Our muscles will atrophy as we climb the Kardashev Scale
solmaz.io
solmaz.io
When I was in the US military, we all complained about the Body Mass Index standards. They were based on the WWII era "normal". Men were smaller. Less muscle mass. Shorter. If the average fit American young man tried to fit into a pilot's cockpit from the 1950's, it would feel quite cramped. Like it was built for much small people. It was.
We have certainly climbed the Kardashev scale since the 1950's. To what degree is a matter of contention. But, all would agree that we have moved up the scale.
Muscle atrophy has not been correlated with the growth. The opposite seems true. The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.
In addition, it is likely that the romantic picture of the average laborer "bodybuilding" is fictive and ignores how muscle atrophy and hypertrophy works. Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. They are staying well within cardiovascular zones of muscle activation. Hence, bodybuilders as we know them are largely a modern phenomenon. And they are certainly WAY more muscular.
Seems the model that underlies this claim is built on seemingly demonstrably false premises.
I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but I'd be genuinely interested in reading the source on this, unless you just mean because people are bigger overall they have more muscle as a function of weight.
Dated but still relevant: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adult...
This is particular relevant in the military because your fitness level is graded relative to you BMI. Hence, it is common trope one hears in the military. It is a practical question in the military. If the BMI is based on 1950's pilots and today's soldiers have a higher average BMI, then it can have an impact on promotions, fitness scores, health assessments, etc.
Just one link out of many (this is well known): https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
* obesity (the topic) (11%)
* drug use (marajuana in a country where it's legal in 24 of 50 states) (8%)
* mental / physical health (7%)
how much of that was just previously hidden or lied about? also it doesn't show any previous stats. So can't really draw any conclusions. also doesn't cover where the deltas were from.
Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law. 47 states, the District of Colombia, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands have restructured their own marijuana laws to except from them use of marijuana, generally or in specific forms, for medical use. 24 of those states, D.C., Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands have (also, except in the last case) done the same for adult (over 21) recreational marijuana use [0], as well. The federal government has an official (in the form of a restriction in appropriations laws since 2015) policy of non-enforcement for now (without waiving the possibility of future enforcement within the statute of limitations should that funding restriction lapse) of certain federal criminal prohibitions against state-authorized medical use. (However, for example, all financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with Treasury’s FinCEN for all marijuana-related businesses they discover to be clients, even if the businesses are exclusively involved in activities covered by that enforcement deferment.)
[0] For those interested in inverting this, marijuana use has neither medical nor adult-use exceptions under state/territorial law in only 3 states (Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska) plus American Samoa.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/Est...
The data isn't hidden or lied about. If you think the data is fudged, go pick up a high school year book or photo album from the 1950s or 1960s and take a look at the young people.
Also as the gpgp was talking about... in many places obseity is purely based on weight / height ratio... which doesn't bring muscle into account. So all I can say is I can't really say what factors are involved.
Suburbs around the country are quiet after school as all the kids are inside physically atrophying.
This is true, but sort of a sleight of hand -- obese people that don't exercise have more muscle mass than non-obese people who don't exercise, just to carry around all of the fat. And obviously the average American, both male and female, is more overweight/obese than in 1924.
(I agree with basically everything else you say, though.)
What I could have added was a caveat that sample non-obese people from each time would indicate that 2024 people have greater average muscle mass.
Personally, a more interesting question is whether growth along the Kardashev scale leads to a greater disparity in muscle mass vs body fat. The past 100 years would seem to indicate that it is possible. That being said, it could also be a uniquely American phenomenon. My hypothesis would be that avg muscle mass among French men has still grown over the past 100 years but I don't think obesity has grown to the extreme that it has in the USA.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
Not true. Overweight and obese are defined on fixed scales. You can have a population that is 100% obese.
No? You have to compare like for like. Sedentary obese women have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight women, and sedentary obese men have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight men. (And the ratio of women to men hasn't moved very much since 1924, and both sexes are heavier than they were in 1924.)
