| ▲ | schnuri 3 hours ago |
| I am in awe about how wonderfully engineered by evolution the body is. E.g., what we are able to do with it and how it heals itself when we have an injury. Sure, many people would not live long without external intervention, but many others would. I still want to see the robot that can survive 80 active years without maintenance. |
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| ▲ | onlypassingthru 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The human machine doesn't just survive without external intervention, it actually gets better at being a machine. Speed, endurance, power, coordination... all improve with usage. |
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| ▲ | dgunay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well, we do at least have to eat enough food and sleep ~1/3rd of our lives. That's kinda maintenance |
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| ▲ | vconnor an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Compared to most animals that spend their entire day foraging for food, it's not too bad. Adapting to eating dense and very nutritious animal flesh is a great time-saver, and as we didn't evolve long fangs, we had to learn to use tools instead, and the rest is history. (mixing cause and effect here for dramatic purposes) | | |
| ▲ | nerdralph 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I think learning to cook food was likely a greater benefit. It's like we externally expanded our means of digestion. I watched a Ted talk where the speaker suggested our large brains with their high energy consumption would not have been possible were it not for cooking. |
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| ▲ | yhjc2692 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | quite the delightful maintenance too | |
| ▲ | micromacrofoot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | that's absolutely maintenance, without it you have a total system failure in a week |
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| ▲ | ericmay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| When you watch those sci-fi shows and folks have nanobots implanted in them that heal wounds really fast or do other cool things I can't help but think in many ways we already have that technology we just need it to do more, faster as our brains and ability to create things have outpaced the rate of evolutionary change. |
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| ▲ | RobotToaster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Humans don't last long without topping up their fluids and consumables. |
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| ▲ | markyc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| no you don't |
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| ▲ | chistev 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The human body can't survive 80 active years without maintainance. They take drugs, they see the doctor, etc. |
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| ▲ | CookieCrisp 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | What did people do 500 years ago? | | |
| ▲ | EduardoBautista 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Die as a child at alarming rates | | |
| ▲ | lukan 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | But those who did not, got quite old without ever seeing a doctor. (If we are talking about hunter gatherers, not poor exploited peasants) | | |
| ▲ | steve_adams_86 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Humans have assisted each other medically, supported injured and disabled tribe members, and sought out medicinal herbs since long before history was written. I'm not sure how you'd delineate between modern health care and when humans never had some notion of health care and/or support when bodies enter failure modes. We don't survive well without a lot of assistance and care, and living long lives required plenty of bodily maintenance regardless of how fortunate and healthy we were. | |
| ▲ | 1attice 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Citation required | | |
| ▲ | Fezzik an hour ago | parent [-] | | Gurven, Michael & Hillard Kaplan (2007). “Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination.” Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321–365 If you made it past age 5 as a hunter-gatherer you’d likely live to 50-60 years of age. | | |
| ▲ | 1attice an hour ago | parent [-] | | Interesting. Yet as someone approaching the first of those two last numbers, I would say that that isn't very old at all | | |
| ▲ | Fezzik an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s also worth noting that, while this is (I think) likely the most cited paper on the topic, all the observed societies are from the 20th century. So we can’t necessarily extrapolate from that that hunter-gatherers 300,000 years ago fared the same. | |
| ▲ | exe34 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Old people are at least 20-30 years older than I am. |
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