Hacker News Reader

Comment by 323 | Hacker News Reader

> Not enough fuel and a car stops. It's completely binary, either you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human there is an incredible range of failure modes for not having enough fuel. Humans can survive an absurdly long time when they are 'empty' of food.

You're highly selective. Let's switch things around a bit:

Not enough oxygen and a human stops. It's completely binary. But remove the oil from a car, and it can survive an absurdly long time.

More seriously, you can in sequence replace all parts of a car and it still functions as the original one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), but you can't do that with a human (even if cells do that in a way). This means you can have a car last 1000 years, but not a biological human.

View on HN

> But remove the oil from a car, and it can survive an absurdly long time.

I wouldn't call less than 30 minutes[1] "an absurdly long amount of time". I've lost a car due to all the oil leaking before. I don't even think it lasted ten minutes after the low oil light popped up (I was in the middle of an expressway), and that engine was toast afterwards. I had it pop up another time for another car and thankfully I was two minutes away from an exit to an oasis and got oil into it pretty quickly.

If you mean an EV car then that's not fair, it's not designed to use oil, that's like saying a human can survive an absurdly long time without eating dirt.

[1]: https://www.matfoundrygroup.com/blog/can-you-run-an-engine-w...

A car can last a long time without the cup holders. And you can use the cup holders as ash trays.

> I don't even think it lasted ten minutes after the low oil light popped up (I was in the middle of an expressway), and that engine was toast afterwards.

Pretty sure they were referring to storing a car for a long time (months or longer) without any oil in it. Not trying to operate the ICE car without oil in it.

> More seriously, you can in sequence replace all parts of a car and it still functions as the original one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), but you can't do that with a human

Actually there’s enough evidence at this point that you can, you just have to do it on the cellular level, not tissue level, and the hardest problem for therapies in living humans is not creating cancer at the same time.

Partial reprogramming (resetting methylation status on the DNA) looks like the most important maintenance to do inside the human cells, but there are other known problems with partly known solutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com