Your dog, while it may appear that he loves you only because he has been conditioned by evolution to love you, actually loves you.
If you are a life form and you cook a baby and copy your genes into them, you will find that the genes have deteriorated due to oxidative stress etc, which is not cause for celebration, but if you find another optimistic person and randomly swap in half their genes, your baby will on average be somewhat less fit than you and your optimistic-hot friend, but now there is variation, so if you cook multiple babies, One of them may be as fit or even fitter than you, and is likely to have more babies than your other babies, and thus there may be more complex life in the universe with increasing entropy.
If we want, we can definitely can Figure out which of the 300-ish strains of rhinovirus is circulating in a given area at a given time and vaccinate people rapidly to stop it and thus eventually “cure” the common cold, and although it’s very annoying to have to chase it right now, it seems like it’s just a matter of time.
If you look at history you’ll see that plagues went from Europe to the Americas, but not the other way around, which suggests that urbanization and travel are great allies for infectious disease, and both of these continue to this day, but kept in check by sanitation and vaccines, while we have lots of tricks like UVC light and high frequency sound and air filtration and waste monitoring and paying people to stay home that we’ve barely adapted to.
While engineered infectious diseases continue to loom as a potentially huge problem, we also have plenty of crazy tricks up our sleeves can Panopticon viral screenings or toilet monitors or daily personalized saliva sampling or engineering microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or making people walk around in tiny personal spacesuits, and while most of it doesn’t sound terrible, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be a battle that we will win.
That clean water, unlimited, almost free.
That dentistry.
That tongue.
Radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy, but also quickly cease to exist – one gram of rubidium-90 scattered around your kitchen emits the same energy as ~200,000 incandescent bulbs, but only 0.000000113 grams remain after an hour – or do not release much energy but continue to exist for a long time – one gram of carbon-14 only emits the same amount of energy as 0.0000212 light bulbs. But if you start with one gram, after a year you’ll still have 0.999879 grams—so that’s not really the case. He It is easy to permanently poison the environment with radiation, however Cobalt-60 is unfortunate with its moderate energy output and moderate half life, despite medical applications I still wish Cobalt-60 did not exist, screw you Cobalt-60.
While treating all cancer would increase life expectancy by only ~3 years and treating all heart disease would increase life expectancy by only ~3 years, and preventing all accidents would increase life expectancy by only ~1.5 years, if we did all of this at the same time and then did lots of other things too, eventually the effects would become nonlinear, so trying to cure cancer isn’t really a waste of time, thankfully.
The peroxisomes, while the mitochondria and their stupid Krebs cycle get all the attention, when a fatty-acid that is too long for their catabolism comes along, whatever you would call it.
That we have preferences, that there’s no agreed order of how good different things are, which is neat, and not something that would obviously be true of an alien species, and given our limited resources we’re probably happier on the net.
That cardamom, is cheap but expensive in taste, if cardamom cost 1000× more, people would brag about how they went to Sri Lanka so they could taste tea made from fresh cardamom and swear that it changed their whole life.
Gregory of Nyssa, he was right.
It’s not too late, Grandma Moses.
That sleep, perhaps evolution first created a low-energy mode so that we would not starve so fast and then depend on certain maintenance processes, but the effect of this is that we live in a cycle and when things are not going your way it is comforting that reality does not loom at you indefinitely, but instead you can expect a reset and a pause that is neither experienced nor released in any way.
That, glamorous or not, comfortable or not, cheap or not, carbon emitted or not, air travel is very safe.
That, for most of the things you are worried about, the markets are less worried about you and have a better track record, although your mortality is not the issue.
From sexual attraction to romantic love to economic unit reproduction, it’s a strange bundle, but who are we to argue with success.
Every symbolic expression constructed recursively from different elementary functions has a derivative that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions, although the latter expression may require many more words.
Every expression graph constructed from different elementary functions and producing scalar outputs has a gradient that can itself be written as an expression graph, and furthermore the later expression graph is always the same size as the earlier one and is easier to find, and thus it is possible to fit very large expression graphs to the data.
Surprisingly, biological life and biological intelligence do not seem to use that property of expression graphs.
If you look at something and move your head around, you observe the entire light field, which is a five-dimensional function of three spatial coordinates and two angles, and yet if you do something fancy with lasers, somehow that entire light field can be stored on a piece of normal two-dimensional film and then replicated later.
As far as I can tell, the reason why five-dimensional light fields are stored on two-dimensional film cannot be explained without a lot of wave mechanics, a vivid example of the strangeness of this place and proof that all those physicists are really capable of doing something with their diffraction and phase conjugation.
That disposable plastic, litter or not, harmless when consumed in the form of thousands of tiny particles, is popular for a reason.
That disposable plastic, when disposed of properly, is virtually carbon sequestered, and could be incredibly convenient if/when air-derived plastics replace dead-plankton-derived plastics, although it should be said that the carbon in disposable plastics currently only represents a single-digit percentage of total carbon emissions.
Rocks can be broken into pieces and then you can’t break the pieces but you can check that they came from the same rock, it’s basically cryptography.
The deal society has made is that if you have children, everyone you come in contact with is obliged to contribute something to your support, and it seems to mostly work without the need for constant messy negotiated transactions as Econ 101 would suggest, although the exact outlines of this deal seem a little vague.
The vast majority of all humans who have ever lived lived under some form of despotism, the rest distributed among tribal groups, warlords, failed states, and flawed democracies, and only a few like 1% enjoyed free elections and the rule of law and civil liberties and minimal corruption, yet we endured and today that number is closer to 10%, and so if you find yourself outside that set, don’t lose heart.
If you were in two dimensions and you tried to eat something you would probably split into two pieces because the entire path from mouth to anus would fall apart, so be grateful that you are in three dimensions, although maybe you had some kind of jigsaw shaped digestive system so both of your pieces could only move around or maybe you used the same orifice for both purposes, remember that if you ever find yourself in two dimensions, I guess.
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