this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
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Probably not. Mammals and birds demand 10~100 times more oxygen to survive than other vertebrates (source), as our metabolism is rather high; I don't think that the oxygen in water is able to supply that. And a change in that metabolic rate seems a bit too involved to be feasible, specially given that our brains use a lot of energy (thus oxygen).
With selective breeding you could technically be lucky and slow down the metabolism, selective breeding isn't a very precise way to change something, but the actual problem would be time anyway.
The problem is that any change slowing down the metabolism would be deleterious in nature: no/slower body heating, lower brain capabilities, slower healing, increased reaction times, etc.
As a rough comparison, it's like trying to reduce the energy demand of a computer. There's some room for optimisation but eventually the only way to do it is by reducing the amount of things that it does, by throttling its components.
Moore's Law disagrees
Moore's Law has no good biological equivalent. And it doesn't even refer to energy consumption itself, but the number of transistors in a circuit.
Also its outdated because we ran into a physical barrier.