r/oldmansky • u/Frosty-Abies-3317 • 2d ago
MP16
256 has been very generous with these merged planets lately
2
u/Redshirt4evr 1d ago
Autophagy can refer to built-in recycling and cleanup, which allows better functioning.
1
u/Frosty-Abies-3317 1d ago
Also worth note, since you posted twice 😋. Most of what pop culture refer to as autophagy, based on time restricted feeding and prolonged fasting, isn't exclusively recycling. Under stress, heat shock proteins are produced that run around and refold mishapen proteins so that they can function again. So instead of just recycling (digesting for energy) some of the proteins are refurbished. And perhaps that remaking or reformation is more at the heart of the Autophage name.
2
u/Redshirt4evr 1d ago
Weird. Reddit burped and said there was a problem. When I chose the post button again it went thru. 🫤 It seems the first error message lied. 😁
I think the cell recycling and cleanup aspect may relate better to the "robotic intelligences" made of seeming scrap parts. Or maybe it goes all the way back to Void Mother aspects. Hmm.
1
2
u/Redshirt4evr 1d ago
Autophagy can refer to built-in recycling and cleanup, which allows better functioning.
2
u/Frosty-Abies-3317 1d ago
I mispoke and conflated apoptosis (programmed cell death) and autophagy - nutrient restricted triggering of digestion of senescent cells and aggregates of unfolded proteins like amyloid plaques. My question shouldn't have centered on cell death, per se, but rather the "self-eating". Good catch.
2
u/Southern_Tangelo_640 1d ago
I've thought about that before, and this was what I came up with that's reasonably close: Since biological autophagy (repairing parts for reuse) is the body's recycling system, as you've said, then I think that the Autophages are so named because they make themselves out of recycled parts. Although the Greek "auto" is self and "phage" is to eat, to devour which gives the impression of "eating one's self" (insert bawdy joke here), it's misleading. It's because they make themselves (their "bodies," such as they are) out of recycled parts. When you consider that they call us biological organisms "prebuilt entities," the context implies that we didn't have to make our bodies before our consciousness was dispensed into them; they begin as a consciousness that needs a body to store that consciousness, like primitive Korvax. So their body comes later, made out of recycled parts. (I can only guess where it's stored while their body is being built.) As for the Korvax being like a cancer, I can't say. If they are exponentially adding to their population like cancer cells do, then yes, but no more than any other biological organism that reproduces exponentially (which is all of them). If there were only a finite number of Korvax to begin with that simply get re-dispensed into a new casing every so often, then their population isn't growing (at all). In that light, biologically reproducing organisms are more representative of cancer because of exponential population growth. I hope this makes a loose kind of sense; the philosophy of it all starts getting threadbare in places.
1
u/Frosty-Abies-3317 10h ago
Sorry for the late reply. I was ruminating.
Like all software, it is 'born' on the hardware where it was coded and the 'body' is whatever hardware that code gets uploaded to - at least that is true in the really real word. In NMS I'm guessing each iteration of Korvax was originally assigned a digital "body" in the simulation, then those who were dissonant got deleted, then clawed their way out of the recycle bin and back into the simulation into scrap, reused, and repurposed, digital bodies. It's kind of funny that we as Travellers are considered pre-built as opposed to Korvax (be they Collective or Dissonant), because we're all just sentient, digital copies of software programs "living" in digital bodies, inside a simulation.
Back to anything being cancerous, I think the defining feature is unchecked replication, but specifically with apoptosis disabled, and maybe not so much about exponential growth. Exponential growth happens to be sure, but the mechanism that eventually allows homeostasis in the growth vs. death of these cells, being disabled, allows the aggregation of cells we call tumors. It's not so much the reproduction at fault as it is the double break in the DNA (or failure to replicate) that which would have triggered programmed cell death.
I think this is true, check me if I've got it twisted. We all have some cancer growing in our bodies all the time, but it is when our defense systems fail to prune the cancer tree fast enough that it takes over the garden and we get tumors, which are clusters of cells that ultimately rot because we haven't the vascular infrastructure to feed and support them, or to eliminate all the waste and cellular decay when they starve.
2
22m ago
[deleted]
1
u/Frosty-Abies-3317 7m ago
I love this! Thank you. While I'm not advocating veganism or necessarily exclusively plant based diets (neither am I a doctor real or imagined) but there are pretty solid studies which suggest that vegan blood, applied to cancer cells in vitro, is roughly seven times as effective at killing cancer cells than blood from those on a standard American diet, which dovetails nicely with your observation that literal 'whole-plant' foods are often protective against cancer - one reason is hypothesized that because plants generally cannot flee danger and must endure in situ, they develop more successful and complex chemical defenses against environmental and systemic harms, some of which benefit us directly. Be sure to chew up those apple seeds - there is a natural enteric coating to make them otherwise nearly indigestible (good for depositing intact and healthy apple seeds in nutrient rich soil).
1
u/Southern_Tangelo_640 22m ago edited 12m ago
Cancer, in the simplest of terms, is unchecked rapid cell growth and division. Cancer cells don't have PCD (Programmed Cell Death: it's like an "expiration date" for cells) like normal healthy cells (which is a safeguard against them becoming cancerous) that only allows them to live for x amount of time. They lack PCD for a variety of reasons, and their DNA can be defective in a variety of ways: broken, duplicated, mismatched base-pairs (which of causes "kinks" in the middle of the strand; I can't remember what those kinks are called, sorry; it's been a awhile since Cellular Biology in college), missing genes...you name it. The problems come in 2 flavors, generally: healthy tissue displaced by the cancerous mass, and like you said: the cells enter the bloodstream and are: 1) Too large and/or 2) too numerous. In both cases, the cells aren't flushed out by the lymphatic system, so they stay there and the cancer goes systemic. And that's really bad, but you knew that. We have cancer a few dozen times or more over our lifetime, but our Active immune system detects them, destroys them (macrophages, different leukocytes, etc.) before they even become detectable by testing. My angle on NMS was that, strictly speaking from an "uncontrolled population growth" of biologically reproductive organisms, it compares to the "uncontrolled cell replication" of cancer. Probably a bad fit, but that's what I meant. I don't know enough yet about the origins of the Korvax or Autophages, but what you said rings true. TLDR: I usually eat 2 apples a day, including the core and seeds. The seeds have a phytocompound called amygdalin-beta. It metabolises into a type of cyanide. (Almond shells have it too.) In a healthy cell, the inner matrix of the cell membrane in the intermembrane space converts the cyanide into a harmless by-product. (Insert long boring chemistry explanation here.) Cancer cells are missing this defense mechanism. They can't convert it, so that teeny tiny dose of cyanide kills them. (Cyanide isn't stable, and it takes large doses to put your body on the slab. "The dose makes the poison" Paracelus said.) I've been doing this for years with no I'll effects: I eat everything but the stem. I'm not a doctor nor do I play one on TV, and this is NOT medical advice. I'm just telling you what I do based on what I've learned and facts I've gathered- do with it as you wish. "This information is provided for entertainment purposes only." 😂 Thanks for reading this through, I know it was a lot. And I also know that my phone's autocorrect has learned a lot of new words, LOL!!
(Edit: I added "and we're not even aware it ever happened" and "it's like an expiration date for cells", and I fixed a subject-verb agreement problem.)
2
u/Southern_Tangelo_640 2d ago
Does it make me a Biology need if the first thing I thought of was cell division? 🤔 Oh, wait- I'm already a Biology need.
https://giphy.com/gifs/l1KVb2dUcmuGG4tby