A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?
118 points - last Tuesday at 9:55 AM
Sourcedjokkataja
today at 8:57 AM
This reminds me of a gem of a comment from about a month back, about a dead simple Russian guidance system from a Cold War-era missile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389285
Actually, someone even commented in that thread about how it was similar to biological mechanisms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390619
For explorations of simple mechanisms like this leading to complex behaviour, Valentino Braitenberg’s book Vehicles is a classic.
bryancoxwell
today at 12:03 PM
Would it do well on a Kindle or does it rely on illustrations?
Definitely relies on illustrations.
The author passed away 15 years ago so I will mention the PDF of the book shows up in the first few search results on Google.
bryancoxwell
today at 12:35 PM
Thanks!
What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction
But at the same time the motor is extremely finicky/fragile in the source of energy (negentropy) it will accept, while natural life is extremely hardy and adaptable.
I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.
For more complicated organisms, robustness comes in the form of cellular turnover, and regenerative healing in response to injury, at least in youth. I wonder though if single celled organisms have or even need such a function.
That is a fair point to be honest! I guess when you a 20min lifetime you can probably compromise on reliability in favour of extra efficiency
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
today at 8:04 AM
The need to reproduce and repair our bodies is a big trade-off.
Electric motors are sort of like hermit crab shells - Hard and long-lasting, but they only exist because they piggyback off of a living species.
pazimzadeh
today at 6:21 AM
at the scale that it operates, the flagella is more a drill than a propeller
there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c
bacteriumiu
today at 8:19 AM
Article stopped exactly where stuff got interesting.
This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.
cineticdaffodil
today at 10:58 AM
To not use the motor is to prolong its life? So do not heat your body with the motor?
Also can work as atp generator by applying rotation ?
zimpenfish
today at 6:31 AM
For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.
> For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.
Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things, must be multiplied by (order of magnitude) the number of bacteriums on the planet.
> Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things
The caveat is that more zeros do nothing for our comprehension of the scale. That's the problem because most people can't comprehend how evolution is even possible. We just don't have a mental model for a trillion, it's all the same to us after a certain threshold.
zimpenfish
today at 7:58 AM
Good point, forgot about that. Add another 10-20 zeros?