A castle built on sand. The only way to take the premise of this claim seriously is to ignore data for the past 100 years.
When I was in the US military, we all complained about the Body Mass Index standards. They were based on the WWII era "normal". Men were smaller. Less muscle mass. Shorter. If the average fit American young man tried to fit into a pilot's cockpit from the 1950's, it would feel quite cramped. Like it was built for much small people. It was.
We have certainly climbed the Kardashev scale since the 1950's. To what degree is a matter of contention. But, all would agree that we have moved up the scale.
Muscle atrophy has not been correlated with the growth. The opposite seems true. The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.
In addition, it is likely that the romantic picture of the average laborer "bodybuilding" is fictive and ignores how muscle atrophy and hypertrophy works. Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. They are staying well within cardiovascular zones of muscle activation. Hence, bodybuilders as we know them are largely a modern phenomenon. And they are certainly WAY more muscular.
Seems the model that underlies this claim is built on seemingly demonstrably false premises.
> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924.
This is true, but sort of a sleight of hand -- obese people that don't exercise have more muscle mass than non-obese people who don't exercise, just to carry around all of the fat. And obviously the average American, both male and female, is more overweight/obese than in 1924.
(I agree with basically everything else you say, though.)
Agreed, I was debating whether or not this was relevant to mention.
What I could have added was a caveat that sample non-obese people from each time would indicate that 2024 people have greater average muscle mass.
Personally, a more interesting question is whether growth along the Kardashev scale leads to a greater disparity in muscle mass vs body fat. The past 100 years would seem to indicate that it is possible. That being said, it could also be a uniquely American phenomenon. My hypothesis would be that avg muscle mass among French men has still grown over the past 100 years but I don't think obesity has grown to the extreme that it has in the USA.
While the US is extrem, the “obesity epidemic” affects pretty much all countries as they become richer. I wonder if recent developments in obesity drugs like ozempic will have a significant impact there in the coming decades.
Obese people don't have more muscle, especially if you look into the more extreme cases. Muscle atrophy seems to happen due to low insuline sensitivity.
And relative they are weaker in the sense that the ratio between strength and body mass is smaller than that of normal people.
So: extreme cases (both obesity and powerlifting) are not relevant when we're talking about population-wide averages. And relative weakness is also irrelevant (the original claim was solely about muscle mass -- if you want to talk about that being a bad metric, you're responding to the wrong comment).
You make one specific relevant claim: "obese people don't have more muscle." (Which belies everything I've read on the subject.) So, uh, why do you think that?
by that logic, women would have more muscle mass then men, because they carry around more fat. Average american by definition is average. Overweight by definition is above average. BMI normal is outdated, just needs to move up.
> by that logic, women would have more muscle mass then men, because they carry around more fat.
No? You have to compare like for like. Sedentary obese women have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight women, and sedentary obese men have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight men. (And the ratio of women to men hasn't moved very much since 1924, and both sexes are heavier than they were in 1924.)
The rest of your comment is not responsive to mine.
Why would BMI need to move up? Because it doesn't represent the average, or because it doesn't represent health?
I think the former is uncontroversial but boring, and the later is wrong. I also think that people conflate the two because they want to pretend that being average is the same thing as being healthy.
It's worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of classical statues like Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules, etc. indicates that there were at least some men walking around in antiquity with an amount of muscle mass that could only be developed by deliberate hypertrophy training of the whole body, as opposed to just getting muscle as a side effect of specific athletic training. It seems like these people were doing something quite similar to modern bodybuilding, goal-wise.
Milo of Croton is often cited as the earliest recorded examples of a progressive resistance training program: "He would train in the off years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place. By the time the events were to take place, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. He carried the full-grown cow the length of the stadium, then proceeded to kill, roast, and eat it."
Full grown cow gemini says 1,400lbs. World squat record 1,311.8. Panathenaic Stadium, Athens was 850 feet long, further than a single squat. Either we've gotten weaker, or cows have gotten bigger.
Cows and other animals have been intentionally bred to become bigger.
If you look at medieval illustrations of shepherds and farmers [0], one thing that strikes you is just how small all the animals are. Even in relation to the medieval humans who were significantly shorter than us.
It had its advantages - for example, a leaner, smaller animal can walk long distances and won't get stuck in swampy ground. But it doesn't give you a lot of anything - hide, meat, milk... Nowadays, we have huge animals, which nevertheless have to be transported by trucks. No longer capable of walking 50 miles from the lowland to the mountains to graze.
In ancient times, such as during the period of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, full-grown cows were significantly smaller than modern cattle. Based on archaeological evidence (bones and remains), historians and archaeozoologists estimate the following sizes:
• Height: Approximately 100–120 cm (3.3–4 feet) at the shoulder.
• Weight: Between 200–400 kg (440–880 lbs), depending on the breed, sex, and regional conditions.
For comparison:
• Modern cattle like Holsteins (dairy cows) stand around 140–150 cm at the shoulder and weigh 700–900 kg.
• Some smaller modern breeds, like Dexter cattle, resemble ancient cattle in stature, with a height of 90–120 cm and weight of 300–450 kg.
Factors Influencing Smaller Size in Ancient Cattle
1. Nutritional Limitations: Grazing conditions were less controlled, and fodder quality was inconsistent.
2. Genetics: Ancient cattle were not selectively bred for size like modern cattle.
3. Purpose: Cattle were primarily used for labor (draught animals) and small-scale milk production, rather than for meat.
Ancient cattle were functional animals suited to the agricultural practices and available resources of their time, so their size reflected these limitations.
Please don't post LLM output as comments here. It is helpful for commenters to apply at least a modicum of effort to ensuring that the factual statements they make are correct rather than just authoritatively phrased bullshit.
Of course, plenty of us are capable of producing authoritatively phrased bullshit without any artificial aids! But we should try to minimize that phenomenon rather than maximizing it.
Cows have gotten a lot bigger. That specific legend about Milo may be embellished, but his existence as an exceptional athlete is attested by multiple authors.
The point is really: Classical Greek athletes were doing a lot of recognizable strength training. "Halteres" are basically stone dumbbells (in Spanish the derived word "halterofilia" is the modern name for Olympic weightlifting).
You have other examples like Bybon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybon) where we have an inscribed rock with a handle carved into it explicitly to use as a weightlifting feat.
This was definitely part of the culture and people knew what trained athletes looked like.
If you miss Chuck Norris jokes and want to know the Ancient Grecian equivalent, I highly suggest reading more quotes about Milo of Croton.
The dude won six Olympic wrestling events in a row. The seventh Olympics, he came in second. A twenty-eight year rein in one of the most practiced sports in the ancient world.
It's also worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of the art of Tom of Finland, depicting men with penises in an anatomically accurate position, indicates that there were men with enormous bulging dicks in the early 1960s, enormous bulging dicks of a size and heft typically unequalled by the average man today. Could he have imagined a penis larger than he had ever actually seen? Impossible, of course. The human brain is incapable of bringing to mind anything that it has not seen actually put in its eyes' field of vision.
A large penis looks the same as a small penis, only larger. Hypertrophied muscles do not look like bigger versions of normal muscles; they have a significantly different shape. A muscular person with normal-to-high body fat also looks very different than a muscular person with low body fat (look at heavyweight or superheavyweight powerlifters compared to bodybuilders). Classical sculptures of Greek heroes display high muscle mass and very low body fat.
Indeed, all humans must have been as big as Michaelangelo's David: 17 feet tall, since anyone who acquires the skill of accurate detailed sculpting automatically loses their ability to do anything but a 1:1 scale. :p
Are you kidding? Even if you're a very skilled sculptor, you don't get an extremely accurate sculpture of a human body without a living reference in front of you. A muscular person doesn't look like a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up
Well, my response was slightly tongue in cheek. I was just struck by the implied theory that because works of art depict something, that automatically means that thing actually existed.
Regarding your specific example, I'd actually say that "a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up" is a fairly good description of what a muscular person looks like! And, further, I would be fairly confident that an ancient Greek sculptor, having observed numerous models, would be able to ramp the dials up to 12, producing a figure with a degree of outlandish magnificence never actually quite seen in real life, while still appearing anatomically accurate enough not to look weird.
As to how buff the Greeks really were, I admit we'd need a time machine.
I can imagine big dicks all I want, if I've never seen one, it's hard to sculpt it accurately. Indeed, me sculpting a perfectly accurate huge dick, veins and all, almost certainly means I've seen at least one.
There is another, and in my opinion, a much greater flaw with the base argument - most predictions about the future are very, very wrong. The future is not only built on technological and scientific progress, but also on the generation and evolution of social mores and expectations. We are already seeing a scientific and cultural shift that celebrates being healthier, including working out to have more muscle mass and investing heavily in optimising this, and there is no way on how this will evolve in the future.
And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).
The major federal government food assistance programs came out of findings in WW2 that many potential recruits were literally malnourished and underweight. They had grown up poor and starving during the Great Depression. Beyond the human tragedy this was a national security issue. Some men were too small and weak to meet military standards.
Indeed. Which would seem to indicate that positive growth along the Kardashev scale will lead to hypertrophy not atrophy, as conjectured by the OP. One could hypothesize that growing control of energy is highly correlated with the ability to empower a population to increase in muscle mass. Of course, history would seem to indicate that there can also be a correlation to increased obesity.
> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924.
I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but I'd be genuinely interested in reading the source on this, unless you just mean because people are bigger overall they have more muscle as a function of weight.
No, I do mean precisely the average muscle mass is higher. Granted we are dealing with statistics. There is inevitably a lot more context than just a myopic focus on this single fact.
This is particular relevant in the military because your fitness level is graded relative to you BMI. Hence, it is common trope one hears in the military. It is a practical question in the military. If the BMI is based on 1950's pilots and today's soldiers have a higher average BMI, then it can have an impact on promotions, fitness scores, health assessments, etc.
* drug use (marajuana in a country where it's legal in 24 of 50 states) (8%)
* mental / physical health (7%)
how much of that was just previously hidden or lied about? also it doesn't show any previous stats. So can't really draw any conclusions. also doesn't cover where the deltas were from.
> drug use (marajuana in a country where it’s legal in 24 of 50 states)
Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law. 47 states, the District of Colombia, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands have restructured their own marijuana laws to except from them use of marijuana, generally or in specific forms, for medical use. 24 of those states, D.C., Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands have (also, except in the last case) done the same for adult (over 21) recreational marijuana use [0], as well. The federal government has an official (in the form of a restriction in appropriations laws since 2015) policy of non-enforcement for now (without waiving the possibility of future enforcement within the statute of limitations should that funding restriction lapse) of certain federal criminal prohibitions against state-authorized medical use. (However, for example, all financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with Treasury’s FinCEN for all marijuana-related businesses they discover to be clients, even if the businesses are exclusively involved in activities covered by that enforcement deferment.)
[0] For those interested in inverting this, marijuana use has neither medical nor adult-use exceptions under state/territorial law in only 3 states (Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska) plus American Samoa.
The data isn't hidden or lied about. If you think the data is fudged, go pick up a high school year book or photo album from the 1950s or 1960s and take a look at the young people.
I didn't say it was fudged.... mmmm fudge... I was pointing out that the article is pretty useless for determining if it's obesity or other for seeing why they're changing the requirements.
Also as the gpgp was talking about... in many places obseity is purely based on weight / height ratio... which doesn't bring muscle into account. So all I can say is I can't really say what factors are involved.
Even at the high school level, coaches for sports like football have noticed in the past 10-20 years that the fitness of incoming students has precipitously declined because so much of how children spend their time is less playing outside (e.g., running around, jumping, climbing, etc.) but playing inside (e.g., video games, doomscrolling, watching Youtube, etc.).
Suburbs around the country are quiet after school as all the kids are inside physically atrophying.
Sorry, what am I missing here? Your link talks about average weight and BMI increasing, not muscle mass. You couldn't safely draw a conclusion about muscle mass from BMI.
> A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.
What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.
Anecdotal: I helped my dad a few years ago do a lot of genealogy. He had pictures going back to the late 1800s for one branch of the family that just arrived from Ireland. Most of the men were shirtless and you could count every rib. There was very little muscle.
People who fled a famine so severe that it lead over 100% of that country's population to emigrate are surely a representative sample of a normal physique from that era, especially immediately after a week-long ocean crossing.
Of course most eras have famine victims, once-in-a-century famines happen more or less every century after all. But treating those famine victims as representatives of a normal physique for that era would be foolish, in any era.
Agreed, there is an economic factor here but I would see that is highly correlated with the Kardashev grade of a civilization. The conjecture of the OP is that higher Kardashev grade will result in higher atrophy. My claim is that we seem to find precisely the opposite to be true.
I'm not making a counter-argument to the OP's position. I'm only making a refutation of the conjecture.
Over the last year I've roughly doubled my pushup strength, with very visible resulting muscular hypertrophy in my triceps, back, and shoulders (even though I was optimizing for strength rather than hypertrophy). The total time taken over that year has been about 6 hours: three 40-second sets of pushups every two days, with 2⅓ minute breaks between sets, which I'm not counting because I can post to HN and drink yerba mate during that time. This works out to one minute per day.
There is literally nobody in the world who has less than 6 hours of free time per year. This is not a matter of economics; no economic system is so all-pervading as to sell every single minute of your day.
I started out doing three sets of knee pushups to failure, and once I reached ten reps I switched to real pushups; once I reach failure on the real pushups (3–5 reps in the first set, sometimes as little as 2 in the last) I continue with knee pushups until failure. This takes about 40 seconds and seems to be a good balance of intensity and safety. The only equipment it requires is a reasonably clean floor or patch of grass, so you don't have to buy equipment, pay a gym membership, or even walk to a different part of the house. You can do it on the train while commuting to work, at the bus stop while awaiting the bus, in the break room at the office, outside your car in the parking lot, in the park when you walk the dog, or in your bedroom after getting up, unless your hoarding problem is even worse than mine.
