A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

bacteriumiu•4 minutes ago

Article stopped exactly where stuff got interesting.

This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.

Almured•about 3 hours ago

What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction

ssivark•about 1 hour ago

But at the same time the motor is extremely finicky/fragile in the source of energy (negentropy) it will accept, while natural life is extremely hardy and adaptable.

I wonder how much of machine-like "efficiency" is actually "overfitting" at the cost of robustness.

Almured•40 minutes ago

That is a fair point to be honest! I guess when you a 20min lifetime you can probably compromise on reliability in favour of extra efficiency

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•20 minutes ago

Every race, the engine of a top-fuel dragster only completes about 900 revolutions and then has to be rebuilt! https://www.motortrend.com/features/top-fuel-dragsters

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•19 minutes ago

The need to reproduce and repair our bodies is a big trade-off.

Electric motors are sort of like hermit crab shells - Hard and long-lasting, but they only exist because they piggyback off of a living species.

abhikul0•about 2 hours ago

Relevant Smarter Every Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSm9gJkPxU

pazimzadeh•about 2 hours ago

at the scale that it operates, the flagella is more a drill than a propeller

there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c

zimpenfish•about 2 hours ago

For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.

ur-whale•44 minutes ago

> For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.

Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things, must be multiplied by (order of magnitude) the number of bacteriums on the planet.

f6v•12 minutes ago

> Which if you want an actual feel for the true scale of things

The caveat is that more zeros do nothing for our comprehension of the scale. That's the problem because most people can't comprehend how evolution is even possible. We just don't have a mental model for a trillion, it's all the same to us after a certain threshold.

zimpenfish•25 minutes ago

Good point, forgot about that. Add another 10-20 zeros?

A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews