Murder fanboys are fricking creepy

If you are not fat, you are hotter than your ancestor from a 100 years ago. Yet you are still dying out, because consumerism and capitalism has made reproduction even more competitive than it previously used to be.

We are already expecting global population to shrink by 25% by the end of the century. Assuming that it peaks by 2050.

As developed economies continue to get richer, their fertility rate continues to go down, even long past the replacement fertility level.

Globally, more than half of the world population is now urbanized. Urban populations have been population sinks since time immemorial. On top of that it has never before been more profitable to not have children when it comes to income accumulation.

What this means is that humanity would have to evolve a strain of humans that like to have more than two children even when they are wealthy and packed together like sardines.

For such an evolutionary trait to emerge would take centuries if not millennia. That is the time scale on which we can expect the human population to keep consistently declining over time.

Lithuania's population has been on the decline since 1991. Their fertility rate today is below 1.3. Globally such a trend holds in the majority of the cases, and the exceptions are found in extremely conservative or extremely poor societies.

Humans are not like grass or trees or fish. Humans do not benefit from a planet covered by themselves. The reason for this being that humanity never grew past the federal union state as their highest functional unit.

Human population would decline until only those remain or evolve that can enjoy each others company long term.

As of now, Netherlands is the smallest unit of collective humans that can contribute positively and heavily to the world. Their population is 17.9 million and rising, and they are already a trillion dollar economy that's not slowing down anytime soon.

We can take this as the assumed minimum human population required to keep moving science and human capabilities forward.

That is, if human population over time shrunk to 0.2% of what it is today, before rebounding, humanity would still be fine and dominating this planet.

This fact alone justifies the amount of competition among humans to separate the wheat from the chaff, again and again, generation after generation.

Conclusion:

Developed world fertility rates are not going to go above replacement for centuries. World population is going to move in the order of "poorest countries --> lower middle income countries --> middle income countries --> upper middle income countries --> high income countries --> developed economies --> Richest developed economy --> Richest developed economy state".

If at any point one of these is having negative population growth, that means something is not working correctly and that part of the world is in decline.

The world population is going to move from the global South to the global North even as it keeps shrinking over time. Expect countries stuck in the middle income trap to split from within into multiple countries as all the rich occupy one side of the country while the poor occupy the other.

Humanity would have fallen to 1% of the population that it has today by the time the global human population begins to rise once again.

The global millionaire population of today is the global total population of tomorrow.

John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire in the US, is believed to have 150 descendants alive today. That's 150 people descended from one billionaire in 180 years time.

Elon Musk already has 12 children and its safe to assume that all of those children together are going to end up with more than 12 grandchildren for Elon Musk.

In the long run, the millionaire class of today, is the average of tomorrow, as humanity continues to evolve upwards.

Moore's law is going to be obsolete by 2036. LLM's increasing computation to develop new capabilities appears to have nearly reached its end point. Vertical farming appears to be a partial replacement for contemporary farming rather than an upgrade over it. Cultured meat never outcompeted normal meat prices, but appears to have become its own luxury meat market. Self driving vehicles appear to be improving linearly rather than exponentially. Same for Robotics. We were hoping for robot nurses by 2030 but it looks like it will be decades more before a humanoid robot can move faster than a human child in an uncontrolled environment.

Everything appears to be moving at the speed of "you will notice the difference in 30 years time." Which is exceptionally slow compared to the pace of the past century.

For all intents and purposes, we appear to be reaching the end point of what is possible in a species scaled up into nation-states.

Where does humanity go from here? It's not like we are technologically in a position to colonize the moon. We at current levels at best have the tech to set up one or two functioning moon bases. Space mining is still generations away.

We are stalling. What is the solution to this problem? It's not just a numbers issue. Research Productivity has been halving every 14 years. We would need to double the number of researchers globally every 14 years to balance it out. A 5% manpower growth rate for researchers globally annually. The world is very obviously not able to keep up with such extreme demands.

The only remaining solution is to increase human intelligence, but even in that the global population is nearing its peak point. In the developed world IQ growth appears to have stalled. Meanwhile in the developing world, IQ appears to be still growing at a rate of 1-3 IQ points per decade. A growth we can expect to stall by the end of the century, based on historical trends in the west.

Currently, the smartest man alive who can add to human knowledge is Terence Tao, and even he is barely able to solve maybe one or two unsolved math problems per decade at his best, then too collaborating with others.

