it required an “emergency brake”.

The body and mind is healing itself but today’s scientists and doctors cannot fully quantify it. Only using “primitive” tools (EEGs, CT, MRI) which only allow us to see through a tiny keyhole of what is a vast number of possibilities.

krisoft3• 2 years ago

To me, seems like this is what we describe today as a “comatose” state. Is the individual “brain dead” or did the person sustain so much damage that it required an “emergency brake”.

I’m not sure what you are talking about, but “comatose” and “brain dead” are two very different states. If you are brain dead you are not comatose.

trenchgun• 2 years ago

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die

rolandog• 2 years ago

Wow. This is nature's mechanism for lazy evaluation.

thimkerbell• 2 years ago

"Biologists discovered a widespread protein that abruptly shuts down a cell’s activity — and turns it back on just as fast."

Maybe we need this for dogs, so their lifespan isn't substantially squandered when their owners are at work.

Ductapemaster• 2 years ago

You should check out a company called Loyal — they’re making lifespan increasing drugs for dogs of all sizes!

niemandhier• 2 years ago

This feels quite distopian.

hnbad• 2 years ago

Turning your pets on and off to accomodate your lifestyle? Yeah, that doesn't sound great. I'm sure there'd be a huge market for it though.

tracker13• 2 years ago

Is the value of a dog's life subjectively tied to the enjoyment of the owner? May as well shut down when the owner is asleep too... or, get a robot dog instead.

tzs2• 2 years ago

I think you and most of the other commentators are not reading the suggestion the way it was intended.

Dogs are usually very social. If they are left alone they will often be very unhappy. I think what was being suggested was that if a dog that was going to be left alone for half the day each work day could be "turned off" during that time so it would not experience those hours of loneliness it would make the dog's life happier.

_wire_• 2 years ago

#In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake. Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight. There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these. But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can't help waking up. He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.

Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns. Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.

These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.

Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.

The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him!

. . .

At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.

As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

https://hell.pl/agnus/anglistyka/2211/Neal%20Stephenson%20-%...

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

Nobody seems to be mentioning the therapeutic possibilities. I'd love to be able to make a bacterial infection dormant. Or a tumor.

tracker13• 2 years ago

Tumors might be difficult, since afaik, cancer cells aren't working correctly by definition.

frenchyatwork• 2 years ago

Also, the classic issue with tumors, is that they're your own body, and it's hard to selectively target them. Any treatment that hibernates tumor cells is likely hibernate normal cells, and be incompatible with life; unless you get really lucky.

mvc2• 2 years ago

Sshhh. Noone tell the proles that it's perfectly natural to have a bit of slack where many individuals in complex systems are doing nothing and, far from being a leech on society, it is actually essential to keeping the overall system alive.

Phiwise_2• 2 years ago

Are the proles in your metaphor also capable of indefinitely suspending half of all their starvation-level resource consumption? Are they doing it as stochastic insurance against a population-level extinction event, which they are capable of recovering from? This is a mind-numbingly poor extension of this article's actual contents.

mvc2• 2 years ago

Probably not. Which is why the rest of the population should fund their (very modest) consumption until they're ready to be productive again rather than force them into some risky low paid job like delivering pizzas on a push bike so they can generate profits for investors who use those profits to heat their swimming pools and cool down their massive houses. Or lately plough into AI planet heating credits.

The population-level extinction event is coming if we don't change course.

jrvieira• 2 years ago

i feel seen

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

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