Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

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Another reply mentioned the Covid-19 vaccines; not quite a survival-of-the-species level problem, but serious nonetheless.

I could imagine scenarios where civilization depended on our ability to create energy or grow food on a scale that required ramping up fission or fusion reactors really fast. For instance, an asteroid or volcanic eruption blocks out the sun and we need to figure out how to keep our cities from starving.

Another technological approach to avert starvation in the same sort of ecosystem collapse scenario is to develop and implement human hibernation, like the cryo-sleep pods from science fiction movies. Thus we drastically reduce the calorie needs of the average person, so that a much smaller population can try to work out the problems and get the world back into a state where it can support a larger population. (There was a movie called Downsizing that was about that kind of solution, except that in the movie they literally shrank people so that their demands on the ecosystem are dramatically reduced, and cost of living is almost nothing.)

If you're worried about that specific scenario there's a charity called ALLFED trying to develop technologies ahead of time to let us survive off of all the resultant dead biomass in a scalable way until farming can be reestablished.

Interesting.

That's really interesting about human hibernation. I have always interpreted it as a way to pass the time. But, now that I think about it it's more often a way to avoid aging.

My knee-jerk was that hibernation doesn't save a ton of calories - a passive day and a highly active day are only a factor of 2 different (something I learned when getting my resting calorie spend as a volunteer medical test subject).

But, pausing aging - that's different than just sleeping all day and keeping your caloric spend to base. If you aren't aging I suspect no calories can be spent.

Is that possible? I know there are the "Walt Disney's head is frozen to be revived later" concepts, but do we have any evidence it is possible to pause aging entirely?

I'd bet that controlled and sustained fusion is closer. And, that seems like fantasy.

I don't know what the current state of the art knowledge is with respect to freezing or hibernating people. I think the science-fiction depiction (like in the Alien movies, or Han Solo frozen in carbonite) is generally that a person's metabolism is basically stopped and (optionally) their body is cooled to a very low temperature to stop chemical processes from happening except at a very slow rate. I think it's implied that you don't age at all, and you probably don't consume calories. (The machine you're in just requires electricity to run presumably and maybe has some consumables like IV fluid and drugs.)

If I understand correctly, one of the barriers to the science-fiction approach of freezing people is that ice crystals form and destroy tissue if one were to actually literally freeze a person. In order to survive that, you'd need some way of inhibiting ice formation. Maybe it could be solved by injecting people with some non-toxic antifreeze solution, or immersing them in fluid at such high pressures that ice doesn't form, or you could just maintain a temperature just above freezing. And then there's the problem of how to thaw a person back out. I don't know if that's solved, but I guess there is a body of knowledge around reviving extreme hypothermia cases.

Less extreme forms of hibernation might look like medically induced coma or like a bear hibernating through the winter. I don't know if bears age significantly while they're sleeping. I'd guess that they age somewhat, but at a slower rate than normal.

One of the differences between the atom bomb and any "breakthrough biotech" project is that the developing the atom bomb, directly, isn't likely to kill people.

It did kill people - of course - due to the criticality experiments - but that was in part caused by cavalier experimentation by a researcher (over the objection of colleagues at the time to boot).

Contrast to biotech: you can't do human targeted biological experimentation without humans. At it's core you put lives at risk doing the most mundane things in biotech. You can easily wind up killing people trying to develop something and the further you're reaching the more likely it is. We don't have disposable, non-sentient human bodies to experiment on with complicated biotechnology and won't for a very long time.

When I think about sci-fi and people pulling together for an earth-scale thing I immediately think about The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin. Culturally interesting that its a chinese movie whereas in my mind a lot of western sci-fi is more individualistic.

The stories that are told maybe more individualistic but that is the nature of the story. However the backdrop usually implies a lot of pulling together e.g. You dont get a space habitat built as one person, or even as one nation.

Also, was your introduction to wandering earth the movie? If so I suggest reading the trilogy.

Have not yet read that one but have read the Three Body Problem by Cixin and am a fan! More of his work is definitely on my reading list.

Indeed nature of the story is to focus on individuals. Still for example interstellar, you fully follow the dad/daughter and all that tubular space station building just happens completely off screen. And its assigned to the brilliance of the daughter instead of the coming together of people (how i interpret it!) curious how you view that for example :)

a movie/book/story needs a protagonist. All that building that goes on off-screen is the meat and potatoes of the solution, yes the daughter has a breakthrough realisation, but the realisation is for nothing if the infrastructure isnt there.

I think the 3body problem has a similar theme, the protagonist is central to the story, without him stuff does/doesnt happen, but the infrastructure (which in the main happens off camera) is built and deployed by the many not an individual, of course some solutions (trying not to spolier anything) are dependant on one individual.

I guess my point is that there isnt much difference between western and chinese sci-fi but chinese sci-fi also has to please the chinese government to be allowed to be published, so that also needs to be considered.

Huh, I'll have to watch that sometime; I've read the 3-body problem / the dark forest / death's end.

Really good points.

It might take me being further from covid for how similar it is to the Manhattan project response to really sink in. Might be too “fresh.”

Maybe this is a chance to learn something about those times. So until the bomb was dropped, the public wouldn’t have had any conception of it being a way out of the war. Yet if the war was in decline when the bombs dropped, I suspect we can agree the bombs did make the finality pretty certain. (Edit-I would argue the bombs absolutely did end the war in a way that wasn’t assured without them dropping, but that’s a point for another time.)

As someone living through covid, the vaccine was something we all were essentially waiting around for while others developed it. We’re aware of it, even if we don’t know how much work was needed to develop the mRNA vaccines. So in WWII your average person could have perceived much more terror from not even fathoming the end of the war at various points.

> Another reply mentioned the Covid-19 vaccines; not quite a survival-of-the-species level problem, but serious nonetheless.

In a morbidly curious way, I wonder what society's reaction and government reactions would have been in the emergence of an airborne pathogen MUCH worse than covid19. Not some fanciful human species killing event like in "The Stand", but with a potential to kill 10-20% of the planet if left unchecked.

I hope that wealthy countries' reactions to finding a vaccine, cure and preventing the spread would make the Manhattan Project look like building a back yard tool shed, but I don't know for sure how we would have handled the global catastrophe.

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