The Line is very stupid.

At 200 meters across and 170 km long it has a surface area of 34 square kilometers.

Let’s assume that instead of building a giant line, we build a bunch of highrises next to each other with the same height and same combined building footprint (so, same internal area). To account for the fact that we would need streets between the buildings we’ll just double the required area to 68 sq km (the line’s design already has internal streets, so this is a high ball estimate).

The resulting city, if it were a circle, would have a diameter of 9.3 km. Which means it would take you about 23 minutes to get from one edge to the other (worst case trip) by riding a bike, or ~12 minutes to get from the center to the edge.

As you can see stretching a city out into a giant ribbon makes things very far away from each other for little benefit. Water pipes are lines too, and while building your city like that would mean that you’d only need one big pipe it certainly wouldn’t make it easier to distribute water if you had to pump it a hundred km.

No matter what comparison you pick people will complain that it isn’t applicable.

I think I understand your main point pretty well, that point being “takes bong rip bro, just think about how small an atom is bro, like bro, just think about how many atoms are in your hand bro, dude woah”.

Up until my last comment I was trying to have a meaningful conversation with you about things like organization in biological systems, but you’ve done nothing but talk past me while jerking yourself off over how much more “aware” you are than everyone else, even while you admit you don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about about cellular biology.

And by the way, I’m not attacking you for “explaining things in simple terms”, I’m attacking you because you said a bunch of stuff that’s factually wrong while acting like an ass.

8 billion now.

Definitely wrong, although I do not have a collegiate off-hand understanding of biology to really fully decribe it.

Well, from reading this its pretty clear to me now that you don’t know much about biology. And yet you have really strong opinions on something you have no education in.

But it comes down to what does a “cell” mean in biology? Even your case in point specifies an object with many cells in it.

What are you even trying to say here?

Cell membranes don’t use simple diffusion to transport chemicals across.

They do for quite a lot things actually. Simple diffusion, facilitated diffusion, and active transport all take place and are all necessary for the cell to function. The ratio of cytoplasm volume to cell membrane area is relevant regardless.

By the way, you didn’t need to write an entire paragraph about homeostasis or try to define what a cell is.

I really have to ask… Why do you think humans aren’t so big on the scale of life? Your perspective really come across as human-centric. Not “bad” by itself, but still wholly incompatible with reality.

Your perspective really comes across like you’re high on something. You also apparently didn’t understand what my comment was even about. It was about this sentence:

You are assuming a red blood cell is a common size

I wasn’t assuming anything. In saying “correct me if I’m wrong” I was being charitable in leaving the door open that you might know something relevant about cellular scale that I didn’t. But I’m pretty confident now that is not the case.

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC cell size is mostly determined by the necessary rate of diffusion across the membrane and the surface area to volume ratio for a given size.

So, while there are some extreme outliers with more exotic cell biology, organisms having similar cellular metabolisms will generally have similarly sized cells, at least within an order of magnitude. Or in other words, an elephant is much larger than an ant because it has many more cells, not because its cells are much larger.

An exception to this of course being neural cells, which can be very very long, or very wide and branched (like Purkinje cells). But even within the brain this still kinda holds true. I actually know much more about brain anatomy than general biology, and I remember from the book Principles of Brain Evolution that elephant brains are much larger than ours, and actually have a much larger number of neurons, and that strangely intelligence seems to correlate more with the ratio between brain and body size than with absolute brain size. A possible explanation is that it may simply take a larger number of neurons to coordinate a larger number of muscle cells.

EDIT: case in point C. Elegans is about 1mm (or 1000 μm) long and has 1031 cells, including 302 neurons, which lines up with its cells being about as large as human cells when you consider that its a 3D volume and not a single chain of cells lined up next to each other.

Yeah, but its not made out of undifferentiated proteins, its made out of cells.

A human red blood cell is about 6.2 μ wide (though only a couple micrometers thick), so if we assume this little guy is 1.5 cm long that’s only 2420 human red blood cells from tip to tail.

IMO that’s pretty amazing and you should be amazed.

Interesting to note that this is being spearheaded by lower-income developing nations.

There were those on the left who were worried that the phase out of fossil fuels would be like the developed nations pulling the ladder up behind themselves. But with the way things are going now countries in the global south may actually end up leapfrogging the imperial core, as they build out cleaner and more advanced infrastructure.

Yep, instead of a single address you should be able to issue keys that let people message you, and when you receive a message you should be able to see what key was used to send it.

And of course you should be able to revoke keys (tell your mail server to no longer accept messages signed with it).

Its terrible because it is geometrically impossible for a form of transit to simultaneously have high capacity and to carry people directly to their destination.

Cars average an occupancy of about 1.5, while trains routinely carry hundreds of people. A bit of thought about the implications of everyone arriving directly at their destination should reveal why the average occupancy of such a transit mode can never be much higher than 1.5. This is something that many many advocates of PRT (personal rapid transit) systems fail to understand.

By the way, a pedestrian oriented space can be made to accommodate people that have difficulty walking, but it is virtually impossible to make a city safe and accessible for people with difficulty seeing if the expectation is that everyone is driving a car to their destination.

Its possible for every urban area everywhere across the globe, because the laws of geometry are the same across the entire globe.

In many cities in many countries the conscious choice was made to destroy transit infrastructure and radically alter the urban fabric to accommodate cars (and in so doing hamper every other form of transportation). But nothing about this has anything at all to do with the city’s location, and its not an accident that public transportation just ‘happens’ to be better in some places than in others.

Its not possible for the majority of uninhabited land on the planet, but its possible for the majority of people globally that live in urban areas.

Its a good thing that busses and trains don’t take you directly to your destination.

Can it even be said that it was perfected when later we switched from carbon filament to tungsten, and from there to halogen-surrounded tungsten.

And on the other side, Edison’s lamp wasn’t even the first one to be mass produced and commercially sold.

There’s a certain style of education that really wants to draw a hard line between “before the thing” and “after the thing”, and credit its invention to a single guy. But really the line is quite wide and fuzzy.

deleted by creator

Hell yeah brother

I was trying to resolve the ambiguity between “this account” (which is indeed an object) and “the people here”.

I try not to misgender, so I have edited it to “they”. Not because I respect anything an advertiser says though.

Everyone arguing with this account needs to realize that they might as well be talking to an LLM. Look at how advertisers think:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf

Just like an LLM can’t distinguish between truth and fiction they can’t distinguish between meaningful information and advertising BS. The people here will never win their argument against them because they classify all human communication as an act of manipulation, so the definition of advertising will be made more and more broad until they say “look, you were swayed”.

Because making a dynamic 3rd person camera that works well is really complicated.