The rest of your comment is not responsive to mine.
I think the former is uncontroversial but boring, and the later is wrong. I also think that people conflate the two because they want to pretend that being average is the same thing as being healthy.
And relative they are weaker in the sense that the ratio between strength and body mass is smaller than that of normal people.
And then we have the powerlifting community.
You make one specific relevant claim: "obese people don't have more muscle." (Which belies everything I've read on the subject.) So, uh, why do you think that?
https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-f...
In ancient times, such as during the period of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, full-grown cows were significantly smaller than modern cattle. Based on archaeological evidence (bones and remains), historians and archaeozoologists estimate the following sizes: • Height: Approximately 100–120 cm (3.3–4 feet) at the shoulder. • Weight: Between 200–400 kg (440–880 lbs), depending on the breed, sex, and regional conditions.
For comparison: • Modern cattle like Holsteins (dairy cows) stand around 140–150 cm at the shoulder and weigh 700–900 kg. • Some smaller modern breeds, like Dexter cattle, resemble ancient cattle in stature, with a height of 90–120 cm and weight of 300–450 kg.
Factors Influencing Smaller Size in Ancient Cattle 1. Nutritional Limitations: Grazing conditions were less controlled, and fodder quality was inconsistent. 2. Genetics: Ancient cattle were not selectively bred for size like modern cattle. 3. Purpose: Cattle were primarily used for labor (draught animals) and small-scale milk production, rather than for meat.
Ancient cattle were functional animals suited to the agricultural practices and available resources of their time, so their size reflected these limitations.
Of course, plenty of us are capable of producing authoritatively phrased bullshit without any artificial aids! But we should try to minimize that phenomenon rather than maximizing it.
If you look at medieval illustrations of shepherds and farmers [0], one thing that strikes you is just how small all the animals are. Even in relation to the medieval humans who were significantly shorter than us.
It had its advantages - for example, a leaner, smaller animal can walk long distances and won't get stuck in swampy ground. But it doesn't give you a lot of anything - hide, meat, milk... Nowadays, we have huge animals, which nevertheless have to be transported by trucks. No longer capable of walking 50 miles from the lowland to the mountains to graze.
[0] https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef01...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Me...
https://imgcdn.stablediffusionweb.com/2024/11/21/ce988f0d-9e... - note how the cow barely reaches Villon's waist!
The point is really: Classical Greek athletes were doing a lot of recognizable strength training. "Halteres" are basically stone dumbbells (in Spanish the derived word "halterofilia" is the modern name for Olympic weightlifting).
You have other examples like Bybon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybon) where we have an inscribed rock with a handle carved into it explicitly to use as a weightlifting feat.
This was definitely part of the culture and people knew what trained athletes looked like.
The dude won six Olympic wrestling events in a row. The seventh Olympics, he came in second. A twenty-eight year rein in one of the most practiced sports in the ancient world.
Eat your heart out, Tom Brady.
If you truly believe that, you cannot have seen many penises at all.
Regarding your specific example, I'd actually say that "a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up" is a fairly good description of what a muscular person looks like! And, further, I would be fairly confident that an ancient Greek sculptor, having observed numerous models, would be able to ramp the dials up to 12, producing a figure with a degree of outlandish magnificence never actually quite seen in real life, while still appearing anatomically accurate enough not to look weird.
As to how buff the Greeks really were, I admit we'd need a time machine.
Anecdotal: I helped my dad a few years ago do a lot of genealogy. He had pictures going back to the late 1800s for one branch of the family that just arrived from Ireland. Most of the men were shirtless and you could count every rib. There was very little muscle.
I'm not making a counter-argument to the OP's position. I'm only making a refutation of the conjecture.
Over the last year I've roughly doubled my pushup strength, with very visible resulting muscular hypertrophy in my triceps, back, and shoulders (even though I was optimizing for strength rather than hypertrophy). The total time taken over that year has been about 6 hours: three 40-second sets of pushups every two days, with 2⅓ minute breaks between sets, which I'm not counting because I can post to HN and drink yerba mate during that time. This works out to one minute per day.