I'm slightly obese (109kg) like most of the population in rich countries, and I think my state of muscular development was about average in that context. Calisthenics permits increasing resistance to almost arbitrarily high levels, so you can keep the intensity high and the workouts short even as you get stronger. Stronger people would presumably need to invest more time than one minute per day to make further progress, perhaps as much as ten minutes or even more, but those aren't the people we're talking about.
So what's missing? It might be inspiration, discipline, executive function, hope, knowledge, wisdom, or some combination of these. But it's not time or money.
I fully agree that these simple exercises can get you quite far. I have made similarly good experiences by aiming for 50 cleanly executed push-ups per day. But you will soon have to diversify them, though that requires simple equipment only: a high horizontal bar for pull-ups and dead hangs is surprisingly hard to find outside of a gym.
Aerobic exercise, which should really also be part of a workout routine, is significantly more time-consuming though, and requires proper equipment. Most importantly a new pair of good running shoes every year or so to reduce wear on the joints.
So yes, even with kids or similarly demanding circumstances it should be possible to accommodate moderate exercise in most peoples lives. But the result probably won't be body-builder levels of muscular development.
I pretty much agree, though I do have a few thoughts to add.
One is that if you're doing 50 pushups you're probably doing endurance training rather than strength training, unless you're talking about doing 10 sets in a day. And if you're doing them every day you're going to build strength very slowly or actually decline in strength. You need recovery time to build muscle. If that's what you're after, do however many pushups every other day. You can work on your legs in between if you want. My legs are still pretty decent from when I used to commute by bicycle in San Francisco.
Another thought is that diversifying from extensor exercises into flexor exercises isn't even as hard as you make it out to be. It doesn't even require simple equipment.
You can bicep-curl the groceries.
You can do a pullup on a doorframe, if you can find a doorframe that won't break.
You can do one-arm inclined rows with a clothesline pole in your crotch. If you don't have clotheslines in your country, use a telephone pole.
Guys in prison deadlift the bed, or each other.
Kids climb trees and hang from horizontal tree branches. You can do that too.
If you lie down on your back under the kitchen table, you can grab opposite sides of the table with your two hands and lift yourself up with your biceps that way. If this isn't enough resistance, you can do archer rows that way. Putting both hands on the same side of the table may destabilize it, depending on the table.
I have a metal-framed transom over my kitchen door that's tall enough that I can dead-hang from it.
Fences and walls are commonly high enough that you can dead-hang from your hands on them too, though they may not be ideal for a pullup.
If you have a door, even a hollow-core wooden door, you can open the door, support its distal side with a wedge of wood (or newspaper) to take the load off the hinges, and then you can safely hang from the top of the door. This will not work with an aluminum screen door or a car door, but otherwise you're good.
Unless you live in the Gobi, you can tie a rope around a telephone pole or a tree, then climb the rope.
You can pull up to a ladder rung from underneath the ladder.
Playgrounds have jungle gyms.
Finding objects strong enough to hang from is a little harder than finding a floor, but still not a category that requires exercise equipment specifically built for it.
As for aerobics, for me the best aerobic exercise is dance, because running is boring and I don't care for the social dynamics of team sports, and running shoes are generally not helpful for dance. Many forms of dance are done barefoot; others usually use flat-soled shoes with no cushioning, on purpose, because cushioning dramatically impairs your balance. (I agree that cushioning is very important not just for running on concrete but even for extended walking on it.)
(Actually, swimming is even better, but I live too far from the river.)
Many, perhaps most, people in rich countries are experiencing levels of physical disability due to muscular atrophy that could be corrected by exercise averaging on the order of one minute per day. It's true that, to get body-builder levels of muscular development, you have to treat it as not just a full-time job but also a weird cult that fanatically controls your diet. In between the literally crippling levels of sedentarism so many people suffer, and eating kilograms of meat three times a day except when you're cutting, there is an enormous spectrum.
I'm aware of the need for regeneration. Fortunately (?) I am not actually disciplined enough yet to do it every day; more like three days in a row and then a rest day. And other exercises in between sets to make use of that rest time. I'm not gonna aim for higher reps, but will eventually elevate my feet to make the push-ups harder.
Supporting the door to protect the hinges is an excellent suggestion, since concern about the hinges is exactly why I originally hesitated from using a door! It seems creativity is indeed the true limiting factor in choosing equipment and adapting exercises.
I think I will pick up running (many acquaintances are in a runner group), but dancing is also on my to-do list.
Maybe? I feel like an awful lot of people today, especially in wealthy countries, have at least 7 hours a week of time that they do not carefully allocate. Many have much more than that.
Right, and that effect is comparably enormous when you look at the period when the steam engine was taking hold and today. We are unimaginably wealthy compared to then.
"And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap."
Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".
The faulty premise I see here is that squishy bodies will even be relevant as we climb the scale. Exo-suits are already a thing that can make us stronger in spite of muscle atrophy. And further up the scale, in-silico intelligence will replace the need for a highly inefficient body to power our highly inefficient brains. We could even down-throttle our consciousness to make journeys to distant stars. The future will be so abstract to us that we can’t even fathom what humanity will have become.
Well, a popular French army soldier who trains the soldiers of the Foreign Legion said multiple times on his YouTube channel that a good soldier is "un chat soldat" (cat soldier): his weight must be between 60 and 70 kg only.
A cat soldier is the only one who can overcome all type of obstacles and is operational under all circumstances with high efficiency.
Spartan soldiers were too efficient are were known for eating little (not until they felt full).
>Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy.
Modern laborers aren't even allowed to. Just because you're jacked and can install semi truck tires by hand doesn't mean your boss wants to risk the insurance or OSHA dumpster fire that could arise if you throw out your back doing so.
>98% of humans born in first-world countries reach adulthood and have the chance to reproduce. This number will asymptotically approach 100% as we ascend. Is speciation possible in such circumstances?
Speciation would happen over hundreds or thousands of years. I doubt the notion of first world countries will outlast that time frame, even more so the 100% reproduction opportunity.
Isolated populations could come from space colonies, geographic isolation from war or extreme climate events, rich people with exclusive genetic upgrades, cyborg implants that make it possible to only reproduce with other cyborgs. Just off the top of my head.
If you're less patient, give it enough time the old fashioned way and homo sapiens as they are today would eventually not be able to reproduce with their descendants. Genetic drift.
I think realistically we have to reduce our body mass by 99% if we want to go interplanetary, much less interstellar. It's extremely expensive to drag around 70kg of meat and minimizing weight is key to making solar sails work.
The mass of the actual meatsacks inside the spaceship is barely anything compared to the rest of it. A true step forward would be to rengineer ourselves to be way smaller. Santi-like.
That’s what I mean, reduce us and the entire ship can be reduced too. We can’t go interplanetary with humans as evolved today. Solar sails can only push a very small payload.
I kind of suspect that working out suspended animation would be easier than trying to shrink humans. You can save a lot of mass by minimizing the amount of space you need via keeping the humans dormant for the entire trip and while also reducing food and water needs. Tightly pack them in, surround them with cargo to help with radiation shielding, and keep them hibernating for the entire trip.
I think we’ll just probably convert ourselves into data and beam ourselves across space at the speed of light and install ourselves into machines deployed at various sites.
Except I'd be the one left behind, so I'd really know the difference, and if my copy was good, it would also know it's the copy and the original was left behind.
You’re missing the fact that most of the weight of a spaceship is to support that 70kg and accelerate the whole thing. Watch this discussion about getting to Alpha Centauri.
We know how already: exogenous testosterone (or other, more anabolic hormones), but that has downsides like left-ventricular hypertrophy, masculinization in women, and (usually reversible) infertility.
Yes, yes, it's safe to presume GP means "figure out muscle atrophy without the well-known terrible side effects of current treatments" from even a mildly charitable reading of his comment.
This is the easiest part. Our bodies are not good for this task, so only frozen gametes should travel to be "assembled" on destination. End of the problem
We already know how to prevent it, it’s called anabolic steroids or testosterone. Once I read a study that showed sedentary people on testosterone gained more muscle mass than people actually working out.
This is me. I cycle on and off testosterone (100mg/w for 12 weeks typically) and combine it with light exercise (20-30min of lifting 3x a week). Other than that my only exercise is walks with my dog (typically ~45min). The rest of the time (~12hrs/day+) I'm at my desk. When I'm on testosterone it I definitely see major results, just from that level of exercise.
My perspective on it is it is borrowing from the future. I feel better while on it, but it's just changing what the problem is. I've turned a sedentary lifestyle issue into a hormone issue. There are side effects (ie enlarged heart in the future). I'm using it as a crutch while I have a demanding job that keeps me working for longer hours.
FWIW the research does not show enlarged heart or many of the other negative side effects for people taking TRT at therapeutic, physiological doses (like, your 100mg/week is not supraphysiological for many men with low T). (And if you aren't low T, why take exogenous T? Especially given your concerns about borrowing from the future.) The heart issues and other bad side effects happens when bodybuilders take 200-5000 mg/wk doses.
You probably know this, but -- while the myostatin area is an interesting subject for research and drug development -- unlike testosterone, therapies are not commercially available (yet).
TRT isn't unpleasant or dangerous to take at all though from any research I've seen. It's sitting in the low testosterone epidemic we have found ourselves in that has health risks and makes you feel very unpleasant indeed.
My first thought is the study must be capturing what they call “newbie gains” or “diminishing returns”. The sedentary experimental group can gain muscle so fast because they are just starting out on their journey.
Also, it kind of reminds me of the idea that athletes take these as performance enhancing drugs because it helps them in the same way that following a strength-training program would help them.
Shouldn't that be obvious? A lot of untrained men are stronger than a lot of trained women, the deciding difference being their natural testosterone levels, presumably.
I take it you're talking about people like Dallas McCarver, whose autopsy found his testosterone levels to be extremely elevated [0] because of the number and volume of substances he was taking. If you're just taking base TRT and actually do cardio alongside weightlifting, you'll probably be fine.
Fundamentally the heart is a muscle and anabolic steroids and test stimulate muscle growth in muscles at a cellular level. There’s no way to have one and not the other.
That’s just the tip though. They have all kinds of far reaching effects ranging from curtailing height, significantly reducing IQ, constant skin breakouts, altered moods, hair loss, severe anxiety, paranoia, kidney and liver failure, bone breakages etc, severe and permanent decrease in the testosterone you naturally produce etc.
Great-grandparent comment is talking about supraphysiological doses of test and anabolics, not replacement-level T (TRT). I agree that physiological dose TRT in people with otherwise-low T is safe.
I don't think I actually agree with this guy. As anyone who is trying to grow their body knows, rest is important -- just as important as working out and workouts aren't all-day affairs either. You can get very strong with only a few hours/week in the gym.
That's different than subsistence farming, where you're doing a lot of work at sub max levels most every day. You may get strongish, but you won't get large.
Consider a modern day elite marathon runner, who works out >10 hours/week. They can only do so at sub max levels of effort. The top end are prone to injury (overtraining), and the training itself limits muscle development.
The majority of us are getting weaker and fatter. A few of us are still testing the limits of human physiology. The difference is you have a choice to be whatever part of the spectrum you want to be. Most choose "weak and fat".
Much of this is tied to nutrition, which I don't think is talked about in the fine article. Same story, we have a choice to eat the best for us food, or to eat crap. That wasn't always the case for the subsistence farmer.
I wouldn't claim they can handle more weight (since top bodybuilders are lifting insane weights to get those muscles), but they can certainly do it for much longer than bodybuilder who trains for short bursts of maximum efforts. Our body literally builds only around the effort it experiences, and 0 more, running in absolute minimalist mode.
If you ever ie been running, say at 10km consistently, try to move that one day to 20km while maintaining the intensity. Significantly harder, you may experience various connective tissue issues too and not just muscle and energy management.
Or break a leg or two like I managed with recent paragliding accident, don't move one of them for 3 months and you will find that body, in its quest for lowest energy spending at all costs literally consumed all connective tissue to barest minimum, so stuff just doesn't move at all. I guess other mode didn't develop since in our distant past, like in rest of animal kingdom, broken leg meant certain death.
Maybe I’m being pedantic but bodybuilders don’t generally “lift insane weights” or do bursts of maximal effort. That sounds more like powerlifting. Bodybuilders prioritize gaining muscle size, which is not equivalent to gaining muscular strength.
Nah its fine you and me are both right in our own ways. Powerlifters go for absolute maximum, but just below them are bodybuilders. You won't get huge muscles by doing tons of relatively mild repetitions, it just doesn't work that way (say 15 reps of medium effort vs 3-5 of max you can do, former gets you endurance and tonality, latter volume).
Ie Arnold was doing 550 pound (250kg) squats at some point, thats not something you will ever see in normal gym. Similar for other exercises.
It is true that high reps/low weight will build more muscle endurance, but less strength.
However, it is a myth that it results in more "tonality".
Muscle definition is only a result of muscle size and body fat percentage. So you can achieve just as much muscle definition doing high weight low rep exercises, all else being equal.
You've only identified body builders specifically here. Strongmen, powerlifters, wrestlers, and other elite athletes can put in a similar amount of hours as a bodybuilder at the gym and certainly gain more "real strength" than a farmer will.
It just feels romantic for many to imagine that the farmhand is the "real" macho man.
All the ones you've listed need to train a lot to reach these heights. While I might've expressed it poorly, my point was that a minor investment of time only allows for body building - and that won't make you strong
If you don't train for strength, you won't get as strong as someone who does train for strength.
But all bodybuilders who train for size alone are stronger than those who don't train at all.
And the amount of additional work it takes to train strength is miniscule if you're primarily training for size. A few heavy top sets at the start of your workout are enough to drive improvements in the skill of strength while the hypertrophy work will increase your potential for force production.
This post vastly under-estimates the amount of malnutrition in most societies pre-modern times. Even with heavy physical labor, I would be willing to bet that the average physical laborer in say 1800, who we know was significantly smaller, would be weaker as well. Farmers and people who do physical labor do build muscles, but they also have modern high nutrition diets and medicine.
1. Myostatin inhibitors are already in development. We're already using a drug that stops us from getting fat, why would we not use a drug that prevents atrophy?
