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Whatever sleep does, it's something nature has had a tough time optimizing out despite the extreme vulnerability it creates and the sacrifice of a little under half an organism's waking time.

That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.

Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.

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Alternately, sleep is the optimal ultra-high-efficiency survival state and wakefulness only exists to give creatures enough time to get their affairs in order so that they can safely return to dormancy.

It's easy to think of sleep as a compromise to be defeated because we're culturally preoccupied with the achievements and pleasures of wakefulness, but that's really just us claiming personal preference for one narrow part of a holistic system that's just doing its own survival and propagation thing.

Consider trees, mushrooms, cicadas, snakes, or cats. Chilling out in low power mode as much is possible is maybe not a error to be fixed so much as it is an outcome of efficient design.

Consider hibernation. Evolution went to great trouble there to maximize the duration that some animals can sleep for - and it's pretty clearly solely designed to save power.

Which doesn't mean that's the only thing sleep is good for, evolution doesn't believe in separating concerns, but it's definitely a thing it does.

I think one of our goals is to reduce entropy in the Universe, and being awake lets us do 100x more of that than if we were in low power mode

What kind of sleep are you having that is more entropic than your waking?

Entropy increases in the universe by default, so sleeping allows that to happen more than in the waking state

I enjoy this flipped perspective.

The default and optimal state of a life form is waiting and efficiently using resources.

Moving around, socializing and reproducing, killing and eating, are all energy expenditures or necessary to be able to prolong the sleep-life. Annoyances, from the POV of the sleep-being.

"Hurry up and idle" for CPU design ended up being great for power efficiency. Nature came to the same conclusion for biological organisms a long time ago.

I wonder if we looked at really basic life forms like bacteria, would we find things akin to sleep at that level? What about next up in sophistication?

> if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.

Cats sleep during the day without any issues. So the amount of light seems to not matter.

By the way I wonder do their ear sleep or not because they still wake up easily if there is some suspicious sound.

Yeah. Nature is the ultimate form of science. At any moment, it's incorporating an infinite amount of science, most of which we likely haven't discovered yet, and may not discover for millions of years - if ever.

Nature developed over millions of years of trial and error.

That is like saying God is the ultimate form of religion

Seems likely like the need for sleep then selects for many social/group behaviors. “Solo self-found” is not really an option unless you’re really good at hiding or have some other tricks

Most animals sleep alone, that's simple reality.

Recent work suggests that "Animals that live in groups do not sleep in isolation":

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953472...

So now we just need to know what percent of animals live in groups.

While older studies suggest that most mammals live alone, new field data show that only 22% of mammals are solitary: https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Keep in mind that my claim doesn't require them all sleeping together - any protective any social behavior would suffice (e.g. Having look-outs, etc.)

Since it's such simple reality, surely you can support your claim?

Maybe you were talking about non-mammals?

Sleep is vulnerable, but it also keeps you curled up and hidden somewhere rather than out in the open walking around and taking risks.

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