Humanity does not just want intelligent AI, it NEEDS intelligent AI, to continue the growth that humanity has reached the peak of and cannot go any further.

Humanity is once again stuck in competition with one another for resources, until it can figure out a way to continue growing once again. A golden age for the species is coming to an end, unless it figures out a way to revolutionize growth once again.

Industry 4.0 isn't enough. All it did for the developed world was to take it out of the 2008 financial crisis, and that too barely. If the world is to grow any further, it needs something truly world altering. Something that would explode in its reach, and would keep scaling up at that same rate across generations.

So what is that something?

It's not AI. It's not transistor chips. It's not industrial automation, because South Korea is the most heavily automated country in the world, and they are still slowing down. So what is it?

What is the secret to rapid economic growth in the 21st century? Is it to just throw all the technological know how to the developing world? After all, the developing world is all that is growing now. Even so, global growth is still going down.

There is the answer. A problem without a solution. So what's your suggestion?

Factoring in that tech is slowing down not speeding up, these robots are not going to be replacing humans for general purpose work for another 30-40 years if at all.

What's instead going to happen is that we are going to keep getting better at making niche task robots to replace the human from random places. It's going to be a very drawn out iterative process.

We are still just making better cowtools over time. Nothing that can replace us.

Even AI is hitting a wall now, probably got 3-4 more years left before it too hits the wall and is again stuck for another 20-30 years of time.

Additional fun fact:

Japan's life expectancy has begun to go down. 90 might actually be the limit even with all the medical care in the world. Cancer or brain worms just catch up in the end. Nothing is forever repairable. Even stars die.

Tech is hitting the wall, and having only one or zero kids may be the only way left to keep getting richer in a developed economy.

Age of Sigmar's lore is more weird than anything else. Why not bring tomb kings back as living golden rulers of a restored kingdom?

!ifrickinglovescience

!ifrickinglovescience !mathematics !chuds

TLDR photosynthesis converts sunlight, water, and CO2 into energy. Animal cells consume oxygen and sugars and emit CO2. By creating animal cells that consume less oxygen and emit less CO2, we can defeat the disgusting Indians and Chinese raping the planet once and for all.

Abstract

Chloroplasts are photosynthetic organelles that evolved through the endosymbiosis between cyanobacteria-like symbionts and hosts. Many studies have attempted to isolate intact chloroplasts to analyze their morphological characteristics and photosynthetic activity. Although several studies introduced isolated chloroplasts into the cells of different species, their photosynthetic activities have not been confirmed. <mark>In this study, we isolated photosynthetically active chloroplasts from the primitive red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae and incorporated them in cultured mammalian cells via co-cultivation.</mark> The incorporated chloroplasts retained their thylakoid structure in intracellular vesicles and were maintained in the cytoplasm, surrounded by the mitochondria near the nucleus. Moreover, the incorporated chloroplasts maintained electron transport activity of photosystem II in cultured mammalian cells for at least 2 days after the incorporation. Our top-down synthetic biology-based approach may serve as a foundation for creating artificially photosynthetic animal cells.

Article

In an incredible feat that redefines biological boundaries, scientists have successfully engineered animal cells capable of photosynthesis. This breakthrough, led by Professor Sachihiro Matsunaga at the University of Tokyo, could transform medical research and aid in advancing lab-grown meat production. Photosynthesis, traditionally exclusive to plants, algae, and certain bacteria, is a process that uses sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and sugars – essentially "feeding" the organism. "All living organisms on Earth, including humans, are able to live thanks to photosynthesis," Matsunaga said. "Animal cells consume oxygen, eat and break down sugars, and emit carbon dioxide. This reaction is completely opposite to photosynthesis." By introducing photosynthetic properties into animal cells, the team hopes to create cells that consume less oxygen and emit less carbon dioxide – essentially turning them into mini oxygen producers.

Attempts to create photosynthesizing animal cells date back to the 1970s. <mark>"If we can get even part of photosynthesis to occur in animal cells, we can reduce the amount of oxygen consumed, reduce the amount of sugar eaten, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions," Matsunaga said.</mark> However, the challenge lies in convincing animal cells to accept chloroplasts, the cellular structures where photosynthesis happens in plants. Previously, animal cells would destroy chloroplasts, recognizing them as foreign invaders, like bacteria or viruses. After a decade of unsuccessful attempts, research in this field was abandoned, and it became widely accepted that chloroplasts could not function within animal cells.