There is literally nobody in the world who has less than 6 hours of free time per year. This is not a matter of economics; no economic system is so all-pervading as to sell every single minute of your day.
I started out doing three sets of knee pushups to failure, and once I reached ten reps I switched to real pushups; once I reach failure on the real pushups (3–5 reps in the first set, sometimes as little as 2 in the last) I continue with knee pushups until failure. This takes about 40 seconds and seems to be a good balance of intensity and safety. The only equipment it requires is a reasonably clean floor or patch of grass, so you don't have to buy equipment, pay a gym membership, or even walk to a different part of the house. You can do it on the train while commuting to work, at the bus stop while awaiting the bus, in the break room at the office, outside your car in the parking lot, in the park when you walk the dog, or in your bedroom after getting up, unless your hoarding problem is even worse than mine.
I'm slightly obese (109kg) like most of the population in rich countries, and I think my state of muscular development was about average in that context. Calisthenics permits increasing resistance to almost arbitrarily high levels, so you can keep the intensity high and the workouts short even as you get stronger. Stronger people would presumably need to invest more time than one minute per day to make further progress, perhaps as much as ten minutes or even more, but those aren't the people we're talking about.
So what's missing? It might be inspiration, discipline, executive function, hope, knowledge, wisdom, or some combination of these. But it's not time or money.
Aerobic exercise, which should really also be part of a workout routine, is significantly more time-consuming though, and requires proper equipment. Most importantly a new pair of good running shoes every year or so to reduce wear on the joints.
So yes, even with kids or similarly demanding circumstances it should be possible to accommodate moderate exercise in most peoples lives. But the result probably won't be body-builder levels of muscular development.
One is that if you're doing 50 pushups you're probably doing endurance training rather than strength training, unless you're talking about doing 10 sets in a day. And if you're doing them every day you're going to build strength very slowly or actually decline in strength. You need recovery time to build muscle. If that's what you're after, do however many pushups every other day. You can work on your legs in between if you want. My legs are still pretty decent from when I used to commute by bicycle in San Francisco.
Another thought is that diversifying from extensor exercises into flexor exercises isn't even as hard as you make it out to be. It doesn't even require simple equipment.
You can bicep-curl the groceries.
You can do a pullup on a doorframe, if you can find a doorframe that won't break.
You can do one-arm inclined rows with a clothesline pole in your crotch. If you don't have clotheslines in your country, use a telephone pole.
Guys in prison deadlift the bed, or each other.
Kids climb trees and hang from horizontal tree branches. You can do that too.
If you lie down on your back under the kitchen table, you can grab opposite sides of the table with your two hands and lift yourself up with your biceps that way. If this isn't enough resistance, you can do archer rows that way. Putting both hands on the same side of the table may destabilize it, depending on the table.
I have a metal-framed transom over my kitchen door that's tall enough that I can dead-hang from it.
Fences and walls are commonly high enough that you can dead-hang from your hands on them too, though they may not be ideal for a pullup.
If you have a door, even a hollow-core wooden door, you can open the door, support its distal side with a wedge of wood (or newspaper) to take the load off the hinges, and then you can safely hang from the top of the door. This will not work with an aluminum screen door or a car door, but otherwise you're good.
Unless you live in the Gobi, you can tie a rope around a telephone pole or a tree, then climb the rope.
You can pull up to a ladder rung from underneath the ladder.
Playgrounds have jungle gyms.
Finding objects strong enough to hang from is a little harder than finding a floor, but still not a category that requires exercise equipment specifically built for it.
As for aerobics, for me the best aerobic exercise is dance, because running is boring and I don't care for the social dynamics of team sports, and running shoes are generally not helpful for dance. Many forms of dance are done barefoot; others usually use flat-soled shoes with no cushioning, on purpose, because cushioning dramatically impairs your balance. (I agree that cushioning is very important not just for running on concrete but even for extended walking on it.)
