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Comment by fairpx | Hacker News Reader

We humans look smart when we manage to create a bad copy of a tiny part of nature. How small we are.

Machines fall flat in many aspects: They don't heal, reproduce or "survive" well without human help in any way. Then again, they do things that are impossible with organic systems, like going to space, travelling at supersonic speeds or lifting hundreds of tonnes in one go. That's why technology has always been an extension of ourselves, but now we're taking the first steps to bring these different lines together. That will of course lead to some awkward in-betweens, which nature has produced as well (see the tully monster for example).

> (see the tully monster for example).

Wow, that looks like something straight out of Spore! [1] Thanks for mentioning this! Weird creatures like these on our own planet only pique the excitement for seeing how truly alien life on other planets must be like.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Tullimon...

Looks like something straight out of H.P. Lovecraft's works. Even the description on the Wikipedia page is pretty Lovecraftian.

This can also be seen as tight constraints leading to convergent evolution. There's nothing shameful in recognizing when something else's invention is relevant to your needs.

This. It's not that nobody thought of evaporative cooing before. It just didn't make sense within the constraints in the prior cases when it was considered. Water methanol (or any other fuel but you pretty much only see it used this way with water methanol) injection in combustion engines makes a large part of its performance impact through evaporative cooling. That's more than half century old technology but it was applied in a different situation. I would have never thought of using a porous alloy to deliver coolant like that but that's also way outside my area of expertise.

This isn't very amazing. It's more of a "congratulations on finding a novel way to solve the problem utilizing the resources available, now produce it at scale". All sorts of cool things can be done in a lab if you've got modern manufacturing techniques at your disposal and a pile of cash. Scaling at a reasonable price point is the hard part.

I know! And isn't that just the greatest?! Look at just how much more we have to learn and do!

To be fair, nature had a 3.5 billion year head start.

And an entire earth and no concept of animal rights.

And we're still beating it in some ways! Sintered aluminium bones with nonuniform porosity to optimize evaporation? Fuckin' metal.

But heavier than bone. And about 50% of all instances are distributed factories.

Regular bones are also structure with non-uniform porosity. But to optimize something like strength-to-weight ratio by reinforcing areas under the most stress. http://classes.mst.edu/civeng120/lessons/composite/materials...

I think that's about as fair as saying "No, those three lines of code is actually millions of lines of code". After all, it's arbitrary wherever you set the cut off (e.g. it's worth noting that human level intelligence wasn't first invented by humans).

We're nature in recursion!

Ah, but unlike nature we get to use intelligent design!

And, we came up with an emulation of a product of billions of years of evolution in this case.

In the case of intelligence, there is plenty of "randomness." And in the case of evolution, there is plenty of..well, something beyond randomness.

Just tacking on a few more things about our "original equipment":

(1) built with "unskilled" labor (2) uses commonly-available materials and energy sources (3) integrated self-defense systems against hostile nanotechnology (4) automatic repair system, automatically reconfigures to adapt to certain load profiles (5) some not-yet-matched strength-vs-weight profiles (6) self-lubricating (7) serviceable "in place"

Either part tends to fail after about 40 years of use though. Evolution is a harsh mistress.

Replacements are very costly and hard.

We're copying useful features while avoiding copying the bad parts. This robot's not going to get cancer or die of old age, and we can replace its limbs with a screwdriver.

> We're copying useful features while avoiding copying the bad parts. This robot's not going to get cancer or die of old age, and we can replace its limbs with a screwdriver.

Well, it won't get cancer, but the memory will suffer bitflips over time and tin whiskers will eventually cause shorts. It will also stop working at some point, like all machinery.

Not really disputing that this is impressive. But mechanical systems just have different longetivity problems than biological ones.

Tin whiskers are largely a solved problem. Conformal coatings or just plain plating prevents them from growing: http://www.ipc.org/feature-article.aspx?aid=Effective-Tin-Wh...

"The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which had not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural."

- j.b.s haldane 1924 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus;_or,_Science_and_the_...

not everything in nature is very smart, like vestibular system in the inner ear, so easy to temper with. Actually human can make far more cool things than that.

Nature has had a lot longer than we have. And its first few years weren't that impressive either.

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