But a virus's "goal" would not be to wipe out a species, that would be a dead end. Nature has explored flight on an unimaginable scale, yet our machines fly better (at least in most aspects) than birds, some even go to space.

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gilleain 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, but also viruses do not actually have goals as such - maybe 'replicate' could be their only goal. So a virus _could_ come up with a mutation that kills all its hosts, it just dies out as well in the process. Not very reassuring for the host!

As a slight aside - since I was talking about the weakness of biological analogy on HN recently - the way humans fly is very very different to how (most) birds do. If nanomachines actually could be built by humans (non-biological nanomachines) they might be as different to virus/cells/organisms as plane wings are to bird wings.

Of course, also please do not prompt a frontier model to make nanomachines, either, thankyou.

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timcobb 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds. Our flying machines combust jet fuel, birds can fly by ATP. Not to mention earth-destructing.

And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)

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nsarrazin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds

This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds!

You have to look at the energy spent for moving a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits)

For a plane that’s roughly 80 tonnes of kerosene for 170 tonnes dry weight on a similar distance (787). Energy density of fat and kerosene are actually pretty close so you can just look at the kg of fuel burned per kg of payload for the trip. For a bird that’s 1kg of fuel per kg transported and for the plane that’s ~0.5kg per kg. So roughly twice as efficient.

So from a pure energy point of view it’d be more efficient to put all the migratory birds in a 787 than letting them fly on their own!

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elcritch 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Fascinating! Though how much of that would be due to a birds baseline metabolism? Wouldn’t be a fair comparison if that includes the birds basic energy costs of living.

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nsarrazin an hour ago | parent [-]

Did some quick maths, it’s roughly 10% for the bird (2W, approx. 4g/day of fat, over 10 days) so not negligible but doesn’t change the full story.

And you could argue the plane also has a baseline metabolism ;)

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timcobb 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

Haha thanks for the check, I am, tbh, pretty surprised. But it's within the same order of magnitude given the assumptions, which is interesting too.

	▲	nsarrazin 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To be completely fair to the birds, I think a lot of this comes from the fact that what matters for flying efficiency gets better as you size up thanks to the square-cube law: the drag is reduced and the engine efficiency increases. You could not scale down a plane to the size of a bird and match their efficiency. On the other hand you also couldn’t scale a bird to the size of a plane so I guess we can call it even!

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lumost 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Biology is very messy and very data constrained. We think that human anatomy works one way- but surgery and radiology are hard because every human is very different.

Missing organs, odd tissue performing unclear functions, different, new or missing muscles.

It’s unclear whether a world ending virus is even possible. There might be better luck with prions, or fungi.