(Actually, swimming is even better, but I live too far from the river.)
Many, perhaps most, people in rich countries are experiencing levels of physical disability due to muscular atrophy that could be corrected by exercise averaging on the order of one minute per day. It's true that, to get body-builder levels of muscular development, you have to treat it as not just a full-time job but also a weird cult that fanatically controls your diet. In between the literally crippling levels of sedentarism so many people suffer, and eating kilograms of meat three times a day except when you're cutting, there is an enormous spectrum.
Supporting the door to protect the hinges is an excellent suggestion, since concern about the hinges is exactly why I originally hesitated from using a door! It seems creativity is indeed the true limiting factor in choosing equipment and adapting exercises.
I think I will pick up running (many acquaintances are in a runner group), but dancing is also on my to-do list.
Many thanks for your kind suggestions!
And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).
What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.
Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".
A cat soldier is the only one who can overcome all type of obstacles and is operational under all circumstances with high efficiency.
Spartan soldiers were too efficient are were known for eating little (not until they felt full).
Modern laborers aren't even allowed to. Just because you're jacked and can install semi truck tires by hand doesn't mean your boss wants to risk the insurance or OSHA dumpster fire that could arise if you throw out your back doing so.
Then there's cyborgs...
Isolated populations could come from space colonies, geographic isolation from war or extreme climate events, rich people with exclusive genetic upgrades, cyborg implants that make it possible to only reproduce with other cyborgs. Just off the top of my head.
If you're less patient, give it enough time the old fashioned way and homo sapiens as they are today would eventually not be able to reproduce with their descendants. Genetic drift.
[0] https://drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/dallas-mccarver...
That’s just the tip though. They have all kinds of far reaching effects ranging from curtailing height, significantly reducing IQ, constant skin breakouts, altered moods, hair loss, severe anxiety, paranoia, kidney and liver failure, bone breakages etc, severe and permanent decrease in the testosterone you naturally produce etc.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...
Also, it kind of reminds me of the idea that athletes take these as performance enhancing drugs because it helps them in the same way that following a strength-training program would help them.
Much better to do something targeted like reduce myostatin.
My perspective on it is it is borrowing from the future. I feel better while on it, but it's just changing what the problem is. I've turned a sedentary lifestyle issue into a hormone issue. There are side effects (ie enlarged heart in the future). I'm using it as a crutch while I have a demanding job that keeps me working for longer hours.
Won't it cause your hormones/sperm/hairline to get messed up?
You may enjoy "Gentle Seduction" by Marc Stiegler [1].
TL; DR Leave the meat part in place and project your consciousness through offboard sensors.
I recall certain classes of drugs that make mice into muscle-bound warriors, I believe using a different pathway then steroids.
That's different than subsistence farming, where you're doing a lot of work at sub max levels most every day. You may get strongish, but you won't get large.
Consider a modern day elite marathon runner, who works out >10 hours/week. They can only do so at sub max levels of effort. The top end are prone to injury (overtraining), and the training itself limits muscle development.
The majority of us are getting weaker and fatter. A few of us are still testing the limits of human physiology. The difference is you have a choice to be whatever part of the spectrum you want to be. Most choose "weak and fat".
Much of this is tied to nutrition, which I don't think is talked about in the fine article. Same story, we have a choice to eat the best for us food, or to eat crap. That wasn't always the case for the subsistence farmer.
But real strength, like farmers traditionally had, is hardly visible and needs an insane amount of time just handling heavy weights.
These people look completely average but can easily handle way more weight than the totally jacked body builder can.
But if the goal is mainly the physic and not strength... Then yes: a few hours a week is plenty
If you ever ie been running, say at 10km consistently, try to move that one day to 20km while maintaining the intensity. Significantly harder, you may experience various connective tissue issues too and not just muscle and energy management.
