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Comment by joeberon | Hacker News Reader

> But we do have computation readily available, my 3060 is just sitting there while I sleep

You have vastly overestimated the power of your 3060 if you think it can simulate all the Earth's atoms at the beginning of life here.

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I would instead call this "vastly underestimating the complexity of physics". Again, protein folding is a tiny tiny subset of physics and is famously extremely computationally difficult.

Back in my day they put men on the moon on some tubes /s. Yeah I get it, just a what if though, but good to know not easy.

At some point I will get the time though and dive into it, learn new things. One time I didn't have a job for several months that was great.

No tubes used but been watching the CuriousMarc series about Apollo missions recently really cool, particularly the TWT stuff and core memory.

not only “not easy”, I highly doubt it is even theoretically possible in this universe. Probably it can be proved that a computer that simulates the universe must have at least as many qubits as atoms in the universe to be able to describe the state of the universe or something. Obviously not possible since qubits are physical entities

Don't mean to drag this on, not arguing with you guys but, can you not do a small part, like a puddle. Not the entire universe. I realize that's still a lot but you know, maybe you could do small sets/chunk it but yeah it's all bs on my part.

It is probably outside the human civilisation's current abilities to simulate the molecular physics of a human cell. Looking through the references of https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-43229-4_... turns up in particular https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1094342018819741 from the year 2019, which mentions simulating "20 trillion atoms" on a certain supercomputer; this is perhaps enough atoms to make a very small cell, but I presume those simulated atoms are somehow very nicely behaved (and are simulated over a very short simulated timeframe) relative to the actual biology that happens in humans.

That's good info, thanks for the links worth reading. Well if you can anyway not sure if you have to pay.

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