Immune System: Hey wanna see who can survive the hottest temperatures?
Bacteria: No, absolutely not.
Immune System: Too late!
Bacteria: It’s me! You lose!
Immune System: Fair enough, you defeated the human.
MRSA has entered the chat.
Assuming there is a future for us, big assumption, oh to be a fly on the wall when people are taught that in our era, already aware that we were destroying the planet with heavy industry, we decided to amp up the destruction by generating energy intensive to produce encrypted digital bullshit tokens with fake value as yet another thing to trade with one another just for the hell of it.
Today, class, we’ll be continuing our discussion on the early human economics centuries. Remember these key points for the quiz at the end of the week:
- First they dug shiny gold out of the ground and traded it with one another until they ran out of gold
- Then they traded paper made from trees representing the gold that they no longer traded because there wasn’t enough of gold
- When they finally wiped out trees, they could no longer create more paper to trade, so they started trading random bits of data.
All of this was before the Fortnite skins economy took over, but thats next week’s lesson…
Tally sticks have more to do with the history of currency than gold does
I’d originally written it to cover 20th and 21st century, but gold goes way back farther than that. I was out of interest to expand it.
I feel like this will be an easily understandable concept, provided that money still exists
I feel like given the weather events we’re seeing, that will continue to worsen, greed as a justification to destroy the habitability of our only world will be met with contempt once most have lost friends/relatives to the accompanying destruction/famines/droughts. No different than the highly profitable slave trade.
If we make it and find ways to mitigate or tolerate our new climate that will take millions of years to repair itself from what we’ve done in decades, we will likely be considered very backwater and primitive for doing it eyes wide open.
If you get infected, you’ll wish you had never been born
So before it emails your grandmother all of your porn
Turn off your computer and make sure it powers down
Drop it in a forty-three foot hole in the ground
Bury it completely, rocks and boulders should be fine
Then burn all the clothes you may have worn any time you were online!
VIRUS ALERT!
That’s not too far off from the truth. Viruses hijack your cells’ machinery to reproduce. Some are choosy about which cells/tissues they target, but some are not.
Fever, histamine, a whole slew of different immune mechanisms all cooperate to tackle these invaders. In turn, our immune system also provides a lot of strong evolutionary pressure on these bugs, which spurs high mutation rates like we’ve seen with COVID. What I find fascinating is that, over time, a lot of viruses have evolved to take advantage of our habits and behaviors including leaning into our immune response(s). The common cold (rhinovirus) is a good example here as it causes just enough sneezing in social settings to propagate, but is not aggressive enough to kill the host or keep you bedridden. Norovirus is another one, opting to incubate for a bit, then overwhelm the host with a big mess, and finally leaving you feeling a-okay to socialize while still being contagious (in the grossest way possible).
And the icing on the cake? Some cells survive to incorporate viral DNA into that cell’s genetic code, while still being perfectly healthy. Human DNA is littered with many such encodings, suggesting we all carry the genetic memory of some ancient pandemics.
Edit: the Anime “Cells at Work” is a very fun romp into this world. Highly recommended.
Isn’t cells incorporating invader DNA how we ended up with mitochondria?
Also, 2nd season of cells at work is even better than the 1st fwiw.
I thought mitochondria was thought to have been a bacteria which was absorbed by a cell and ended up not getting eaten and it became a symbiotic relationship somehow.
I think the mitochondria thing was more a case of ancient cells incorporating other cells as organelles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis#From_endosymbionts_to_organelles
I couldn’t get into that 2nd season since it was very dark. I’ll have to give it another go.
When you have one of those sweaty poops that makes you cramp, that’s a bitcoin being released.
They will actually wear out your hardware by increasing cell turnover. Eventually re-copying the code to new cells becomes less accurate and it starts introducing bugs like cells that don’t work as well or make too many of themselves and that don’t kill themselves if they wind up growing in the wrong place or making hormones they’re not supposed to or in the wrong amounts. There are some specific things that make the dna itself just copy wrong to begin with like nicotine or UV exposure, and those are the highest risk, but ultimately anything that puts wear and tear on your body in some way is a little bit of a risk.
Kinda the same no, your body is using a lot of energy and wasting some as heat to fight, similarly to your GPU trying to run whatever the new hard to process game is now.