Or break a leg or two like I managed with recent paragliding accident, don't move one of them for 3 months and you will find that body, in its quest for lowest energy spending at all costs literally consumed all connective tissue to barest minimum, so stuff just doesn't move at all. I guess other mode didn't develop since in our distant past, like in rest of animal kingdom, broken leg meant certain death.
Ie Arnold was doing 550 pound (250kg) squats at some point, thats not something you will ever see in normal gym. Similar for other exercises.
However, it is a myth that it results in more "tonality".
Muscle definition is only a result of muscle size and body fat percentage. So you can achieve just as much muscle definition doing high weight low rep exercises, all else being equal.
You've only identified body builders specifically here. Strongmen, powerlifters, wrestlers, and other elite athletes can put in a similar amount of hours as a bodybuilder at the gym and certainly gain more "real strength" than a farmer will.
It just feels romantic for many to imagine that the farmhand is the "real" macho man.
If you don't train for strength, you won't get as strong as someone who does train for strength.
But all bodybuilders who train for size alone are stronger than those who don't train at all.
And the amount of additional work it takes to train strength is miniscule if you're primarily training for size. A few heavy top sets at the start of your workout are enough to drive improvements in the skill of strength while the hypertrophy work will increase your potential for force production.
1. Myostatin inhibitors are already in development. We're already using a drug that stops us from getting fat, why would we not use a drug that prevents atrophy?
2. This is entirely focused on what would be efficient at a global scale, while decisions are made on individual's desires. People (in general) want to look muscular and fit; it's as hardcoded into our reproductive desires as anything else is. Given increasing resources, is it reasonable to assert that people will choose to totally forgo their biological body? Why is it impossible for them to have the same productive advantages while retaining a physical body for when they want it?
Human desire trumps production, even in the long term, or at least medium term. I could eat monkey chow every day and never have to do dishes or cook ever again, and save an extra 10 hours a day. I could wear the same thing every day so a machine can fold it. I can put my brain in a jar to avoid commuting. But no matter how much technology advances, if I still spend 8 hours working with my brain implant or whatever then I'm still doing at worst 24% as good as the guy working 24/7. Why would it ever be worth giving up such basic human pleasures as eating or sex just for 4x the salary?
Maybe sexual selection will be altered by further technological changes. If we manage to technologically replicate the feeling of amazing sex with super hot individuals on demand, there would be little point in expending the effort it takes to have a great body for that purpose.
There are plenty of other reasons great to exercise regularly. For one, it helps stave off the negative effects of aging in a way that I doubt a pill will ever manage. But that's also an argument for ridding us of these pesky bodies that we have to be carried around in.
This fear is unfounded. It isn't the proliferation of technology that is making people dumber; it's the American cultural deemphasis of education, entirely independent of technology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#:~:t....
You can even publicly state same in most places on Earth today and not be beaten or killed.
The situation improves even faster with the mass education that the internet allows for.
I could make further points that new faiths have become more entrenched, such as nationalism and political partisanship to name just two. Or even beliefs like free markets being some unquestionable good, or maybe that technological progress is inexorable. That these kind of tribal splits are increasing, betray this notion that we are becoming more rational as a species. I’d posit that even if we did cast off the shackles of religion, we’d simply find new kinds of faith to replace them.
The brain, however, is well developed and draws on a high proportion of the body's blood supply. It is a mystery as to how this creature can sustain itself without external support."
The above quote is information you get from studying deceased bodies of a particularly advanced alien race in the original X-COM game, released in 1994.
(The X-COM in-universe explanation for the aliens' physiology is more psionic than cybernetic, as OP suggests. This makes OP a bit more credible than the Microprose writers, at least if your object is a discussion about plausible aliens or far-future humans in the real world within the known laws of physics. The aliens' psionic powers are kinda terrifying AF, so the Microprose prose does just fine for its intended purpose: Good storytelling for a computer game that makes no attempt to be fully real-world plausible / "hard" SF.)
