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
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
ssivark 2 hours ago [-]
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.
anjel 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
Almured 2 hours ago [-]
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
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.
bacteriumiu 1 hours ago [-]
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.
For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
f6v 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
Good point, forgot about that. Add another 10-20 zeros?
Rendered at 09:44:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Actually, someone even commented in that thread about how it was similar to biological mechanisms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390619
I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.
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.
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.
there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c
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.
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.