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Comment by lifeformed | Hacker News Reader

Amazing that our state of the art technology is a fragile device that can fly for 30 minutes, while this ancient entity can fly nonstop, deriving energy from bugs and water, fly through storms, self repair any damage, has global navigation and local avoidance, and even can self replicate.

It's humbling to realize how far off our technology is in certain areas from competing even with insects.

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Let's give the technology 60 million years to be perfected and then compare.

P.S. This aircraft flew from Japan to Hawaii in 118 hours solely powered by solar energy https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/solar-impulse-2-br...

(n.b. this isn't to dispute the awesomeness of birds.)

Yes, and then they had to replace the batteries that suffered “irreversible damage” and that took several months to fix. These birds just keep on going.

Unless they hit one of our earlier attempts to survive long enough to be as good as birds. I hope new wind farms are built with awareness of bird migration in mind.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

Self-replication helps a lot. Birds suffer irreversible damage all the time. They just spam the world with more birds to replace the dead ones.

I'm sure the bird started the trip with a full stomach, so that it had the fuel not only to power itself but also to repair itself in flight.

> Let's give the technology 60 million years to be perfected and then compare.

Your point being?

I really don’t get the point of that comment, that was a genuine question.

I mean, it’s pretty clear what the point is. That we are comparing a few decades of work with what is essentially millenias worth of evolutions.

Of course our technology is going to lose, it’s nowhere near as mature as nature’s.

Technology will never replace nature, only augment. People who think wrongly will be the destroyers of nature.

I'd go a step further and say that technology is nature. Humans just represent another way for nature to enhance the permutation of new possibilities. For thousands of years, we acted like the animal analogue to the fungal mattes that had terraformed the continental landmasses to become livable by plants hundreds of millions of years ago.

Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.

Humans have always been a disaster for the environment they move into. We drove mammoths to extinction over 10,000 years ago. Australia used to have large numbers of megafauna species which the aborigines killed off tens of thousands of years ago. Humans would use fire to burn their prey out of hiding (and destroying their habitat in the process), then just move off to the next habitat once everything was burned up.

Humans being a destructive force to the ecosystems we depend on is definitely not a new thing.

That humans had a major role in the extinction of wooly mammoths is likely correct.

However this cannot be said for the megafauna in Australia: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existe...

Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature.

Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies.

There is substantial evidence that the Amazon rainforest for instance was at least in part cultivated: https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-c...

Where are all the horses augmented by technology doing the plowing?

Well we are destroying nature. And don't forget the whole "sustainable agriculture" movement, and recent attentions brought to how plowing degrades soil, etc.

(Just responding to your point; not claiming the parent is right or wrong.)

I think in your scenario we’re augmenting humans, not horses.

Is this a trick question? The horse does not naturally have a plough attached, as far as I am aware.

The plough was meant to augment the nature of the soil, not the horse.

The plough turns out to mine the soil, not augment it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/24/967376880/new-evidence-shows-...

I am so glad to hear this statement from someone else. You put into words a feeling that I have have struggled to express properly.

A lot of folks look at the narrow window of time of their life as evidence for very broad-sweeping claims and frankly, I find that to be very arrogant, short-sighted, and frightening. A lot of people with this kind of mindset are now in high-power positions and making decisions that we have yet to see the repercussions for, with the short-term results they can show as evidence of their success and no concern for the long-terms effects.

My favourite is when they suggest replacing bees with miniature quadcopters for pollenation.

I once read this bit and your comment reminds me of it: "As life, cockroaches absolutely suck, but as technology they excel".

Though to be fair to technology, it's amazing how it can track a bird 8000 miles on just solar power, giving us a view of the world no other bird will ever really have at the moment.

Building small robots is a pain. The commercially available actuators are huge and not very powerful if they don't come with a gearbox.

That's not the reason they're a pain. They are a pain because friction doesn't scale down nicely.

Biology is basically alien technology that we've been studying but can't figure out how it works.

Nature is the most advanced technology there is. This is why it's such a shame that climate change leads to destroyed habitats and lost species. We'll never know what ingenious solutions nature cooked up in some obscure extinct species.

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