Because it's nice to have the strength when you need it. Also, it protects your body. I developed a bulged disc in my neck from decades of spending too much time at a computer. Muscular balance and variety of movement is critical to maintaining a healthy body. Not to mention benefits like lessening injuries from accidents.
We're not just economic units. We eat, we love, we breathe fresh air, we sleep. Even in a far-flung future, if we are still human, we are still animals.
Muscle mass requires more energy, but by definition, a Type 1 civilization has no shortage of it. And I expect making food out of thin air (like plants do) would be the kind of technology such a civilization would have.
This stands to reason once you mentally discard exercise as a pre-requisite of strength. An elephant is strong, not because it exercises, but because of the biological mechanisms e.g. genetics that says: grow big, grow strong, and the effect size of those mechanisms are much much larger than individual differences due to exercise. It is clear, at least to me, that the need for exercise for adjusting strength has more to do with not spending extra energy building a body that has high upkeep if it isn't needed for survival.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/frederik-pohl/plague-of-py...
Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327782 - May 2024 (28 comments)
Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067895 - May 2021 (5 comments)
Classifying Civilisations: An Introduction to the Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108947 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
The Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24084021 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Nikolai Kardashev (of Kardashev scale fame) died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20619494 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)
Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20603386 - Aug 2019 (31 comments)
Kardashev scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183106 - Feb 2011 (15 comments)
When you first start lifting, your 1 rep max is limited by your ability to recruit muscular functional units simultaneously (and in the correct order) to complete the movement. I forget the real number but an untrained person will be able to recruit maybe 1/3rd of the muscle they have for a 1RM movement.
Keyboard ticklers - get out there and use that meat! I mean it!
We'd naturally fork, because that future sounds like a dystopic hellscape to many (if not the overwhelming majority).
And indeed once we reach the point of being able to reliably colonize other planets, large scale splintering (both physical and cultural) will begin near immediately. You'll have libertarian planet, Islamic planet, even the Mormons will finally have their planets! And so on.
And the people who want to sacrifice their bodies to go enter the machine will certainly have their own little slice of the universe as well.
I don't think this degree of uniformity is plausible.
I reject this as an explanation for the Fermi paradox for similar reasons, except they're even more relevant across all of the putatively common alien civilizations. I don't even find it plausible that all of human civilization would do this, let alone all of every civilization ever.
Our lives do an unbelievably good job of teaching us endless unteachable lessons. What if life as we know it is, for instance, little more than a day's lesson in another reality? Or a day of a gaming? Perhaps a test of character for some sort of role? There's no reason to assume time, and life expectancy as we know it, are universal truths. Even within our own reality the rate of the passage of time is variable.
The only problem I have with the simulation hypothesis is it being turtles all the way down. Imagine you pass from this world only to 'awake' in another. How does the exact same simulation argument not just apply yet again? It seems fundamentally unfalsifiable and circular, but I suppose that is standard for any explanation of life.
Also, if you permit me to get spiritual for a moment, I believe that it could be theoretically possible to simulate any fully materialist universe, but I'm not convinced consciousness can arise from doing maths. Since I am conscious, this universe must not be simulated, no matter how many simulated worlds actually exist.
[1] I'm assuming that most creatures intelligent enough to understand the concept of simulating a universe will want to try it. But if it takes an entire civilization to do so and that civilization has to choose between, say, spending the energy on simulation running or on food production, it's pretty clear what will happen.
However that doesn't preclude 'my' version of the simulation hypothesis. Imagine you were in a full body VR sim from the moment of birth, that artificial reality would likely simply be reality to you, yet your consciousness would remain. So all that's fundamentally required is some tech to temporarily block all past memories before entering the sim.
Sounds like an interesting concept for a story, if nothing else.
biological humans, which are subdivided into various genetically altered varieties and the original unmodified humans.
nuclear powered humanoid robots that are not allowed on earth but are perfect for working in space.
fully simulated humans being run on nuclear powered computers buried deep underground for security. Their minds run 700 times faster than normal humans.
This feels pretty plausible to me.