2. This is entirely focused on what would be efficient at a global scale, while decisions are made on individual's desires. People (in general) want to look muscular and fit; it's as hardcoded into our reproductive desires as anything else is. Given increasing resources, is it reasonable to assert that people will choose to totally forgo their biological body? Why is it impossible for them to have the same productive advantages while retaining a physical body for when they want it?
Human desire trumps production, even in the long term, or at least medium term. I could eat monkey chow every day and never have to do dishes or cook ever again, and save an extra 10 hours a day. I could wear the same thing every day so a machine can fold it. I can put my brain in a jar to avoid commuting.
But no matter how much technology advances, if I still spend 8 hours working with my brain implant or whatever then I'm still doing at worst 24% as good as the guy working 24/7. Why would it ever be worth giving up such basic human pleasures as eating or sex just for 4x the salary?
> Given increasing resources, is it reasonable to assert that people will choose to totally forgo their biological body?
Maybe sexual selection will be altered by further technological changes. If we manage to technologically replicate the feeling of amazing sex with super hot individuals on demand, there would be little point in expending the effort it takes to have a great body for that purpose.
There are plenty of other reasons great to exercise regularly. For one, it helps stave off the negative effects of aging in a way that I doubt a pill will ever manage. But that's also an argument for ridding us of these pesky bodies that we have to be carried around in.
If paying the rent is our aim, who knows what unnecessary limbs may be disposed of. What need has a programmer for legs? Or arms even, if neuralink happens.
Not that our muscles aren't important, but I'm less worried about our muscles atrophying as a result of technology and more worried about our brains atrophying as a result of technology.
More people read more things off of more screens than ever before in history.
This fear is unfounded. It isn't the proliferation of technology that is making people dumber; it's the American cultural deemphasis of education, entirely independent of technology.
Yes, with the internet, I've read more, learned more than it would have ever been possible without the internet. But with LLMs, I fear the part of our brain that performs reasoning/critical thinking will diminish. Just look at all those who fell for flat-earth, alien cow abductions, anti-vax, etc.
> According to global Win-Gallup International studies, 13% of respondents were "convinced atheists" in 2012, 11% were "convinced atheists" in 2015, and in 2017, 9% were "convinced atheists". However, other earlier global studies have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.
My point was not that there are more atheists; my point is that whereas 1-2k years ago, ~100% of humans believed sincerely and wholly in supernatural nonsense, now we have beaten that back to somewhere around 90%, which is hundreds of millions of people who at least sometimes are aware of and pursue truth and rationality.
You can even publicly state same in most places on Earth today and not be beaten or killed.
The situation improves even faster with the mass education that the internet allows for.
My point is that the situation you describe is clearly in a reverse trend when you look at the data.
I could make further points that new faiths have become more entrenched, such as nationalism and political partisanship to name just two. Or even beliefs like free markets being some unquestionable good, or maybe that technological progress is inexorable. That these kind of tribal splits are increasing, betray this notion that we are becoming more rational as a species. I’d posit that even if we did cast off the shackles of religion, we’d simply find new kinds of faith to replace them.
"The muscles are severely atrophied and the internal organs appear to be under-developed. The sensory organs, including the eyes, do not appear to function at all.
The brain, however, is well developed and draws on a high proportion of the body's blood supply. It is a mystery as to how this creature can sustain itself without external support."
The above quote is information you get from studying deceased bodies of a particularly advanced alien race in the original X-COM game, released in 1994.
(The X-COM in-universe explanation for the aliens' physiology is more psionic than cybernetic, as OP suggests. This makes OP a bit more credible than the Microprose writers, at least if your object is a discussion about plausible aliens or far-future humans in the real world within the known laws of physics. The aliens' psionic powers are kinda terrifying AF, so the Microprose prose does just fine for its intended purpose: Good storytelling for a computer game that makes no attempt to be fully real-world plausible / "hard" SF.)
In another vein, technology could also help us perfectly fit bodies by altering our cells at a molecular level. But if there is no need to move to contribute to the economy, why would anyone do such an expensive thing?
Because it's nice to have the strength when you need it. Also, it protects your body. I developed a bulged disc in my neck from decades of spending too much time at a computer. Muscular balance and variety of movement is critical to maintaining a healthy body. Not to mention benefits like lessening injuries from accidents.
And it is not even expensive to a full type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale. We just need to hack some genes to not require exercise to develop muscle mass. We already can do it with drugs, and we probably could do it genetically if it wasn't for safety and ethical concerns. As for the cost, I expect a Type 1 civilization to be able to fix genetic diseases as a routine operation, and they could fix muscle atrophy at the same time, if desired.
Muscle mass requires more energy, but by definition, a Type 1 civilization has no shortage of it. And I expect making food out of thin air (like plants do) would be the kind of technology such a civilization would have.
Also because physical attributes are a key component of attractiveness, regardless of their actual utility.
We're not just economic units. We eat, we love, we breathe fresh air, we sleep. Even in a far-flung future, if we are still human, we are still animals.
While its fun to explore ideas, this post commits the intellectual sin of simple extrapolation-ism when everything is just oh so much more complicated than that. As others are pointing out here in the threads, biological interventions for physical strength are inevitable.
This stands to reason once you mentally discard exercise as a pre-requisite of strength. An elephant is strong, not because it exercises, but because of the biological mechanisms e.g. genetics that says: grow big, grow strong, and the effect size of those mechanisms are much much larger than individual differences due to exercise. It is clear, at least to me, that the need for exercise for adjusting strength has more to do with not spending extra energy building a body that has high upkeep if it isn't needed for survival.
He says he has a hard time beating his feather in arm wrestling despite him working out. Anecdotally blue collar people have much strong wrist flexion (cupping) than us white collar people, but pronation and technique can help negate that. My experience shows that power cleans can help with arm wrestling but not many people do those.
Yeah, arm-wrestling is kind of a specific skill that isn't covered by most "exercise" (including strength training) unless you are specifically focused on it. It's like notorious for skinny-looking specialists being able to best jacked non-specialists.
I recently re-read Frederick Pohl's Plague Of Pythons which I will try hard not to spoil for you. In it there is not only the most evil set of villains that I've ever seen in science fiction based on dear Tellus, but they suffer muscular atrophy too.
There's no guarantee of this. It's quite possible that muscle and bone cells require the stress of weight loading to develop properly and that there's no simple hack to make them do it without that response.
Even beyond that, there's a bunch of neuromuscular training needed to deploy the muscle properly!
When you first start lifting, your 1 rep max is limited by your ability to recruit muscular functional units simultaneously (and in the correct order) to complete the movement. I forget the real number but an untrained person will be able to recruit maybe 1/3rd of the muscle they have for a 1RM movement.
Keyboard ticklers - get out there and use that meat! I mean it!
This is a somewhat simplistic take. Yes, people worked with their hands, but there were also other factors in the mix:
* frequent starvation or food insecurity among anyone but the high class, not good for overall physique,
* high parasite load sucking you dry from within - read up something on how massive infestation with hookworm can sap big, adult men of power,
* infections like tuberculosis.
I would be surprised if a 16th century peasant had more muscle than a 21th century student who does at least some sports. They would be a lot more used to physical work, yes, but that is not the same as "our muscles have atrophied".
If anything, we might have weaker sinews, but not muscle per se, and our bones are almost certainly stronger, as we lack neither calcium nor important vitamins.
If society ever developed along the lines proposed, which is highly improbable to begin with, then speaking of humanity as a whole is a complete nonstarter.
We'd naturally fork, because that future sounds like a dystopic hellscape to many (if not the overwhelming majority).
And indeed once we reach the point of being able to reliably colonize other planets, large scale splintering (both physical and cultural) will begin near immediately. You'll have libertarian planet, Islamic planet, even the Mormons will finally have their planets! And so on.
And the people who want to sacrifice their bodies to go enter the machine will certainly have their own little slice of the universe as well.
In the excellent very hard sci-fi novel Diaspora by Greg Egan humanity has split into 3 main branches that don't really trust each other much.
biological humans, which are subdivided into various genetically altered varieties and the original unmodified humans.
nuclear powered humanoid robots that are not allowed on earth but are perfect for working in space.
fully simulated humans being run on nuclear powered computers buried deep underground for security. Their minds run 700 times faster than normal humans.
I can’t remember if this was in the Heinlein novel, but in the film the director was certainly having a go at this when that planet was the one to get attacked
The Expanse also had fun with this bit. It's a nice little easter egg because I think most people think Mormonism is just another typical Christian branch.
You have to have everyone go into the splintered metaverses to avoid physical expansion. Everyone. Every biological body. Every AI. Every AI written for the specific purpose of having a long enough time horizon to settle new locations physically. Even the AIs written specifically to marshal together the physical resources to build more metaverse computing power. Even the AIs and fiesty biological bodies who one way or another end up with a 100% bias towards physical reality. Even the many, many beings who will quite accurately observe that no matter how short-term appealing this is a long-term loss. Even the beings who specifically want to be the ones in charge of the physical machinery and see an advantage to continuing to expand it. Every. Last. Being.
I don't think this degree of uniformity is plausible.
I reject this as an explanation for the Fermi paradox for similar reasons, except they're even more relevant across all of the putatively common alien civilizations. I don't even find it plausible that all of human civilization would do this, let alone all of every civilization ever.
I couldn't agree more, but with one exception. I tend to heavily indulge the simulation hypothesis, but the nuance here being that it's not necessarily just an arbitrarily simulated complete reality.
Our lives do an unbelievably good job of teaching us endless unteachable lessons. What if life as we know it is, for instance, little more than a day's lesson in another reality? Or a day of a gaming? Perhaps a test of character for some sort of role? There's no reason to assume time, and life expectancy as we know it, are universal truths. Even within our own reality the rate of the passage of time is variable.
The only problem I have with the simulation hypothesis is it being turtles all the way down. Imagine you pass from this world only to 'awake' in another. How does the exact same simulation argument not just apply yet again? It seems fundamentally unfalsifiable and circular, but I suppose that is standard for any explanation of life.
I believe this is actually one of the strongest arguments for the simulation hypothesis. If simulated worlds are possible then there are almost certainly more simulated worlds than non-simulated worlds (of which there can only be one) so therefore the odds of existing in a simulated variety are never less than half and likely much higher or else simulated worlds cannot exist with enough fidelity to remain undetected.
I think the last part is the problem with this argument. We can already simulate worlds (Minecraft), they're just very different from our own. It has to be possible to actually simulate our universe. Not just theoretically, but also practically: Someone needs to have enough energy, time, engineering ability, other resources, and enough motivation¹ to run the simulation.
Also, if you permit me to get spiritual for a moment, I believe that it could be theoretically possible to simulate any fully materialist universe, but I'm not convinced consciousness can arise from doing maths. Since I am conscious, this universe must not be simulated, no matter how many simulated worlds actually exist.
[1] I'm assuming that most creatures intelligent enough to understand the concept of simulating a universe will want to try it. But if it takes an entire civilization to do so and that civilization has to choose between, say, spending the energy on simulation running or on food production, it's pretty clear what will happen.
I agree with the uniqueness of consciousness. Obviously no entity poofs into existence imagining itself adding two numbers when I execute that operation, and I don't think this changes whether one carries out 1, 10, or 2^1000 operations.
However that doesn't preclude 'my' version of the simulation hypothesis. Imagine you were in a full body VR sim from the moment of birth, that artificial reality would likely simply be reality to you, yet your consciousness would remain. So all that's fundamentally required is some tech to temporarily block all past memories before entering the sim.
Yes, I suppose that would actually be a way around the consciousness problem. I really like the memory blocker idea—if we assume that it's not 100% accurate and one or two memories can still bleed through, that would be a third explanation for (claimed) past-life memories, beyond reincarnation or them being made up. They're just memories of a previous simulation or real life, not filtered by the blocker.
Sounds like an interesting concept for a story, if nothing else.
This makes me think that AI will never really take away our “purpose”. Machines have made most of our bodies obsolete long ago, yet we still find value and fulfillment in body building, going to the gym, strenuous physical labor. I believe this extends to intellectual effort and training as well. Even if memorization and most thinking becomes “obsolete” or subsidized, it will still have inherent value.
Physical fitness is a chemical process that we trigger with exercise; we will find a way to short-circuit/mimic it with pills or injections. There are already "exercise in a pill" compounds in the works.
> Physical fitness is a chemical process that we trigger with exercise
Physical fitness is not just chemistry. The body is responding to actual physical forces and the response is tightly coupled to how, when and where those forces are applied. Bone density and structure for instance is not just a matter of increasing production of bone cell production. It instead responds to the forces of gravity and other forces on the body as it moves through space. These forces do trigger electrochemical signals in the body, but it wouldn’t be trivial to recreate these signals in such a way that the body is fooled into responding just as it would if the signals were triggered by gravity and other physical forces.
It seems like it could be a more difficult but similar problem to the one experienced by lab-grown meat producers. The meat texture still isn’t right. And these meat “muscles” only require proper taste and texture. They wouldn’t have to actually support a living organism.
Edit: On reread I realize your comment allowed for assisting rather than totally replacing the required physical aspects. I agree with that. Use of chemicals could make it easier to trigger the necessary reactions, lowering thresholds, increasing outputs, etc. This could be applied broadly and the physical forces of everyday life might do the rest.
Interesting blog post. I think the majority of what you see is that due to how rapidly technology and other fields have bloomed via human involment, and due to how we have become an interconnected society due to the industrial revolution.
I think that the major way humans cope/tackle this is via specialisation. While not for everyone, most people seem to find a job in a field, and the work in that field helps us support a more complicated society than we can fathom. Most people can't memorize all the stuff from multiple domains, or they would burn out. Most people don't understand how truly complex a semiconductor is, or how electricity and power is generated, or how to design a car. These are just basic examples but I'd argue a really good example of how humans have chosen a specific domain or thing and over time developed better understandings of the field and topic. The average person could do any job I'd argue.
We are not as physical as we used to be, we have "engineered" ourselves replacements. The tractor, the car; both replaced horses but at the cost of needing someone who understood the principal of the new technology.
Be it robot workers replacing amazon warehouse employees, or the tractor that improved the farmers ability to harvest or plant crops; both required smart people to not only develop them but to maintain them.
