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Comment by Jaygles | Hacker News Reader

I am convinced fruit flies are some sort of multidimensional being. I will sit in a room, observe three fruit flies in the air, swat and kill those three fruit flies, then sit back and observe no change in the number of flies in the air.

They either throw out decoys when you swat them to fool us, or there’s a large queue of them waiting to take their turn to keep the number flying constant

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I can't blame medieval scholars for believing that flies spontaneously generated from things like raw meat (instead of reproducing). I would guess that fruit flies played a major role in supporting this theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

But how are they born? I'll have no fruit flies in the house, and then I'll forget a potato, it rots, and then I'll be infested with fruit flies. Were they already on the potato before it rotted, or did one just happen in, found some food, and figured it would stay and start a family here?

I think they’re actually on fruit or may be vegetables in your case from the start.

Yeah, that's my suspicion as well, as I rarely just see one lone random fruit fly in the flat.

Clean/peal the potato and immediately put it in a sealed container. No flies will appear. Only flies beget flies.

This is what I always wondered about maggots, like when a person in any kind of sealed room, anywhere, dies and starts to decompose. I've been lead to believe maggots inevitably appear and start the process but where did the larvae come from?! Food?

How are those products shipped and stored prior to you purchasing them?

Yep, that's right. That's when the flies infect the produce.

They ride in on your grocery store produce. They also seem to hang out in/near soil in house plants.

IIRC, I read in _The Violinist's Thumb_ that fruit flies are a more recent import along with tropical fruits (I think bananas?), so the spontaneous generation theory would predate their presence in the West.

The reproductive cycle of fruit flies is approx 10 days. A single fertilized female will lay 100s of eggs over her life. But not all at once, it's more like 5 a day.

So if you have a single fertilized female in a room, about 10 days later, you will start getting those handful flies emerge every day. You can keep your room completely isolated, but still you can catch 5 a day on average for about a month or two (in lab conditions longer). If you don't catch them all and you end up with another fertilized female, the story continues.

I think flies are very opportunistic individuals, in the sense that there is always a fly hatching somewhere. If there is food, it will lay the eggs there. If there is no food it will try and stick around or die. But even if it dies, it's bothers and sisters are constantly emerging. So the population will survive a lot of adverse conditions.

They are basically quarks. If the gap between any two quarks gets too big, a third quark will pop into existence between them*.

*I may have grossly misunderstood my physics lecturer. It was a long time ago.

Sounds like the Game of Life

The binding energy between quarks is so huge (more than 99% of the total energy of a proton) that, if you attempt to pull them apart, the energy you have to apply in the process is enough to create additional quarks.

So it’s not that they just pop into existence. You, as the person pulling them apart, are the cause of the extra quarks being created.

Very similar to how you, as the person swatting the flies, generate enough energy for another to spontaneously emerge.

Hmmm but the fly must have some kind of incredible complexity compared to a pair of subatomic particles. I mean, it's made of an uncountable number of such particles, bound together in an extremely complex singular arrangement. And as i recall, the energy to separate 2 quarks (produce a quark anti-quark pair) is somewhere around the hundreds of MeV.

I wonder how hard you'd have to slap a table to spontaneously generate a fruit fly. Or the average number of attempts required.

Actually a pair of quarks are created, not only a third one. This is required to keep the overall set colorless.

Sounds like you need a multi-phasic trans-dimensional pitcher plant.

I’ll add some tinder to the fire.

I have an indoor bug zapper. I set it next to a window and it gets the bugs that are inside. Does a great job. But always intermittently some small fly will fly into it. Even when a door hasn’t been opened.

I joke, but I’m semi convinced that 1 in every few billion try’s, the tiny flys make it thru the glass of the window. Where else are they coming from ? lol.

Of course The Simulation has wallhacks.

If a mouse can get in your house, so can a fly. There are holes

I think I had one lay eggs in my house. A few weeks ago, on a day when I hardly opened a door for more than a few seconds I suddenly found at least 100 horseflies in my house. I was sucking them up with a hand vac and releasing them outside, and every few hours I’d go suck up about 30 more — and every single day after that I found at least 30 or so more for at least a week. I’m still seeing 1-2 per day, but at least that’s manageable. Hopefully these last stragglers are the last that I’ll have. It’s nuts!

releasing horse flies.

Horse flies are the bitey kind, so release?! ... well, no polite words here.

(House flies are typically just... flies)

Also, you probably have a dead mouse or some such, in a crawl space. Thus maggots, thus flies.

Oops. Autocorrupt got me. Houseflies.

Proof that AI is sentient, and malign. The more horseflies, the more societal unrest.

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