I can’t remember if this was in the Heinlein novel, but in the film the director was certainly having a go at this when that planet was the one to get attacked
* frequent starvation or food insecurity among anyone but the high class, not good for overall physique,
* high parasite load sucking you dry from within - read up something on how massive infestation with hookworm can sap big, adult men of power,
* infections like tuberculosis.
I would be surprised if a 16th century peasant had more muscle than a 21th century student who does at least some sports. They would be a lot more used to physical work, yes, but that is not the same as "our muscles have atrophied".
If anything, we might have weaker sinews, but not muscle per se, and our bones are almost certainly stronger, as we lack neither calcium nor important vitamins.
Physical fitness is not just chemistry. The body is responding to actual physical forces and the response is tightly coupled to how, when and where those forces are applied. Bone density and structure for instance is not just a matter of increasing production of bone cell production. It instead responds to the forces of gravity and other forces on the body as it moves through space. These forces do trigger electrochemical signals in the body, but it wouldn’t be trivial to recreate these signals in such a way that the body is fooled into responding just as it would if the signals were triggered by gravity and other physical forces.
It seems like it could be a more difficult but similar problem to the one experienced by lab-grown meat producers. The meat texture still isn’t right. And these meat “muscles” only require proper taste and texture. They wouldn’t have to actually support a living organism.
Edit: On reread I realize your comment allowed for assisting rather than totally replacing the required physical aspects. I agree with that. Use of chemicals could make it easier to trigger the necessary reactions, lowering thresholds, increasing outputs, etc. This could be applied broadly and the physical forces of everyday life might do the rest.
I think that the major way humans cope/tackle this is via specialisation. While not for everyone, most people seem to find a job in a field, and the work in that field helps us support a more complicated society than we can fathom. Most people can't memorize all the stuff from multiple domains, or they would burn out. Most people don't understand how truly complex a semiconductor is, or how electricity and power is generated, or how to design a car. These are just basic examples but I'd argue a really good example of how humans have chosen a specific domain or thing and over time developed better understandings of the field and topic. The average person could do any job I'd argue.
We are not as physical as we used to be, we have "engineered" ourselves replacements. The tractor, the car; both replaced horses but at the cost of needing someone who understood the principal of the new technology.
Be it robot workers replacing amazon warehouse employees, or the tractor that improved the farmers ability to harvest or plant crops; both required smart people to not only develop them but to maintain them.
I'd argue while we really are less physically active, due to technology and general advancements we have made over the years; this comes at the cost of mental strain. We mentally must process and think more than ever before, pushing our brains to keep up so we can stay relevant.
Arm wrestling is a poor indicator of strength. Technique and experience account for much more than most people would think. Compare bench press, squat, deadlift numbers instead.
When we are all immersed in the substrate of AI, will there be a gym equivalent for the intellectual?
Skeleton crew or robots to maintain physical world while a majority of humanity living in the matrix. Controlling machines from far away lands (or galaxies).
See "No-communication theorem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
I already find myself instinctively throwing any errors I can’t immediately figure out myself into a chatbot
I think there is much less angst regarding the idea of upgrading humanity piecemeal, a la the Ship of Theseus, than there is to fully discarding one's body for a digital existence. This has already sort of happened over the last few hundred years with the concept of transplantable organs. Prior to the widespread acceptable of the interchangeability of organs, it was not uncommon to think that your self and body are unified and linked in a way that implied organ transplation was problematic or undesirable.
And on that note - is it just me, or are biological visions of humanity's future fairly scarce in sci-fi and in futurism (another name for sci-fi)? My guess is because such topics seem dominated by software engineers, physicists, etc. that are less interested in biology.
Similarly, my understanding of the history of yoga in India is that it was introduced because of the sedentary lifestyle of the Brahmin caste, and much like with office workers today in the USA, it served to keep them in decent physical shape.
We could choose to let go of it, like we recently chose to let go of ravenous hunger with GLP drugs.
I find it amusing that somehow resources would still be constrained as we go closer to be a Kardashev I civilization.