I'd argue while we really are less physically active, due to technology and general advancements we have made over the years; this comes at the cost of mental strain. We mentally must process and think more than ever before, pushing our brains to keep up so we can stay relevant.
> My father grew up while working as a farmer on the side, then studied engineering. He never did proper strength training in his life. I grew up studying full-time, have been working out on and off, more so in the last couple of years. And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap.
Arm wrestling is a poor indicator of strength. Technique and experience account for much more than most people would think. Compare bench press, squat, deadlift numbers instead.
I think the error here is assuming mind and body are separate things. In reality our body, even our gut bacteria, has a huge effect on how we think and feel. There's a reason why sensory deprivation or dissociative anesthetics like ketamine have such a huge effect on cognition. I just don't think the human mind is designed to be a brain in a jar through virtual reality or whatever. I think whatever attempts we make at doing that would probably drive a person insane.
To that I can add from personal experience, that indeed cognitive capacity and muscular health are tightly linked. I remember that on the peak of my form in a gym, I was able to code better, longer, and keep larger mental models in my head while doing it. Compared that to the period after back injury, where I was unable to do any physically challenging activities, I noticed a slump in cognitive abilities as well. So I can't see, how evolutionary, population with weaker and weaker bodies can keep producing highly capable individuals. And yes, of course there are plenty of cases such as Stephen Hawking and alike, but these probably are exceptions that prove the rule.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using.
I’ve been wondering if a similar phenomenon will be observed with our mental muscles. Will future generations know how to write a coherent e-mail or essay? Will they know how to approach solving a complex problem without AI assistance? Will doodling in class be supplanted by Midjourney prompting? Why bother thinking too hard when the machine can do it for you?
When we are all immersed in the substrate of AI, will there be a gym equivalent for the intellectual?
Why do we use weird arbitrary milestones like the (logarithmic) Kardashev scale. It adds literally nothing useful to otherwise fun conversations like this.
All you need to do is look at the NFL to know how silly this claim is. At every level of sport, athletes have gotten bigger, stronger, and faster over the generations. You can write some of it off as hyper-specialization at the professional level, but that says nothing about small school single-a level competitors continuing to set new records in their respective sports.
Uploaded intelligence will pave the way for BMS-III. Climate change resolved (no more need for ag, transportation of any kind, housing). Human brain uploaded to quantum servers cooled in Antartica.
Skeleton crew or robots to maintain physical world while a majority of humanity living in the matrix. Controlling machines from far away lands (or galaxies).
I worry less about the physical muscles and more about the mental. Bit like calculators reduced people’s ability to do basic maths in their head - think similar will happen with AI.
I already find myself instinctively throwing any errors I can’t immediately figure out myself into a chatbot
Tech can surely overcome muscle atrophy if it was a real issue. Do we even need muscle if we add more powerful add on to walk for example? I would argue we want to keep muscle because we can have very precise control and feeling, unless the new stuff can make it even better.
Nah, moving up the Kardashev scale means more control over biology. "Workout in a pill" is not far off. Genetic engineering to retain high levels of fitness with little effort is in the realm of feasible too.
Side-topic, but for Biomechanical Stages (BMS) author skipped from pure muscle to industry ignoring the part where humanity started using animals for heavy/hard tasks of pulling, carrying, pushing.
I don't know, to me it seems like biomedical engineering and manipulation will take off and develop a lot sooner than people willingly "upload" their minds to a machine – itself a dubious idea full of problems. I think it's far more likely that current-state humans won't be exploring the stars, but a genetically modified version of them will be.
I think there is much less angst regarding the idea of upgrading humanity piecemeal, a la the Ship of Theseus, than there is to fully discarding one's body for a digital existence. This has already sort of happened over the last few hundred years with the concept of transplantable organs. Prior to the widespread acceptable of the interchangeability of organs, it was not uncommon to think that your self and body are unified and linked in a way that implied organ transplation was problematic or undesirable.
And on that note - is it just me, or are biological visions of humanity's future fairly scarce in sci-fi and in futurism (another name for sci-fi)? My guess is because such topics seem dominated by software engineers, physicists, etc. that are less interested in biology.
I remember being struck a few years back when shaking the hand of a friend’s farmer father. He was about six-inches shorter than I am (6’1”) but his hands were MASSIVE.
The timescales involved in us becoming even a K1 species are probably enough to say we won't be anything resembling current humans, neither physically nor socially.
Maintenance of one's muscular-skeletal system is a Goldilocks problem. Too little exercise leads to atrophy, but too much also leads to degeneration. Eg the productive lifetime of slaves in the labor-intensive Caribbean sugar plantation system was only about 10 years. Breakdown of joints, ligaments and tendons was a common problem related to overwork (and is commonly seen in athletic training today).
Similarly, my understanding of the history of yoga in India is that it was introduced because of the sedentary lifestyle of the Brahmin caste, and much like with office workers today in the USA, it served to keep them in decent physical shape.
Because some of us have high levels of skepticism with that stuff. Even the GLP-1 inhibitors are too new to really get a handle on. The only proven methods to health are those that have existed before we ever came along: a clean diet and (good) exercise.
History shows time and time again that there are no free lunches in nature.
If anything, I need more reasons to leave the house. Not more reasons to stay inside and be on the computer even more.
I do agree that GLP-1s can't be a free lunch. It can't be that powerful for free. Even beyond that, we might not know what we are doing with them.
It use to be standard for testosterone replacement to get a shot from a doctor every two weeks. This is an unbelievably stupid way to take testosterone. Blasting a super physiologic level of testosterone and then crashing over a two week period would be a good way to amplify side effects if that were the goal but we didn't know what we were doing then.
It is very unlikely we would have just randomly stumbled on the best way to take GLP-1s out of the gate.
It wasn't a question of morality - we don't know what the long term side effects are.
Look if it helps a morbidly obese person drop enough weight so that they can get a handle on their A1C, blood pressure, etc. then it's probably (from what we know now) worth the risk. For the slightly overweight person who takes it, and I know a few from the gym, we don't know what that looks like yet.
It will take time to find out if there are long term detrimental effects.
JFYI, GLP-1 agonists have been in research and clinical use for about 20 years by now.
And while medical chemistry moves slowly, I have no doubt that we'll solve the exercise problem within the next decades. Never mind by the time we're talking about ascending on the Kardashev scale.
Sometimes I think that is what metformin and statins do, because weirdly enough both seem to blunt the exercise response. I’d love to take them but I already exercise.
Traditional office culture makes it very difficult to get a proper workout in while, at the same time, confining you mostly to your chair, hunched over a desk (and/or craning over a small screen), to view things on a screen that eats away at your eyes by default.
WFH made this worse. I've worked with so many people that start work at 0700 and end at 1700 or later.
Add shitty, cheap food, 2.5 kids and a partner in there, and you're basically on an express train to bad hips, bad knees, poor health markersa and immobility at (not so) old age.
"Work out during your lunch hour," you say. The author spends a lot of time on muscle use. Powerlifting workouts require lots of rest between sets, especially as you get stronger. Spending 2h on a workout is normal in powerlifting. Not happening during lunch hour, not like this matters because someone will just schedule a meeting over it anyway.
"But I wake up at 0400..." No. Just no. (A) A parent with two and a half kids is not getting up at ass o clock in the morning to chase that pump (or work out to stay healthy) when their kids are gonna wake them at 0640, and (b) this is an awesome way to either sleep like shit forever or incinerate the last fledglings of your social life.
All this aside, the farmer life is a super hard way to live, . Overuse injuries are very common. However, we went the complete opposite direction in building today's office culture, and it's a real shame.
Modern technology and a sedentary job are what make it possible for me to do hard strength training 4x/week and eat a high protein diet. As an amateur strength athlete, I am almost certainly much physically stronger than any of my ancestors that didn’t have the luxury of eating like I do, or exercising specifically for strength. We have good ways to quantify this even because we have ancient stone lifting traditions- we know how strong the strongest ancient people were, and modern people that train for strength are much much stronger- we now have small women like Chloe Brennan that are as strong as word famous strongmen were a century ago.
Sometimes I hear people say strength is useless nowadays but I couldn’t disagree more. In emergency situations I have been able to push stranded cars uphill to a safer spot, carry injured people and animals to safety, move large furniture and car parts myself, etc. Being more attractive to romantic partners is no downside either, nor is being able to eat a lot and not get fat. Strength makes modern life easier and more fun.
My non physical desk job leaves me with a fresh body after my very much non 12 hour workday.
Because I have the physical energy to, I take that body to the ocean for a swim, to the park for a cycle, and to anywhere with a nice view for a run. Depending on the day. Oh and the gym is a pleasant 12 minute walk from home, so I do that a few times a week as well.
No, no it's not. There is nothing redeeming to be found here, it's nonsense. It's historially ignorant trad-pilled vibes about the past combined with bizarre techbro mumbo jumbo about the future. Neither have any meaningful grounding in reality, nor anything interesting to say about the world.
Bold of them to assume we’ll survive the century at any level above the Iron Age, and with any population above the high millions to low billions.
Capitalism is keeping us locked into the “Business As Usual” model that will bring us to civilization-destroying climate change by the middle of the century, and with tropics-denying lethally high wet bulb temperatures that will get well into the temperate zone by the end of the century. Think most of CONUS being uninhabitable for multiple days to weeks every year, with or without AC.
A castle built on sand. The only way to take the premise of this claim seriously is to ignore data for the past 100 years.
When I was in the US military, we all complained about the Body Mass Index standards. They were based on the WWII era "normal". Men were smaller. Less muscle mass. Shorter. If the average fit American young man tried to fit into a pilot's cockpit from the 1950's, it would feel quite cramped. Like it was built for much small people. It was.
We have certainly climbed the Kardashev scale since the 1950's. To what degree is a matter of contention. But, all would agree that we have moved up the scale.
Muscle atrophy has not been correlated with the growth. The opposite seems true. The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.
In addition, it is likely that the romantic picture of the average laborer "bodybuilding" is fictive and ignores how muscle atrophy and hypertrophy works. Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. They are staying well within cardiovascular zones of muscle activation. Hence, bodybuilders as we know them are largely a modern phenomenon. And they are certainly WAY more muscular.
Seems the model that underlies this claim is built on seemingly demonstrably false premises.
> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924.
This is true, but sort of a sleight of hand -- obese people that don't exercise have more muscle mass than non-obese people who don't exercise, just to carry around all of the fat. And obviously the average American, both male and female, is more overweight/obese than in 1924.
(I agree with basically everything else you say, though.)
Agreed, I was debating whether or not this was relevant to mention.
What I could have added was a caveat that sample non-obese people from each time would indicate that 2024 people have greater average muscle mass.
Personally, a more interesting question is whether growth along the Kardashev scale leads to a greater disparity in muscle mass vs body fat. The past 100 years would seem to indicate that it is possible. That being said, it could also be a uniquely American phenomenon. My hypothesis would be that avg muscle mass among French men has still grown over the past 100 years but I don't think obesity has grown to the extreme that it has in the USA.
While the US is extrem, the “obesity epidemic” affects pretty much all countries as they become richer. I wonder if recent developments in obesity drugs like ozempic will have a significant impact there in the coming decades.
These obesity drugs are already having a huge effect -- obesity is down in the US for the first time in a long time (2023).
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
I'm not gonna go try to find the numbers right now, but the Anglo speaking world is just ahead of the others. They are all trending the same way.
Obese people don't have more muscle, especially if you look into the more extreme cases. Muscle atrophy seems to happen due to low insuline sensitivity.
And relative they are weaker in the sense that the ratio between strength and body mass is smaller than that of normal people.
And then we have the powerlifting community.
Have you never seen a fat guys calves?
So: extreme cases (both obesity and powerlifting) are not relevant when we're talking about population-wide averages. And relative weakness is also irrelevant (the original claim was solely about muscle mass -- if you want to talk about that being a bad metric, you're responding to the wrong comment).
You make one specific relevant claim: "obese people don't have more muscle." (Which belies everything I've read on the subject.) So, uh, why do you think that?
40%[0] of the US population is considered obese. Pretty relevant to population wide averages.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm
This is not responsive to my comment.
It is. Read your own comment again.
by that logic, women would have more muscle mass then men, because they carry around more fat. Average american by definition is average. Overweight by definition is above average. BMI normal is outdated, just needs to move up.
> Overweight by definition is above average
Not true. Overweight and obese are defined on fixed scales. You can have a population that is 100% obese.
> by that logic, women would have more muscle mass then men, because they carry around more fat.
No? You have to compare like for like. Sedentary obese women have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight women, and sedentary obese men have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight men. (And the ratio of women to men hasn't moved very much since 1924, and both sexes are heavier than they were in 1924.)
The rest of your comment is not responsive to mine.
Why would BMI need to move up? Because it doesn't represent the average, or because it doesn't represent health?
I think the former is uncontroversial but boring, and the later is wrong. I also think that people conflate the two because they want to pretend that being average is the same thing as being healthy.
It's worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of classical statues like Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules, etc. indicates that there were at least some men walking around in antiquity with an amount of muscle mass that could only be developed by deliberate hypertrophy training of the whole body, as opposed to just getting muscle as a side effect of specific athletic training. It seems like these people were doing something quite similar to modern bodybuilding, goal-wise.
Milo of Croton is often cited as the earliest recorded examples of a progressive resistance training program: "He would train in the off years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place. By the time the events were to take place, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. He carried the full-grown cow the length of the stadium, then proceeded to kill, roast, and eat it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton
Full grown cow gemini says 1,400lbs. World squat record 1,311.8. Panathenaic Stadium, Athens was 850 feet long, further than a single squat. Either we've gotten weaker, or cows have gotten bigger.
Cows and other animals have been intentionally bred to become bigger.
If you look at medieval illustrations of shepherds and farmers [0], one thing that strikes you is just how small all the animals are. Even in relation to the medieval humans who were significantly shorter than us.
It had its advantages - for example, a leaner, smaller animal can walk long distances and won't get stuck in swampy ground. But it doesn't give you a lot of anything - hide, meat, milk... Nowadays, we have huge animals, which nevertheless have to be transported by trucks. No longer capable of walking 50 miles from the lowland to the mountains to graze.