Matsunaga's team took two major steps to achieve this scientific breakthrough. First, they searched for chloroplasts that could survive the warmer environment of animal cells, which are usually cultured at around 37 degrees Celsius – significantly higher than the temperatures that most plant chloroplasts can endure. After finding suitable chloroplasts, the team had to prevent animal cells from rejecting them as foreign material. "Chloroplasts eaten as food could be maintained in the animal cell for at least two days, during which time the initial reaction of photosynthesis could be detected," said Matsunaga. By allowing animal cells to ingest chloroplasts as "food" rather than forcibly implanting them, the team managed to bypass the immune response that typically destroys the chloroplasts.

The initial results surprised Matsunaga and his colleagues. Not only did the animal cells tolerate the chloroplasts, but they also showed an increased growth rate, suggesting that the chloroplasts provided an additional energy source. "I was surprised because we were able to do something that no one had been able to do for 50 years and that all biological researchers had given up on," Matsunaga said. This achievement may have broad implications, particularly for medical applications and artificial meat production.

While human photosynthesis remains a distant goal, Matsunaga believes the immediate applications lie in medical research and lab-grown meat production. One major obstacle in growing tissue for medical use or artificial meat is ensuring oxygen delivery to densely packed cells. As Matsunaga explained, "when cells become multilayered, the interior of the cell mass [doesn't get enough oxygen]; cell division stops, and size increase is not possible." By embedding chloroplasts, these cell clusters can generate their own oxygen if exposed to light, potentially resuming cell division and growth. Looking further into the future, Matsunaga envisions medical applications that would deliver oxygen to specific organs, such as the heart. For instance, implanting a small LED near the heart could provide light to photosynthetic cells, improving oxygen delivery in heart disease patients. However, extending the chloroplasts' lifespan within animal cells remains a challenge. "In the future, we will improve our technique so that chloroplasts can carry out photosynthesis in animal cells for as long as possible," Matsunaga said.

Matsunaga's study marks a paradigm shift, showcasing how engineering animal cells to photosynthesize could lead to numerous innovations, from lab-grown meat production to enhanced medical treatments. While there is still work to be done to extend chloroplast function within these cells, Matsunaga's team has opened the door to a new realm of possibilities, challenging long-standing beliefs in biology and pushing the boundaries of what cells can achieve. This breakthrough underscores the transformative potential of photosynthesis beyond plant life, offering a unique and versatile tool for addressing human challenges in food production, medicine, and possibly even climate change. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B.

When I'm in a class and don't have a lot to write down but still want to be using my hands, I usually either

Write out a payoff matrix for a 4×4 or 5×5 normal-form game and then try to find all the pure and mixed Nash equilibria, or

Draw a four- or five-vertex directed graph, label the edges with fractions, then write out the transition matrix and calculate the evolution of the system for a handful of time steps

The nice thing about both of these is that they're very "busy" but don't require serious attention, so they're like the math equivalent of worrying a chew toy. I'll probably get tired of these after a while and need to find something else, but I feel like this is at least more enriching than the very space-consuming tesselations I used to fill notebooks with in undergrad.

When I was bored in high school I would encipher texts with a substitution cipher that shifted forward with each letter (so "AAAAA" would be enciphered as "ABCDEF" and "HELLO WORLD" would become "HFNOS BUYTM"). Obviously this is useless as real encryption, but it does frustrate basic frequency analysis if the text is short enough. It consumes a moderate number of background CPU cycles and if you do it enough you derive all kinds of tricks and shortcuts to speed up the process, which made for nice occasional eureka moments to break up the rote part of it.

When I'm bored and have only a pen and paper at my fingertips I sketch out phonologies and evolve them. Start with a phoneme inventory, syllable structure and a few paradigms. Then apply sound changes as desired and see how the paradigms end up. Level analogically, repeat. You can get through a few millennia in the span of a boring lecture or, alternatively, generate a half-dozen daughterlangs with interesting cognate sets. Doing this habitually for years has made me not only a better conlanger but also given me a kind of immediate intuition for diachronics that's very useful in linguistics proper. Highly recommended.

!ifrickinglovescience

!ifrickinglovescience

Palestinian Lives Matter.

Palestine is a gay space marines issue.

!ifrickinglovescience !engineering check this out

Most surreal phenomena ever caught on camera 🧵

1. One of the most mysterious weather phenomena on Earth: meet the sprites pic.twitter.com/JVmz5RVmJT

— Wolf of X (@tradingMaxiSL) October 28, 2024