it’s pretty crazy how we can reprogram our rna now :)

First of all, conversion from electricity to hydrogen achieves 60–80% system efficiency which isn’t even the theoretical maximum. Meanwhile, round-trip efficiency of P2P energy storage system with micro gas turbines between 22% and 29%.. It’s expected that efficiency could get to around 40% in the next decade as well.

So, I don’t think that’s actually a huge issue. The main problem with hydrogen for stuff like planes is low energy density. But that’s not an issue for stuff like ground batteries which are used to capture energy from wind and solar. This also works for transport like trucks. And a big advantage for hydrogen is that it doesn’t need large amounts of rare earths as you do for traditional batteries.

The approach China is taking a shotgun approach to their energy mix where they try a whole bunch of different things, and then see where different methods of energy production and storage make the most sense.

Wasn’t on my radar either, definitely one of the most exciting tech breakthroughs in a while. I wonder if you could apply this to assembling carbon based chips as well.

Yeah, you can basically grow shit bottom up from the atomic scale!

Turns out if you start with basically nothing and strings just fall out. Turns out that you don’t need to assume strings exist at all. Four simple rules, two from quantum mechanics and relativity that everyone already accepts, plus the idea that physics stays consistent at insane energies and that nature picks the simplest possible math then the equations spit out the exact scattering amplitudes string theorists predicted decades ago. The Veneziano amplitude, the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude, and the whole tower of massive spinning particles all just appeared automatically. Strings end up naturally appearing as an emergent phenomena in this framework. It important to note that this is not experimental proof since the energy scales are still stupidly out of reach, but the bootstrap math says if you want a universe that makes sense under these bare minimum rules then string theory is basically what you get.

I guess it makes sense for microadjustments to happen in response to environmental changes since it would nudge the offspring towards having a better chance at survival.

very sci fi

Life is basically just a really complex way to resolve energy gradients by creating metabolic pathways that channel that energy towards creating localized low entropy environments. I’d argue cognition is a bit too strong a word to use in this scenario, it’s more of a mechanical feedback loop like thermostat. The change in environment triggers chemical change in the organism, and it changes behavior in response. But it absolutely is the basis for all volition. Complex organisms like us just have a huge number of really complex feedback loops that our brains end up balancing.

Indeed, we’re gonna be facing much bigger problems. And on top of that, our whole global economy is built entirely on just in time supply chains. Any time there’s a breakdown in shipping then the whole house of cards quickly comes crashing down. And most of the world has no local redundancies that would facilitate any measure of self sufficiency.

I recall reading it was a major factor in collapse of Rome as well.

I mean they do reference the actual study right at the start https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-03338-w#Sec2

Given that these plants would need to devote a significant amount of resources to store the energy in order to produce light, I would expect they would be outcompeted by regular plants that aren’t wasting their energy in the wild. Selection pressures generally favor efficient use of energy.

The key part is having an available energy gradient, and enough chemical variety for self replicating carbon chains to start forming. Pools of water are the dominant theory right now because the idea is that having solvent allows for free molecular movement, and if there was variation with them partially drying out, then they’d act as concentrators pushing these molecules closer together and making these reactions more propabable.

Makes sense, initial life forms had to do with what they had to work with. Couldn’t exactly get picky.

Oncotarget is a respectable journal as far as I know, but yeah feels a bit sensational. Their sample is also tiny of only 300 people.

just another way to make the experiment

I’m disappointed Siegel doesn’t attribute Asimov’s brilliant 1989 essay, The Relativity of Wrong.

Indeed, and another point to consider is that it’s highly unlikely we’d observe a civilization at our level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We’re aware that it’s happening, but it’s of little interest to use on day to day basis. It’s quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

What the article talks about is that a study pointed out a long-term climate process involving algae. As the planet warms, it can lead to larger and more frequent algal blooms in the oceans due to warmer waters and increased nutrients. When these algae die, they sink and sequester carbon in deep-sea sediments, effectively removing it from the atmosphere for a very long time. Their research suggests that the process would take thousands of years to result in significant global cooling. It’s an extremely slow, natural feedback loop. The researchers emphasize that it operates on a timeline that is completely irrelevant to our current, human-caused climate crisis.

But hey, why read the actual article when you can just throw a tantrum like a child.

Didn’t actually red the article did you?