[0] https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef01...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Me...
https://imgcdn.stablediffusionweb.com/2024/11/21/ce988f0d-9e... - note how the cow barely reaches Villon's waist!
FYI: the third url links to an AI generated image.
From 4o…
In ancient times, such as during the period of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, full-grown cows were significantly smaller than modern cattle. Based on archaeological evidence (bones and remains), historians and archaeozoologists estimate the following sizes: • Height: Approximately 100–120 cm (3.3–4 feet) at the shoulder. • Weight: Between 200–400 kg (440–880 lbs), depending on the breed, sex, and regional conditions.
For comparison: • Modern cattle like Holsteins (dairy cows) stand around 140–150 cm at the shoulder and weigh 700–900 kg. • Some smaller modern breeds, like Dexter cattle, resemble ancient cattle in stature, with a height of 90–120 cm and weight of 300–450 kg.
Factors Influencing Smaller Size in Ancient Cattle 1. Nutritional Limitations: Grazing conditions were less controlled, and fodder quality was inconsistent. 2. Genetics: Ancient cattle were not selectively bred for size like modern cattle. 3. Purpose: Cattle were primarily used for labor (draught animals) and small-scale milk production, rather than for meat.
Ancient cattle were functional animals suited to the agricultural practices and available resources of their time, so their size reflected these limitations.
Please don't post LLM output as comments here. It is helpful for commenters to apply at least a modicum of effort to ensuring that the factual statements they make are correct rather than just authoritatively phrased bullshit.
Of course, plenty of us are capable of producing authoritatively phrased bullshit without any artificial aids! But we should try to minimize that phenomenon rather than maximizing it.
Cows have gotten a lot bigger. That specific legend about Milo may be embellished, but his existence as an exceptional athlete is attested by multiple authors.
The point is really: Classical Greek athletes were doing a lot of recognizable strength training. "Halteres" are basically stone dumbbells (in Spanish the derived word "halterofilia" is the modern name for Olympic weightlifting).
You have other examples like Bybon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybon) where we have an inscribed rock with a handle carved into it explicitly to use as a weightlifting feat.
This was definitely part of the culture and people knew what trained athletes looked like.
If you miss Chuck Norris jokes and want to know the Ancient Grecian equivalent, I highly suggest reading more quotes about Milo of Croton.
The dude won six Olympic wrestling events in a row. The seventh Olympics, he came in second. A twenty-eight year rein in one of the most practiced sports in the ancient world.
Eat your heart out, Tom Brady.
It's also worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of the art of Tom of Finland, depicting men with penises in an anatomically accurate position, indicates that there were men with enormous bulging dicks in the early 1960s, enormous bulging dicks of a size and heft typically unequalled by the average man today. Could he have imagined a penis larger than he had ever actually seen? Impossible, of course. The human brain is incapable of bringing to mind anything that it has not seen actually put in its eyes' field of vision.
A large penis looks the same as a small penis, only larger. Hypertrophied muscles do not look like bigger versions of normal muscles; they have a significantly different shape. A muscular person with normal-to-high body fat also looks very different than a muscular person with low body fat (look at heavyweight or superheavyweight powerlifters compared to bodybuilders). Classical sculptures of Greek heroes display high muscle mass and very low body fat.
> A large penis looks the same as a small penis, only larger.
If you truly believe that, you cannot have seen many penises at all.
Indeed, all humans must have been as big as Michaelangelo's David: 17 feet tall, since anyone who acquires the skill of accurate detailed sculpting automatically loses their ability to do anything but a 1:1 scale. :p
Just imagine how big goliath was then! Surely at least 7 hectares!
Are you kidding? Even if you're a very skilled sculptor, you don't get an extremely accurate sculpture of a human body without a living reference in front of you. A muscular person doesn't look like a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up
Well, my response was slightly tongue in cheek. I was just struck by the implied theory that because works of art depict something, that automatically means that thing actually existed.
Regarding your specific example, I'd actually say that "a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up" is a fairly good description of what a muscular person looks like! And, further, I would be fairly confident that an ancient Greek sculptor, having observed numerous models, would be able to ramp the dials up to 12, producing a figure with a degree of outlandish magnificence never actually quite seen in real life, while still appearing anatomically accurate enough not to look weird.
As to how buff the Greeks really were, I admit we'd need a time machine.
I can imagine big dicks all I want, if I've never seen one, it's hard to sculpt it accurately. Indeed, me sculpting a perfectly accurate huge dick, veins and all, almost certainly means I've seen at least one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(ancient_Greece)
Wendy, the bully whippet, would like a word:
https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-f...
There is another, and in my opinion, a much greater flaw with the base argument - most predictions about the future are very, very wrong. The future is not only built on technological and scientific progress, but also on the generation and evolution of social mores and expectations. We are already seeing a scientific and cultural shift that celebrates being healthier, including working out to have more muscle mass and investing heavily in optimising this, and there is no way on how this will evolve in the future.
And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).
The major federal government food assistance programs came out of findings in WW2 that many potential recruits were literally malnourished and underweight. They had grown up poor and starving during the Great Depression. Beyond the human tragedy this was a national security issue. Some men were too small and weak to meet military standards.
Indeed. Which would seem to indicate that positive growth along the Kardashev scale will lead to hypertrophy not atrophy, as conjectured by the OP. One could hypothesize that growing control of energy is highly correlated with the ability to empower a population to increase in muscle mass. Of course, history would seem to indicate that there can also be a correlation to increased obesity.
Doubtful that the energy spent on building muscles is significant as there are also compensating factors that stabilize our metabolic expenditure.
> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924.
I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but I'd be genuinely interested in reading the source on this, unless you just mean because people are bigger overall they have more muscle as a function of weight.
No, I do mean precisely the average muscle mass is higher. Granted we are dealing with statistics. There is inevitably a lot more context than just a myopic focus on this single fact.
Dated but still relevant: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adult...
This is particular relevant in the military because your fitness level is graded relative to you BMI. Hence, it is common trope one hears in the military. It is a practical question in the military. If the BMI is based on 1950's pilots and today's soldiers have a higher average BMI, then it can have an impact on promotions, fitness scores, health assessments, etc.
They keep lowering the standards for acceptance into the military, because young people are becoming less and less fit.
Just one link out of many (this is well known): https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
Without a Waiver due to:
* obesity (the topic) (11%)
* drug use (marajuana in a country where it's legal in 24 of 50 states) (8%)
* mental / physical health (7%)
how much of that was just previously hidden or lied about? also it doesn't show any previous stats. So can't really draw any conclusions. also doesn't cover where the deltas were from.
> drug use (marajuana in a country where it’s legal in 24 of 50 states)
Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law. 47 states, the District of Colombia, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands have restructured their own marijuana laws to except from them use of marijuana, generally or in specific forms, for medical use. 24 of those states, D.C., Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands have (also, except in the last case) done the same for adult (over 21) recreational marijuana use [0], as well. The federal government has an official (in the form of a restriction in appropriations laws since 2015) policy of non-enforcement for now (without waiving the possibility of future enforcement within the statute of limitations should that funding restriction lapse) of certain federal criminal prohibitions against state-authorized medical use. (However, for example, all financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with Treasury’s FinCEN for all marijuana-related businesses they discover to be clients, even if the businesses are exclusively involved in activities covered by that enforcement deferment.)
[0] For those interested in inverting this, marijuana use has neither medical nor adult-use exceptions under state/territorial law in only 3 states (Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska) plus American Samoa.
Obesity rates have roughly tripled in the last 60 years.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/Est...
The data isn't hidden or lied about. If you think the data is fudged, go pick up a high school year book or photo album from the 1950s or 1960s and take a look at the young people.
I didn't say it was fudged.... mmmm fudge... I was pointing out that the article is pretty useless for determining if it's obesity or other for seeing why they're changing the requirements.
Also as the gpgp was talking about... in many places obseity is purely based on weight / height ratio... which doesn't bring muscle into account. So all I can say is I can't really say what factors are involved.
Even at the high school level, coaches for sports like football have noticed in the past 10-20 years that the fitness of incoming students has precipitously declined because so much of how children spend their time is less playing outside (e.g., running around, jumping, climbing, etc.) but playing inside (e.g., video games, doomscrolling, watching Youtube, etc.).
Suburbs around the country are quiet after school as all the kids are inside physically atrophying.
Sorry, what am I missing here? Your link talks about average weight and BMI increasing, not muscle mass. You couldn't safely draw a conclusion about muscle mass from BMI.
> A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.
What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.
Agreed.
Anecdotal: I helped my dad a few years ago do a lot of genealogy. He had pictures going back to the late 1800s for one branch of the family that just arrived from Ireland. Most of the men were shirtless and you could count every rib. There was very little muscle.
People who fled a famine so severe that it lead over 100% of that country's population to emigrate are surely a representative sample of a normal physique from that era, especially immediately after a week-long ocean crossing.
Name a span of time in which there wasn't war, starvation, or economic reasons that would have produced any emaciated set of people.
Of course most eras have famine victims, once-in-a-century famines happen more or less every century after all. But treating those famine victims as representatives of a normal physique for that era would be foolish, in any era.
Y'all are talking about noise inside of stage 2 from the link. A lot of it just being due to economics.
Agreed, there is an economic factor here but I would see that is highly correlated with the Kardashev grade of a civilization. The conjecture of the OP is that higher Kardashev grade will result in higher atrophy. My claim is that we seem to find precisely the opposite to be true.
I'm not making a counter-argument to the OP's position. I'm only making a refutation of the conjecture.
People not having time to train their bodies higher up the scale is also just due to economics.
People do have time.
Over the last year I've roughly doubled my pushup strength, with very visible resulting muscular hypertrophy in my triceps, back, and shoulders (even though I was optimizing for strength rather than hypertrophy). The total time taken over that year has been about 6 hours: three 40-second sets of pushups every two days, with 2⅓ minute breaks between sets, which I'm not counting because I can post to HN and drink yerba mate during that time. This works out to one minute per day.
There is literally nobody in the world who has less than 6 hours of free time per year. This is not a matter of economics; no economic system is so all-pervading as to sell every single minute of your day.
I started out doing three sets of knee pushups to failure, and once I reached ten reps I switched to real pushups; once I reach failure on the real pushups (3–5 reps in the first set, sometimes as little as 2 in the last) I continue with knee pushups until failure. This takes about 40 seconds and seems to be a good balance of intensity and safety. The only equipment it requires is a reasonably clean floor or patch of grass, so you don't have to buy equipment, pay a gym membership, or even walk to a different part of the house. You can do it on the train while commuting to work, at the bus stop while awaiting the bus, in the break room at the office, outside your car in the parking lot, in the park when you walk the dog, or in your bedroom after getting up, unless your hoarding problem is even worse than mine.
I'm slightly obese (109kg) like most of the population in rich countries, and I think my state of muscular development was about average in that context. Calisthenics permits increasing resistance to almost arbitrarily high levels, so you can keep the intensity high and the workouts short even as you get stronger. Stronger people would presumably need to invest more time than one minute per day to make further progress, perhaps as much as ten minutes or even more, but those aren't the people we're talking about.
So what's missing? It might be inspiration, discipline, executive function, hope, knowledge, wisdom, or some combination of these. But it's not time or money.
I fully agree that these simple exercises can get you quite far. I have made similarly good experiences by aiming for 50 cleanly executed push-ups per day. But you will soon have to diversify them, though that requires simple equipment only: a high horizontal bar for pull-ups and dead hangs is surprisingly hard to find outside of a gym.
Aerobic exercise, which should really also be part of a workout routine, is significantly more time-consuming though, and requires proper equipment. Most importantly a new pair of good running shoes every year or so to reduce wear on the joints.
So yes, even with kids or similarly demanding circumstances it should be possible to accommodate moderate exercise in most peoples lives. But the result probably won't be body-builder levels of muscular development.
I pretty much agree, though I do have a few thoughts to add.
One is that if you're doing 50 pushups you're probably doing endurance training rather than strength training, unless you're talking about doing 10 sets in a day. And if you're doing them every day you're going to build strength very slowly or actually decline in strength. You need recovery time to build muscle. If that's what you're after, do however many pushups every other day. You can work on your legs in between if you want. My legs are still pretty decent from when I used to commute by bicycle in San Francisco.
Another thought is that diversifying from extensor exercises into flexor exercises isn't even as hard as you make it out to be. It doesn't even require simple equipment.
You can bicep-curl the groceries.
You can do a pullup on a doorframe, if you can find a doorframe that won't break.
You can do one-arm inclined rows with a clothesline pole in your crotch. If you don't have clotheslines in your country, use a telephone pole.
Guys in prison deadlift the bed, or each other.
Kids climb trees and hang from horizontal tree branches. You can do that too.
If you lie down on your back under the kitchen table, you can grab opposite sides of the table with your two hands and lift yourself up with your biceps that way. If this isn't enough resistance, you can do archer rows that way. Putting both hands on the same side of the table may destabilize it, depending on the table.
I have a metal-framed transom over my kitchen door that's tall enough that I can dead-hang from it.
Fences and walls are commonly high enough that you can dead-hang from your hands on them too, though they may not be ideal for a pullup.
If you have a door, even a hollow-core wooden door, you can open the door, support its distal side with a wedge of wood (or newspaper) to take the load off the hinges, and then you can safely hang from the top of the door. This will not work with an aluminum screen door or a car door, but otherwise you're good.
Unless you live in the Gobi, you can tie a rope around a telephone pole or a tree, then climb the rope.
You can pull up to a ladder rung from underneath the ladder.
Playgrounds have jungle gyms.
Finding objects strong enough to hang from is a little harder than finding a floor, but still not a category that requires exercise equipment specifically built for it.
As for aerobics, for me the best aerobic exercise is dance, because running is boring and I don't care for the social dynamics of team sports, and running shoes are generally not helpful for dance. Many forms of dance are done barefoot; others usually use flat-soled shoes with no cushioning, on purpose, because cushioning dramatically impairs your balance. (I agree that cushioning is very important not just for running on concrete but even for extended walking on it.)
(Actually, swimming is even better, but I live too far from the river.)
Many, perhaps most, people in rich countries are experiencing levels of physical disability due to muscular atrophy that could be corrected by exercise averaging on the order of one minute per day. It's true that, to get body-builder levels of muscular development, you have to treat it as not just a full-time job but also a weird cult that fanatically controls your diet. In between the literally crippling levels of sedentarism so many people suffer, and eating kilograms of meat three times a day except when you're cutting, there is an enormous spectrum.
I'm aware of the need for regeneration. Fortunately (?) I am not actually disciplined enough yet to do it every day; more like three days in a row and then a rest day. And other exercises in between sets to make use of that rest time. I'm not gonna aim for higher reps, but will eventually elevate my feet to make the push-ups harder.
Supporting the door to protect the hinges is an excellent suggestion, since concern about the hinges is exactly why I originally hesitated from using a door! It seems creativity is indeed the true limiting factor in choosing equipment and adapting exercises.
I think I will pick up running (many acquaintances are in a runner group), but dancing is also on my to-do list.
Many thanks for your kind suggestions!
Maybe? I feel like an awful lot of people today, especially in wealthy countries, have at least 7 hours a week of time that they do not carefully allocate. Many have much more than that.
Wealthier people (presumably the ones who have more free time) in first world countries tend to be the healthier ones.
Right, and that effect is comparably enormous when you look at the period when the steam engine was taking hold and today. We are unimaginably wealthy compared to then.
Economics, famine, religious upheaval, war - all factors that have kept people starving and pushed down the scale.
"And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap."
Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".
The faulty premise I see here is that squishy bodies will even be relevant as we climb the scale. Exo-suits are already a thing that can make us stronger in spite of muscle atrophy. And further up the scale, in-silico intelligence will replace the need for a highly inefficient body to power our highly inefficient brains. We could even down-throttle our consciousness to make journeys to distant stars. The future will be so abstract to us that we can’t even fathom what humanity will have become.
We already kind of have exoskeletons anyway: cars.
I did say exo suits are already a thing, not sure how that negates the argument
Well, a popular French army soldier who trains the soldiers of the Foreign Legion said multiple times on his YouTube channel that a good soldier is "un chat soldat" (cat soldier): his weight must be between 60 and 70 kg only.
A cat soldier is the only one who can overcome all type of obstacles and is operational under all circumstances with high efficiency.
Spartan soldiers were too efficient are were known for eating little (not until they felt full).
The efficiency of the Spartan army is a myth, in fact there were quite insignificant; they basically won a battle once and after that were wiped out
>Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy.
Modern laborers aren't even allowed to. Just because you're jacked and can install semi truck tires by hand doesn't mean your boss wants to risk the insurance or OSHA dumpster fire that could arise if you throw out your back doing so.
Having growth hormones in your ultra processed food helps
[dead]
Bold take to proclaim we'll figure out interstellar travel before we figure out how to prevent muscle atrophy.
also bold take to proclaim we'll still have human bodies before moving up kardashev scale
One of the lead SETI researchers wrote about this and how biological life might just be a transitory phase.
also bold take to proclaim, that humans will be required for teleoperation...
We are human bodies.
Homo sapiens is subject to speciation just like every other animal.
Then there's cyborgs...
>98% of humans born in first-world countries reach adulthood and have the chance to reproduce. This number will asymptotically approach 100% as we ascend. Is speciation possible in such circumstances?
Speciation would happen over hundreds or thousands of years. I doubt the notion of first world countries will outlast that time frame, even more so the 100% reproduction opportunity.
Isolated populations could come from space colonies, geographic isolation from war or extreme climate events, rich people with exclusive genetic upgrades, cyborg implants that make it possible to only reproduce with other cyborgs. Just off the top of my head.
If you're less patient, give it enough time the old fashioned way and homo sapiens as they are today would eventually not be able to reproduce with their descendants. Genetic drift.
Replace it one cell at a time. Ship of Theseus awaits to set sail.
Bodies are processes, like chemical reactions or baseball games, not "objects." No problem.
objects undergo processes. atoms in your body are replaced over a period of hours-years.
Is a tornado an object or a process?
Is a thought an object or a process?
does a thought occur in a vacuum?
is there a lot of tornadoes in a vacuum?
Just one big one, afaik. I’m no vacuum engineer though
Amen.
I think realistically we have to reduce our body mass by 99% if we want to go interplanetary, much less interstellar. It's extremely expensive to drag around 70kg of meat and minimizing weight is key to making solar sails work.
The mass of the actual meatsacks inside the spaceship is barely anything compared to the rest of it. A true step forward would be to rengineer ourselves to be way smaller. Santi-like.
That’s what I mean, reduce us and the entire ship can be reduced too. We can’t go interplanetary with humans as evolved today. Solar sails can only push a very small payload.
> reduce us and the entire ship can be reduced too
You may enjoy "Gentle Seduction" by Marc Stiegler [1].
TL; DR Leave the meat part in place and project your consciousness through offboard sensors.
[1] http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
We definitely don't need to reduce it for interplanetary travel.
I kind of suspect that working out suspended animation would be easier than trying to shrink humans. You can save a lot of mass by minimizing the amount of space you need via keeping the humans dormant for the entire trip and while also reducing food and water needs. Tightly pack them in, surround them with cargo to help with radiation shielding, and keep them hibernating for the entire trip.
Embryos are small, and data is free.
I think we’ll just probably convert ourselves into data and beam ourselves across space at the speed of light and install ourselves into machines deployed at various sites.
Copy, not convert. The copies will be the ones exploring the new worlds while the originals continue their mundane life.
That’s just short term thinking. Imagine being a copy, you will know no difference.
Except I'd be the one left behind, so I'd really know the difference, and if my copy was good, it would also know it's the copy and the original was left behind.
Quantum/Jump/Warp drives and portals?
Sure, let's remove 70kg. That'll get the ship moving...not.
You’re missing the fact that most of the weight of a spaceship is to support that 70kg and accelerate the whole thing. Watch this discussion about getting to Alpha Centauri.
https://youtu.be/uZN5xjoS6TU?si=05xuUdWsWADrZY-i
that's a fun thought experiment, but not at all practical
We know how already: exogenous testosterone (or other, more anabolic hormones), but that has downsides like left-ventricular hypertrophy, masculinization in women, and (usually reversible) infertility.
Yes, yes, it's safe to presume GP means "figure out muscle atrophy without the well-known terrible side effects of current treatments" from even a mildly charitable reading of his comment.
This is the easiest part. Our bodies are not good for this task, so only frozen gametes should travel to be "assembled" on destination. End of the problem
It's not just steroids and replacement testosterone.
I recall certain classes of drugs that make mice into muscle-bound warriors, I believe using a different pathway then steroids.
Interstellar travel is not a prerequisite for K1 or K2.
We already know how to prevent it, it’s called anabolic steroids or testosterone. Once I read a study that showed sedentary people on testosterone gained more muscle mass than people actually working out.
Bhasin et. al 2001. If you get in many internet fights about bodybuilding, it's an important part of your repertoire :-)
If you don't get in many internet fights about bodybuilding, testosterone can fix that too.
This is me. I cycle on and off testosterone (100mg/w for 12 weeks typically) and combine it with light exercise (20-30min of lifting 3x a week). Other than that my only exercise is walks with my dog (typically ~45min). The rest of the time (~12hrs/day+) I'm at my desk. When I'm on testosterone it I definitely see major results, just from that level of exercise.
My perspective on it is it is borrowing from the future. I feel better while on it, but it's just changing what the problem is. I've turned a sedentary lifestyle issue into a hormone issue. There are side effects (ie enlarged heart in the future). I'm using it as a crutch while I have a demanding job that keeps me working for longer hours.
FWIW the research does not show enlarged heart or many of the other negative side effects for people taking TRT at therapeutic, physiological doses (like, your 100mg/week is not supraphysiological for many men with low T). (And if you aren't low T, why take exogenous T? Especially given your concerns about borrowing from the future.) The heart issues and other bad side effects happens when bodybuilders take 200-5000 mg/wk doses.
If you don't mind me asking, what type of major results do you see? Reduced fat percentage? Faster muscle gain?
Why do take T in this manner?
Won't it cause your hormones/sperm/hairline to get messed up?
Testosterone is a very broad spectrum way to mess with your whole body.
Much better to do something targeted like reduce myostatin.
You probably know this, but -- while the myostatin area is an interesting subject for research and drug development -- unlike testosterone, therapies are not commercially available (yet).
Those are really unpleasant and dangerous to take and basically not an option for half the population though
TRT isn't unpleasant or dangerous to take at all though from any research I've seen. It's sitting in the low testosterone epidemic we have found ourselves in that has health risks and makes you feel very unpleasant indeed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t...
My first thought is the study must be capturing what they call “newbie gains” or “diminishing returns”. The sedentary experimental group can gain muscle so fast because they are just starting out on their journey.
Also, it kind of reminds me of the idea that athletes take these as performance enhancing drugs because it helps them in the same way that following a strength-training program would help them.
It isn't just beginner gains. Testosterone and anabolics are really, really effective. (They also have horrible side effects.)
They'll also tear their ligaments and tendons when they go to use that muscle mass...
Shouldn't that be obvious? A lot of untrained men are stronger than a lot of trained women, the deciding difference being their natural testosterone levels, presumably.
Yes that’s how you get an enlarged heart and die by 35.
I take it you're talking about people like Dallas McCarver, whose autopsy found his testosterone levels to be extremely elevated [0] because of the number and volume of substances he was taking. If you're just taking base TRT and actually do cardio alongside weightlifting, you'll probably be fine.
[0] https://drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/dallas-mccarver...
Fundamentally the heart is a muscle and anabolic steroids and test stimulate muscle growth in muscles at a cellular level. There’s no way to have one and not the other.
That’s just the tip though. They have all kinds of far reaching effects ranging from curtailing height, significantly reducing IQ, constant skin breakouts, altered moods, hair loss, severe anxiety, paranoia, kidney and liver failure, bone breakages etc, severe and permanent decrease in the testosterone you naturally produce etc.
Great-grandparent comment is talking about supraphysiological doses of test and anabolics, not replacement-level T (TRT). I agree that physiological dose TRT in people with otherwise-low T is safe.
Even more importantly, test causes hair loss.
Sort of. Some fraction of test (natural or exogenous) converts to DHT via 5α-reductase, and some people (not everyone) have DHT-sensitive hair loss.
You may be being facetious but if you’re not I would take hair loss over death any day.
It truly is a wonder therapy with no known side effects. I pair it with Ozempic! /s.
Will we even remember what a muscle is at that point?
I don't think I actually agree with this guy. As anyone who is trying to grow their body knows, rest is important -- just as important as working out and workouts aren't all-day affairs either. You can get very strong with only a few hours/week in the gym.
That's different than subsistence farming, where you're doing a lot of work at sub max levels most every day. You may get strongish, but you won't get large.
Consider a modern day elite marathon runner, who works out >10 hours/week. They can only do so at sub max levels of effort. The top end are prone to injury (overtraining), and the training itself limits muscle development.
The majority of us are getting weaker and fatter. A few of us are still testing the limits of human physiology. The difference is you have a choice to be whatever part of the spectrum you want to be. Most choose "weak and fat".
Much of this is tied to nutrition, which I don't think is talked about in the fine article. Same story, we have a choice to eat the best for us food, or to eat crap. That wasn't always the case for the subsistence farmer.
You can get large with decently defined muscles with medium time investment.
But real strength, like farmers traditionally had, is hardly visible and needs an insane amount of time just handling heavy weights.
These people look completely average but can easily handle way more weight than the totally jacked body builder can.
But if the goal is mainly the physic and not strength... Then yes: a few hours a week is plenty
I wouldn't claim they can handle more weight (since top bodybuilders are lifting insane weights to get those muscles), but they can certainly do it for much longer than bodybuilder who trains for short bursts of maximum efforts. Our body literally builds only around the effort it experiences, and 0 more, running in absolute minimalist mode.
If you ever ie been running, say at 10km consistently, try to move that one day to 20km while maintaining the intensity. Significantly harder, you may experience various connective tissue issues too and not just muscle and energy management.
Or break a leg or two like I managed with recent paragliding accident, don't move one of them for 3 months and you will find that body, in its quest for lowest energy spending at all costs literally consumed all connective tissue to barest minimum, so stuff just doesn't move at all. I guess other mode didn't develop since in our distant past, like in rest of animal kingdom, broken leg meant certain death.
Maybe I’m being pedantic but bodybuilders don’t generally “lift insane weights” or do bursts of maximal effort. That sounds more like powerlifting. Bodybuilders prioritize gaining muscle size, which is not equivalent to gaining muscular strength.
Nah its fine you and me are both right in our own ways. Powerlifters go for absolute maximum, but just below them are bodybuilders. You won't get huge muscles by doing tons of relatively mild repetitions, it just doesn't work that way (say 15 reps of medium effort vs 3-5 of max you can do, former gets you endurance and tonality, latter volume).
Ie Arnold was doing 550 pound (250kg) squats at some point, thats not something you will ever see in normal gym. Similar for other exercises.
It is true that high reps/low weight will build more muscle endurance, but less strength.
However, it is a myth that it results in more "tonality".
Muscle definition is only a result of muscle size and body fat percentage. So you can achieve just as much muscle definition doing high weight low rep exercises, all else being equal.
This is misleading.
You've only identified body builders specifically here. Strongmen, powerlifters, wrestlers, and other elite athletes can put in a similar amount of hours as a bodybuilder at the gym and certainly gain more "real strength" than a farmer will.
It just feels romantic for many to imagine that the farmhand is the "real" macho man.
All the ones you've listed need to train a lot to reach these heights. While I might've expressed it poorly, my point was that a minor investment of time only allows for body building - and that won't make you strong
This is a silly conversation.
If you don't train for strength, you won't get as strong as someone who does train for strength.
But all bodybuilders who train for size alone are stronger than those who don't train at all.
And the amount of additional work it takes to train strength is miniscule if you're primarily training for size. A few heavy top sets at the start of your workout are enough to drive improvements in the skill of strength while the hypertrophy work will increase your potential for force production.
Sorry, completely wrong.
This post vastly under-estimates the amount of malnutrition in most societies pre-modern times. Even with heavy physical labor, I would be willing to bet that the average physical laborer in say 1800, who we know was significantly smaller, would be weaker as well. Farmers and people who do physical labor do build muscles, but they also have modern high nutrition diets and medicine.
Silly.
1. Myostatin inhibitors are already in development. We're already using a drug that stops us from getting fat, why would we not use a drug that prevents atrophy?
2. This is entirely focused on what would be efficient at a global scale, while decisions are made on individual's desires. People (in general) want to look muscular and fit; it's as hardcoded into our reproductive desires as anything else is. Given increasing resources, is it reasonable to assert that people will choose to totally forgo their biological body? Why is it impossible for them to have the same productive advantages while retaining a physical body for when they want it?
Human desire trumps production, even in the long term, or at least medium term. I could eat monkey chow every day and never have to do dishes or cook ever again, and save an extra 10 hours a day. I could wear the same thing every day so a machine can fold it. I can put my brain in a jar to avoid commuting. But no matter how much technology advances, if I still spend 8 hours working with my brain implant or whatever then I'm still doing at worst 24% as good as the guy working 24/7. Why would it ever be worth giving up such basic human pleasures as eating or sex just for 4x the salary?
> Given increasing resources, is it reasonable to assert that people will choose to totally forgo their biological body?
Maybe sexual selection will be altered by further technological changes. If we manage to technologically replicate the feeling of amazing sex with super hot individuals on demand, there would be little point in expending the effort it takes to have a great body for that purpose.
There are plenty of other reasons great to exercise regularly. For one, it helps stave off the negative effects of aging in a way that I doubt a pill will ever manage. But that's also an argument for ridding us of these pesky bodies that we have to be carried around in.
If paying the rent is our aim, who knows what unnecessary limbs may be disposed of. What need has a programmer for legs? Or arms even, if neuralink happens.
Not everyone considers their bodies to be “pesky”.
Not that our muscles aren't important, but I'm less worried about our muscles atrophying as a result of technology and more worried about our brains atrophying as a result of technology.
More people read more things off of more screens than ever before in history.
This fear is unfounded. It isn't the proliferation of technology that is making people dumber; it's the American cultural deemphasis of education, entirely independent of technology.
Yes, with the internet, I've read more, learned more than it would have ever been possible without the internet. But with LLMs, I fear the part of our brain that performs reasoning/critical thinking will diminish. Just look at all those who fell for flat-earth, alien cow abductions, anti-vax, etc.
Look at all of those that fell for monotheism. The situation is improving vastly.
> According to global Win-Gallup International studies, 13% of respondents were "convinced atheists" in 2012, 11% were "convinced atheists" in 2015, and in 2017, 9% were "convinced atheists". However, other earlier global studies have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#:~:t....
My point was not that there are more atheists; my point is that whereas 1-2k years ago, ~100% of humans believed sincerely and wholly in supernatural nonsense, now we have beaten that back to somewhere around 90%, which is hundreds of millions of people who at least sometimes are aware of and pursue truth and rationality.
You can even publicly state same in most places on Earth today and not be beaten or killed.
The situation improves even faster with the mass education that the internet allows for.
My point is that the situation you describe is clearly in a reverse trend when you look at the data.
I could make further points that new faiths have become more entrenched, such as nationalism and political partisanship to name just two. Or even beliefs like free markets being some unquestionable good, or maybe that technological progress is inexorable. That these kind of tribal splits are increasing, betray this notion that we are becoming more rational as a species. I’d posit that even if we did cast off the shackles of religion, we’d simply find new kinds of faith to replace them.
The issue with your argument is that all your examples predate LLMs.
I'd sooner attribute this stuff to the widespread lead poisoning that Gen X and Millennials received as kids.
They were falling for those conspiracies before LLMs and arguably even before the internet. They're just able to be much louder now.
"The muscles are severely atrophied and the internal organs appear to be under-developed. The sensory organs, including the eyes, do not appear to function at all.
The brain, however, is well developed and draws on a high proportion of the body's blood supply. It is a mystery as to how this creature can sustain itself without external support."
The above quote is information you get from studying deceased bodies of a particularly advanced alien race in the original X-COM game, released in 1994.
(The X-COM in-universe explanation for the aliens' physiology is more psionic than cybernetic, as OP suggests. This makes OP a bit more credible than the Microprose writers, at least if your object is a discussion about plausible aliens or far-future humans in the real world within the known laws of physics. The aliens' psionic powers are kinda terrifying AF, so the Microprose prose does just fine for its intended purpose: Good storytelling for a computer game that makes no attempt to be fully real-world plausible / "hard" SF.)
In another vein, technology could also help us perfectly fit bodies by altering our cells at a molecular level. But if there is no need to move to contribute to the economy, why would anyone do such an expensive thing?
Because it's nice to have the strength when you need it. Also, it protects your body. I developed a bulged disc in my neck from decades of spending too much time at a computer. Muscular balance and variety of movement is critical to maintaining a healthy body. Not to mention benefits like lessening injuries from accidents.
And it is not even expensive to a full type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale. We just need to hack some genes to not require exercise to develop muscle mass. We already can do it with drugs, and we probably could do it genetically if it wasn't for safety and ethical concerns. As for the cost, I expect a Type 1 civilization to be able to fix genetic diseases as a routine operation, and they could fix muscle atrophy at the same time, if desired.
Muscle mass requires more energy, but by definition, a Type 1 civilization has no shortage of it. And I expect making food out of thin air (like plants do) would be the kind of technology such a civilization would have.
Also because physical attributes are a key component of attractiveness, regardless of their actual utility.
We're not just economic units. We eat, we love, we breathe fresh air, we sleep. Even in a far-flung future, if we are still human, we are still animals.
While its fun to explore ideas, this post commits the intellectual sin of simple extrapolation-ism when everything is just oh so much more complicated than that. As others are pointing out here in the threads, biological interventions for physical strength are inevitable.
This stands to reason once you mentally discard exercise as a pre-requisite of strength. An elephant is strong, not because it exercises, but because of the biological mechanisms e.g. genetics that says: grow big, grow strong, and the effect size of those mechanisms are much much larger than individual differences due to exercise. It is clear, at least to me, that the need for exercise for adjusting strength has more to do with not spending extra energy building a body that has high upkeep if it isn't needed for survival.
He says he has a hard time beating his feather in arm wrestling despite him working out. Anecdotally blue collar people have much strong wrist flexion (cupping) than us white collar people, but pronation and technique can help negate that. My experience shows that power cleans can help with arm wrestling but not many people do those.
Yeah, arm-wrestling is kind of a specific skill that isn't covered by most "exercise" (including strength training) unless you are specifically focused on it. It's like notorious for skinny-looking specialists being able to best jacked non-specialists.
I recently re-read Frederick Pohl's Plague Of Pythons which I will try hard not to spoil for you. In it there is not only the most evil set of villains that I've ever seen in science fiction based on dear Tellus, but they suffer muscular atrophy too.
"Plague of Pythons" is available (for free) on Standard Ebooks for anyone else interested in reading it:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/frederik-pohl/plague-of-py...
Sounds like an interesting book, added it to my reading list.
"Gateway" by the same author definitely worth a read, too.
Oh yeah, Gateway one of those sci-fi books that reads like literature.
Related. Others?
Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327782 - May 2024 (28 comments)
Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067895 - May 2021 (5 comments)
Classifying Civilisations: An Introduction to the Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108947 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
The Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24084021 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Nikolai Kardashev (of Kardashev scale fame) died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20619494 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)
Kardashev Scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20603386 - Aug 2019 (31 comments)
Kardashev scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183106 - Feb 2011 (15 comments)
When we get to that point we will have the right methods to sculpt our bodies as we like. It's a matter of hormones or some other biological hack.
There's no guarantee of this. It's quite possible that muscle and bone cells require the stress of weight loading to develop properly and that there's no simple hack to make them do it without that response.
Even beyond that, there's a bunch of neuromuscular training needed to deploy the muscle properly!
When you first start lifting, your 1 rep max is limited by your ability to recruit muscular functional units simultaneously (and in the correct order) to complete the movement. I forget the real number but an untrained person will be able to recruit maybe 1/3rd of the muscle they have for a 1RM movement.
Keyboard ticklers - get out there and use that meat! I mean it!
This is a somewhat simplistic take. Yes, people worked with their hands, but there were also other factors in the mix:
* frequent starvation or food insecurity among anyone but the high class, not good for overall physique,
* high parasite load sucking you dry from within - read up something on how massive infestation with hookworm can sap big, adult men of power,
* infections like tuberculosis.
I would be surprised if a 16th century peasant had more muscle than a 21th century student who does at least some sports. They would be a lot more used to physical work, yes, but that is not the same as "our muscles have atrophied".
If anything, we might have weaker sinews, but not muscle per se, and our bones are almost certainly stronger, as we lack neither calcium nor important vitamins.
If society ever developed along the lines proposed, which is highly improbable to begin with, then speaking of humanity as a whole is a complete nonstarter.
We'd naturally fork, because that future sounds like a dystopic hellscape to many (if not the overwhelming majority).
And indeed once we reach the point of being able to reliably colonize other planets, large scale splintering (both physical and cultural) will begin near immediately. You'll have libertarian planet, Islamic planet, even the Mormons will finally have their planets! And so on.
And the people who want to sacrifice their bodies to go enter the machine will certainly have their own little slice of the universe as well.
In the excellent very hard sci-fi novel Diaspora by Greg Egan humanity has split into 3 main branches that don't really trust each other much.
biological humans, which are subdivided into various genetically altered varieties and the original unmodified humans.
nuclear powered humanoid robots that are not allowed on earth but are perfect for working in space.
fully simulated humans being run on nuclear powered computers buried deep underground for security. Their minds run 700 times faster than normal humans.
This feels pretty plausible to me.
>even the Mormons will finally have their planets
I can’t remember if this was in the Heinlein novel, but in the film the director was certainly having a go at this when that planet was the one to get attacked
The Expanse also had fun with this bit. It's a nice little easter egg because I think most people think Mormonism is just another typical Christian branch.
*Starship Troopers I should add for completeness
Can't wait for the Rastafari planet
getting splintered metaverses seem way more feasible than splintered physical planets
You have to have everyone go into the splintered metaverses to avoid physical expansion. Everyone. Every biological body. Every AI. Every AI written for the specific purpose of having a long enough time horizon to settle new locations physically. Even the AIs written specifically to marshal together the physical resources to build more metaverse computing power. Even the AIs and fiesty biological bodies who one way or another end up with a 100% bias towards physical reality. Even the many, many beings who will quite accurately observe that no matter how short-term appealing this is a long-term loss. Even the beings who specifically want to be the ones in charge of the physical machinery and see an advantage to continuing to expand it. Every. Last. Being.
I don't think this degree of uniformity is plausible.
I reject this as an explanation for the Fermi paradox for similar reasons, except they're even more relevant across all of the putatively common alien civilizations. I don't even find it plausible that all of human civilization would do this, let alone all of every civilization ever.
I couldn't agree more, but with one exception. I tend to heavily indulge the simulation hypothesis, but the nuance here being that it's not necessarily just an arbitrarily simulated complete reality.
Our lives do an unbelievably good job of teaching us endless unteachable lessons. What if life as we know it is, for instance, little more than a day's lesson in another reality? Or a day of a gaming? Perhaps a test of character for some sort of role? There's no reason to assume time, and life expectancy as we know it, are universal truths. Even within our own reality the rate of the passage of time is variable.
The only problem I have with the simulation hypothesis is it being turtles all the way down. Imagine you pass from this world only to 'awake' in another. How does the exact same simulation argument not just apply yet again? It seems fundamentally unfalsifiable and circular, but I suppose that is standard for any explanation of life.
I believe this is actually one of the strongest arguments for the simulation hypothesis. If simulated worlds are possible then there are almost certainly more simulated worlds than non-simulated worlds (of which there can only be one) so therefore the odds of existing in a simulated variety are never less than half and likely much higher or else simulated worlds cannot exist with enough fidelity to remain undetected.
I think the last part is the problem with this argument. We can already simulate worlds (Minecraft), they're just very different from our own. It has to be possible to actually simulate our universe. Not just theoretically, but also practically: Someone needs to have enough energy, time, engineering ability, other resources, and enough motivation¹ to run the simulation.
Also, if you permit me to get spiritual for a moment, I believe that it could be theoretically possible to simulate any fully materialist universe, but I'm not convinced consciousness can arise from doing maths. Since I am conscious, this universe must not be simulated, no matter how many simulated worlds actually exist.
[1] I'm assuming that most creatures intelligent enough to understand the concept of simulating a universe will want to try it. But if it takes an entire civilization to do so and that civilization has to choose between, say, spending the energy on simulation running or on food production, it's pretty clear what will happen.
I agree with the uniqueness of consciousness. Obviously no entity poofs into existence imagining itself adding two numbers when I execute that operation, and I don't think this changes whether one carries out 1, 10, or 2^1000 operations.
However that doesn't preclude 'my' version of the simulation hypothesis. Imagine you were in a full body VR sim from the moment of birth, that artificial reality would likely simply be reality to you, yet your consciousness would remain. So all that's fundamentally required is some tech to temporarily block all past memories before entering the sim.
Yes, I suppose that would actually be a way around the consciousness problem. I really like the memory blocker idea—if we assume that it's not 100% accurate and one or two memories can still bleed through, that would be a third explanation for (claimed) past-life memories, beyond reincarnation or them being made up. They're just memories of a previous simulation or real life, not filtered by the blocker.
Sounds like an interesting concept for a story, if nothing else.
I imagine that we don’t exist outside the simulation. There is no “waking up”. We exist in a computer’s memory and that’s it.
Then you get a Chicxulub and it is all over.
He probably should worry about our brain atrophy sooner than our muscles.
Be hipster type II civilization brain in a jar. Wonder what it's like to have muscle / strength train. Incubate a body, start lifting.
This makes me think that AI will never really take away our “purpose”. Machines have made most of our bodies obsolete long ago, yet we still find value and fulfillment in body building, going to the gym, strenuous physical labor. I believe this extends to intellectual effort and training as well. Even if memorization and most thinking becomes “obsolete” or subsidized, it will still have inherent value.
Physical health is directly correlated to mental health, if anything we'd all be jacked to the teets
Physical fitness is a chemical process that we trigger with exercise; we will find a way to short-circuit/mimic it with pills or injections. There are already "exercise in a pill" compounds in the works.
> Physical fitness is a chemical process that we trigger with exercise
Physical fitness is not just chemistry. The body is responding to actual physical forces and the response is tightly coupled to how, when and where those forces are applied. Bone density and structure for instance is not just a matter of increasing production of bone cell production. It instead responds to the forces of gravity and other forces on the body as it moves through space. These forces do trigger electrochemical signals in the body, but it wouldn’t be trivial to recreate these signals in such a way that the body is fooled into responding just as it would if the signals were triggered by gravity and other physical forces.
It seems like it could be a more difficult but similar problem to the one experienced by lab-grown meat producers. The meat texture still isn’t right. And these meat “muscles” only require proper taste and texture. They wouldn’t have to actually support a living organism.
Edit: On reread I realize your comment allowed for assisting rather than totally replacing the required physical aspects. I agree with that. Use of chemicals could make it easier to trigger the necessary reactions, lowering thresholds, increasing outputs, etc. This could be applied broadly and the physical forces of everyday life might do the rest.
Interesting blog post. I think the majority of what you see is that due to how rapidly technology and other fields have bloomed via human involment, and due to how we have become an interconnected society due to the industrial revolution.
I think that the major way humans cope/tackle this is via specialisation. While not for everyone, most people seem to find a job in a field, and the work in that field helps us support a more complicated society than we can fathom. Most people can't memorize all the stuff from multiple domains, or they would burn out. Most people don't understand how truly complex a semiconductor is, or how electricity and power is generated, or how to design a car. These are just basic examples but I'd argue a really good example of how humans have chosen a specific domain or thing and over time developed better understandings of the field and topic. The average person could do any job I'd argue.
We are not as physical as we used to be, we have "engineered" ourselves replacements. The tractor, the car; both replaced horses but at the cost of needing someone who understood the principal of the new technology.
Be it robot workers replacing amazon warehouse employees, or the tractor that improved the farmers ability to harvest or plant crops; both required smart people to not only develop them but to maintain them.
I'd argue while we really are less physically active, due to technology and general advancements we have made over the years; this comes at the cost of mental strain. We mentally must process and think more than ever before, pushing our brains to keep up so we can stay relevant.
> My father grew up while working as a farmer on the side, then studied engineering. He never did proper strength training in his life. I grew up studying full-time, have been working out on and off, more so in the last couple of years. And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap.
Arm wrestling is a poor indicator of strength. Technique and experience account for much more than most people would think. Compare bench press, squat, deadlift numbers instead.
I think the error here is assuming mind and body are separate things. In reality our body, even our gut bacteria, has a huge effect on how we think and feel. There's a reason why sensory deprivation or dissociative anesthetics like ketamine have such a huge effect on cognition. I just don't think the human mind is designed to be a brain in a jar through virtual reality or whatever. I think whatever attempts we make at doing that would probably drive a person insane.
To that I can add from personal experience, that indeed cognitive capacity and muscular health are tightly linked. I remember that on the peak of my form in a gym, I was able to code better, longer, and keep larger mental models in my head while doing it. Compared that to the period after back injury, where I was unable to do any physically challenging activities, I noticed a slump in cognitive abilities as well. So I can't see, how evolutionary, population with weaker and weaker bodies can keep producing highly capable individuals. And yes, of course there are plenty of cases such as Stephen Hawking and alike, but these probably are exceptions that prove the rule.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using.
I’ve been wondering if a similar phenomenon will be observed with our mental muscles. Will future generations know how to write a coherent e-mail or essay? Will they know how to approach solving a complex problem without AI assistance? Will doodling in class be supplanted by Midjourney prompting? Why bother thinking too hard when the machine can do it for you?
When we are all immersed in the substrate of AI, will there be a gym equivalent for the intellectual?
Why do we use weird arbitrary milestones like the (logarithmic) Kardashev scale. It adds literally nothing useful to otherwise fun conversations like this.
Jargon is often used for in-group signaling.
Yes. "Kardashev Scale" has now become a slop indicator.
All you need to do is look at the NFL to know how silly this claim is. At every level of sport, athletes have gotten bigger, stronger, and faster over the generations. You can write some of it off as hyper-specialization at the professional level, but that says nothing about small school single-a level competitors continuing to set new records in their respective sports.
Why not build a user interface that keeps us at peak health by demanding physical activity?
Uploaded intelligence will pave the way for BMS-III. Climate change resolved (no more need for ag, transportation of any kind, housing). Human brain uploaded to quantum servers cooled in Antartica.
Skeleton crew or robots to maintain physical world while a majority of humanity living in the matrix. Controlling machines from far away lands (or galaxies).
Entanglement does not allow for "Zero-Latency Control". This is a common misconception.
See "No-communication theorem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
I worry less about the physical muscles and more about the mental. Bit like calculators reduced people’s ability to do basic maths in their head - think similar will happen with AI.
I already find myself instinctively throwing any errors I can’t immediately figure out myself into a chatbot
Tech can surely overcome muscle atrophy if it was a real issue. Do we even need muscle if we add more powerful add on to walk for example? I would argue we want to keep muscle because we can have very precise control and feeling, unless the new stuff can make it even better.
Nah, moving up the Kardashev scale means more control over biology. "Workout in a pill" is not far off. Genetic engineering to retain high levels of fitness with little effort is in the realm of feasible too.
Anabolic steroids already exist.
Steroids don't really help if you don't actually train. You'll also die a lot younger. Hardly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Side-topic, but for Biomechanical Stages (BMS) author skipped from pure muscle to industry ignoring the part where humanity started using animals for heavy/hard tasks of pulling, carrying, pushing.
everyone knows our future is predicted by Wall-E
I don't know, to me it seems like biomedical engineering and manipulation will take off and develop a lot sooner than people willingly "upload" their minds to a machine – itself a dubious idea full of problems. I think it's far more likely that current-state humans won't be exploring the stars, but a genetically modified version of them will be.
I think there is much less angst regarding the idea of upgrading humanity piecemeal, a la the Ship of Theseus, than there is to fully discarding one's body for a digital existence. This has already sort of happened over the last few hundred years with the concept of transplantable organs. Prior to the widespread acceptable of the interchangeability of organs, it was not uncommon to think that your self and body are unified and linked in a way that implied organ transplation was problematic or undesirable.
And on that note - is it just me, or are biological visions of humanity's future fairly scarce in sci-fi and in futurism (another name for sci-fi)? My guess is because such topics seem dominated by software engineers, physicists, etc. that are less interested in biology.
Muscle mass adaptiveness is an optimization for regular famine conditions.
We could choose to let go of it, like we recently chose to let go of ravenous hunger with GLP drugs.
I need three hands so that I can hold my smartphone at alll times
I remember being struck a few years back when shaking the hand of a friend’s farmer father. He was about six-inches shorter than I am (6’1”) but his hands were MASSIVE.
The timescales involved in us becoming even a K1 species are probably enough to say we won't be anything resembling current humans, neither physically nor socially.
The ideal towards which we all strive is, of course, the Dalek.
Maintenance of one's muscular-skeletal system is a Goldilocks problem. Too little exercise leads to atrophy, but too much also leads to degeneration. Eg the productive lifetime of slaves in the labor-intensive Caribbean sugar plantation system was only about 10 years. Breakdown of joints, ligaments and tendons was a common problem related to overwork (and is commonly seen in athletic training today).
Similarly, my understanding of the history of yoga in India is that it was introduced because of the sedentary lifestyle of the Brahmin caste, and much like with office workers today in the USA, it served to keep them in decent physical shape.
> why would anyone do such an expensive thing?
I find it amusing that somehow resources would still be constrained as we go closer to be a Kardashev I civilization.
Stupid premise.
We already have exercise mimetics in pre-clinical trials. If you can keep yourself fit with zero expenditure of time, why wouldn't you?
The joy of motion and physical effort.
The parent means "why wouldn't you stay fit (either manually or with drugs)" rather than "why wouldn't you do it with drugs".
Parent specifically said “with zero expenditure of time”, which seems to imply the latter question
Because some of us have high levels of skepticism with that stuff. Even the GLP-1 inhibitors are too new to really get a handle on. The only proven methods to health are those that have existed before we ever came along: a clean diet and (good) exercise.
History shows time and time again that there are no free lunches in nature.
Not to mention, I love working out.
If anything, I need more reasons to leave the house. Not more reasons to stay inside and be on the computer even more.
I do agree that GLP-1s can't be a free lunch. It can't be that powerful for free. Even beyond that, we might not know what we are doing with them.
It use to be standard for testosterone replacement to get a shot from a doctor every two weeks. This is an unbelievably stupid way to take testosterone. Blasting a super physiologic level of testosterone and then crashing over a two week period would be a good way to amplify side effects if that were the goal but we didn't know what we were doing then.
It is very unlikely we would have just randomly stumbled on the best way to take GLP-1s out of the gate.
> I do agree that GLP-1s can't be a free lunch. It can't be that powerful for free.
Why? Life is not a morality play.
It wasn't a question of morality - we don't know what the long term side effects are.
Look if it helps a morbidly obese person drop enough weight so that they can get a handle on their A1C, blood pressure, etc. then it's probably (from what we know now) worth the risk. For the slightly overweight person who takes it, and I know a few from the gym, we don't know what that looks like yet.
It will take time to find out if there are long term detrimental effects.
> It wasn't a question of morality - we don't know what the long term side effects are.
But we actually do. And they seem to be all positive so far.
> It will take time to find out if there are long term detrimental effects.
It's been 20 years already from the development of the earliest GLP-1 agonists.
JFYI, GLP-1 agonists have been in research and clinical use for about 20 years by now.
And while medical chemistry moves slowly, I have no doubt that we'll solve the exercise problem within the next decades. Never mind by the time we're talking about ascending on the Kardashev scale.
Do you have any useful search terms for them?
"Exercise mimetics" are fine. You need to look at the professional publications. It's a very active area of research, so things change rapidly.
The newest research: https://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/388/2/232.long
Here's a nice, but a somewhat obsolete review: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8728540/
Sometimes I think that is what metformin and statins do, because weirdly enough both seem to blunt the exercise response. I’d love to take them but I already exercise.
i assume EMS (electrical muscle stimulation)
No, exercise mimetics are drugs that stimulate the same biochemical pathways as regular exercises.
muscle size is to heat the body, more than giving strengh. human muscles are inefficient on purpose
Absolutely correct.
Traditional office culture makes it very difficult to get a proper workout in while, at the same time, confining you mostly to your chair, hunched over a desk (and/or craning over a small screen), to view things on a screen that eats away at your eyes by default.
WFH made this worse. I've worked with so many people that start work at 0700 and end at 1700 or later.
Add shitty, cheap food, 2.5 kids and a partner in there, and you're basically on an express train to bad hips, bad knees, poor health markersa and immobility at (not so) old age.
"Work out during your lunch hour," you say. The author spends a lot of time on muscle use. Powerlifting workouts require lots of rest between sets, especially as you get stronger. Spending 2h on a workout is normal in powerlifting. Not happening during lunch hour, not like this matters because someone will just schedule a meeting over it anyway.
"But I wake up at 0400..." No. Just no. (A) A parent with two and a half kids is not getting up at ass o clock in the morning to chase that pump (or work out to stay healthy) when their kids are gonna wake them at 0640, and (b) this is an awesome way to either sleep like shit forever or incinerate the last fledglings of your social life.
All this aside, the farmer life is a super hard way to live, . Overuse injuries are very common. However, we went the complete opposite direction in building today's office culture, and it's a real shame.
Modern technology and a sedentary job are what make it possible for me to do hard strength training 4x/week and eat a high protein diet. As an amateur strength athlete, I am almost certainly much physically stronger than any of my ancestors that didn’t have the luxury of eating like I do, or exercising specifically for strength. We have good ways to quantify this even because we have ancient stone lifting traditions- we know how strong the strongest ancient people were, and modern people that train for strength are much much stronger- we now have small women like Chloe Brennan that are as strong as word famous strongmen were a century ago.
Sometimes I hear people say strength is useless nowadays but I couldn’t disagree more. In emergency situations I have been able to push stranded cars uphill to a safer spot, carry injured people and animals to safety, move large furniture and car parts myself, etc. Being more attractive to romantic partners is no downside either, nor is being able to eat a lot and not get fat. Strength makes modern life easier and more fun.
> I think that by the time we reach other stars
Isn't that the ultimate hubris?
Sounds a lot like slavery.
My non physical desk job leaves me with a fresh body after my very much non 12 hour workday.
Because I have the physical energy to, I take that body to the ocean for a swim, to the park for a cycle, and to anywhere with a nice view for a run. Depending on the day. Oh and the gym is a pleasant 12 minute walk from home, so I do that a few times a week as well.
Sorry to burst your bubble OP.
> Interesting blog post
No, no it's not. There is nothing redeeming to be found here, it's nonsense. It's historially ignorant trad-pilled vibes about the past combined with bizarre techbro mumbo jumbo about the future. Neither have any meaningful grounding in reality, nor anything interesting to say about the world.
Bold of them to assume we’ll survive the century at any level above the Iron Age, and with any population above the high millions to low billions.
Capitalism is keeping us locked into the “Business As Usual” model that will bring us to civilization-destroying climate change by the middle of the century, and with tropics-denying lethally high wet bulb temperatures that will get well into the temperate zone by the end of the century. Think most of CONUS being uninhabitable for multiple days to weeks every year, with or without AC.
The Kardashev Scale isn't pseudoscience, but it is pseudo-psychohistory.
...So I'm advanced?
This means I'm advanced.
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