Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an 'emergency brake'

The search space is huge, we sometimes find needles in haystacks by accident, isn’t it exciting that we have tools now that can systematically check every piece of hay?

If ops point was rather that “accident”/“luck” are uniquely human… I don’t agree. Luck is when probability works out in your favour - and that can happen all the time with any sort of probabilistic search, which is rife in ML.

Source: spent years looking hard for hibernation promotion factor in P. aeruginosa ribosomes via cryo-EM. Got a PhD and worked a whole lot of 16 hour days. Never got lucky.

Note that numerous of the sources listed here are fortified (that is, have additional vitamin D added), however it does occur naturally in some sources as well:

<https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietar...>

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12788

Our last common ancestor was ~990k years ago (table 1). That's quite long ago in human development

And then hope nothing critically fails for centuries ...

Unless we have perfectionized robots by the time you go into the cryopod, you might as well bet on humans. And if we "perfectionized robots", that do not fail all the time, we already would have a very different world.

What are you saying - the lives of ordinary people are the holy grail in archaeology and history as they are more difficult to investigate and construct. A king's remains and belongings tell you little about the actual society.

Face reality: when you've been on ice long enough that your friends and immediate family are dead, nobody wants you anymore. You will never be defrosted, and if you're lucky at some point your remains will be given a burial. It's more likely you'll be unceremoniously cremated like medical waste.

Because that's what cancers do and it never end well for the host

After the Notre Dam fire someone on Twitter was claiming a miracle because the golden (statues I think?) had survived. Someone then pointed out that the melting point of gold is several hundred degrees above the temperature of a wood fire.

You do realise that metaphors are never perfect?

Here in the valley of Oregon, we don’t get snow often or for very long, but one late winter/early spring we suddenly got 1-2 feet snow cover for at least 3 days. I’ll never forget the few dozen birds I saw dead on the side of the roads because they couldn’t get to food.

I think it's a misguided sentiment of its time, we know today that birds also bust ass in their own birdy ways to live. We all bust ass.

A while ago I was having a discussion, and someone asserted that synthetic fertilizers are necessary because composting doesn't scale.

And my reaction was, surely composting scales to an entire biosphere - like, empirically we know this, right? There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber. Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom to create supply chains that can run as closed loops and accept inputs that aren't so rich and concentrated?

I don't want to argue this point, there are definitely good counterarguments that could be made, but I'm just trying to illustrate the shift in perspective I think the commenter may have been going for rather than change the topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_6:26

It's to reduce risk by letting other people share in funding a venture.

That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking.

None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten worse with every technological advance, and it'd expect it to get meaningfully worse with LLMs now, too.

A select few will still get meaningfully richer, but - on average - their prospects for their future are a complete dumpster fire.

You (leobg) are likely right that people a few hundred years ago probably wouldn't have become depressed like Gen Z, Alpha and likely soon Beta too... But they'd probably long since taken up their arms, wiping out a good chunk of the population and consequently redistributing wealth to the survivers. Do you honestly think that'd be better for us?

With the current amount of technology we could put a roof over people's head, provide clean water and safe foods and medicines. This has nothing to do with owning a Lamborghini or eating a Michelin star restaurant, which would indeed count as superfluous wealth that doesn't actually improve happiness.

They knew what suffering was, and arguably did more of it. But very few of them thought of it as a primarily medical problem, one requiring intervention by professionals, medicine, and so on. People who think of their problems in this newer way handle them differently, and not always better.

With industrial baking, modern fertilizers, farming automation, global container shipping, and all of that, one would reasonably expect it to have gotten significantly cheaper.

Just like the winegrowers, who, living in a garden not cultivated by them, had to understand and feel that they were in immeasurable debt to the landlord, people must also understand and feel that from the day of their birth until their death, they are always in immeasurable debt to someone: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those yet to come; to that which was, is, and will be the beginning of everything. They must understand that with every hour of their life, as they accept life, they reinforce this obligation that binds them to life and its origin, and that therefore, the person who denies this obligation and lives for themselves, in trying to preserve their personal life, ultimately destroys it.

This is precisely what Christ repeated many times.

The true life is only that which continues the past life and contributes to the salvation of the present and future life.

Tangent:

I remember my mother, in the 1980s, getting a parking ticket. So she had to go to the local police officer. We were a tiny town, a village almost. But there was a police station. And the officer was in charge of this case. He talked to my mother. She explained. And he ended up saying that in this case, he’d be willing to make an exception.

Fast forward to today. I drive to school in the morning. There’s a van at the side of the road. It’s not even police; some kind of contractor. Out on the road, there’s a fancy radar/speed trap thing. They probably paid €100,000 of taxpayer money for it, plus a servicing contract. Were probably promised that it’s gonna pay for itself within two years. And now the two dudes sit inside the van. The machine is doing the work. Tickets are being sent out automatically by a computer system. And there is literally nobody who owns the process.

It is an abstract machinery, turning citizens into objects.

My mother and the policeman, as a result of the encounter, had reached an understanding. They became partners in the higher principle. There was a true connection between the citizens and the state. The state had a face, and there was a local representative who was in charge.

Today, the state has no face. Even the judges in the legal system just act as tiny wheels in the machinery. It’s hard to find anyone whoever owns anything. Much less owns up to anything.

There are only a few other terrestrial animals of comparable biomass with humans, e.g. ants and termites.

Right now we have 4, spaced apart about 3-4 years.