We already have exercise mimetics in pre-clinical trials. If you can keep yourself fit with zero expenditure of time, why wouldn't you?
History shows time and time again that there are no free lunches in nature.
If anything, I need more reasons to leave the house. Not more reasons to stay inside and be on the computer even more.
I do agree that GLP-1s can't be a free lunch. It can't be that powerful for free. Even beyond that, we might not know what we are doing with them.
It use to be standard for testosterone replacement to get a shot from a doctor every two weeks. This is an unbelievably stupid way to take testosterone. Blasting a super physiologic level of testosterone and then crashing over a two week period would be a good way to amplify side effects if that were the goal but we didn't know what we were doing then.
It is very unlikely we would have just randomly stumbled on the best way to take GLP-1s out of the gate.
Why? Life is not a morality play.
Look if it helps a morbidly obese person drop enough weight so that they can get a handle on their A1C, blood pressure, etc. then it's probably (from what we know now) worth the risk. For the slightly overweight person who takes it, and I know a few from the gym, we don't know what that looks like yet.
It will take time to find out if there are long term detrimental effects.
But we actually do. And they seem to be all positive so far.
> It will take time to find out if there are long term detrimental effects.
It's been 20 years already from the development of the earliest GLP-1 agonists.
And while medical chemistry moves slowly, I have no doubt that we'll solve the exercise problem within the next decades. Never mind by the time we're talking about ascending on the Kardashev scale.
The newest research: https://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/388/2/232.long
Here's a nice, but a somewhat obsolete review: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8728540/
Traditional office culture makes it very difficult to get a proper workout in while, at the same time, confining you mostly to your chair, hunched over a desk (and/or craning over a small screen), to view things on a screen that eats away at your eyes by default.
WFH made this worse. I've worked with so many people that start work at 0700 and end at 1700 or later.
Add shitty, cheap food, 2.5 kids and a partner in there, and you're basically on an express train to bad hips, bad knees, poor health markersa and immobility at (not so) old age.
"Work out during your lunch hour," you say. The author spends a lot of time on muscle use. Powerlifting workouts require lots of rest between sets, especially as you get stronger. Spending 2h on a workout is normal in powerlifting. Not happening during lunch hour, not like this matters because someone will just schedule a meeting over it anyway.
"But I wake up at 0400..." No. Just no. (A) A parent with two and a half kids is not getting up at ass o clock in the morning to chase that pump (or work out to stay healthy) when their kids are gonna wake them at 0640, and (b) this is an awesome way to either sleep like shit forever or incinerate the last fledglings of your social life.
All this aside, the farmer life is a super hard way to live, . Overuse injuries are very common. However, we went the complete opposite direction in building today's office culture, and it's a real shame.
Sometimes I hear people say strength is useless nowadays but I couldn’t disagree more. In emergency situations I have been able to push stranded cars uphill to a safer spot, carry injured people and animals to safety, move large furniture and car parts myself, etc. Being more attractive to romantic partners is no downside either, nor is being able to eat a lot and not get fat. Strength makes modern life easier and more fun.
Isn't that the ultimate hubris?
Because I have the physical energy to, I take that body to the ocean for a swim, to the park for a cycle, and to anywhere with a nice view for a run. Depending on the day. Oh and the gym is a pleasant 12 minute walk from home, so I do that a few times a week as well.
Sorry to burst your bubble OP.
No, no it's not. There is nothing redeeming to be found here, it's nonsense. It's historially ignorant trad-pilled vibes about the past combined with bizarre techbro mumbo jumbo about the future. Neither have any meaningful grounding in reality, nor anything interesting to say about the world.
Capitalism is keeping us locked into the “Business As Usual” model that will bring us to civilization-destroying climate change by the middle of the century, and with tropics-denying lethally high wet bulb temperatures that will get well into the temperate zone by the end of the century. Think most of CONUS being uninhabitable for multiple days to weeks every year, with or without AC.
This means I'm advanced.