Not to mention that it would be making everything else already relying on the nerve system less effective as well.
(This also affects our motility discussion and whether it should require nerve cells, since without them the muscle cells will definitely produce less speed)
Not sure if this distinction will be mechanically useful, but I don’t mind at all using them to separate the discussion.
What I do think is important is that some of these systems have parts to them that are spread throughout the body and just cannot be all that visible. That’s the nervous system and blood circulation at a basic level. Though both of them can also have elements that are meaningful and larger units, such as the brain and heart.
Most of these make sense to me.
What you’re talking about appears to be the (bio)chemical definition of respiration (which we have very often talked about with microbial metabolism), but does it still make sense to describe it in this way in the Macroscopic Stage?
What you’re describing is happening throughout the entire body unnoticed, not is a specific system. I actually always imagined that we’d not be looking much at ATP in the overall Macroscopic Stage view, instead just looking at glucose stores (and maybe iron, for the weirdoes).
When we’re talking about respiration in macroscopic life irl, we usually mean exchange of (dissolved) gasses with the outside of the organism to fill shortages and get rid of excess. That includes different compounds between a plant and an animal. But I imagine it would include Hydrogen sulfide as well.
What did you have in mind here? Because hearing this I am thinking about lungs exchanging with the circulatory system which then directly ensures the rest of the body can work.
Perhaps for Thrive purposes the respiratory system is not necessarily a heavily separate system?
Makes sense to me as well.
Speaking of senses (ha), might be good to keep in mind the special cases of some senses typically being distributed in the skin.
Agreed on both counts here.
This is certainly starting to make sense to me. I guess these would be separate tabs within the editor? Or perhaps sub-sections within a tab? UI will be critical here.
- Given the diversity of structures in life, do we see a tree-like structure here in terms of paths the “system state” can take?
- For structure components, I am currently imagining the as parts that can be added to/placed inside metaballs (In a quite imprecise, non-specific way). Would they be selectable from this “tab” to then be placed in the body, or be “unlocked” in the more general part menu?
You’ve also cool things like lungs originally being a branch of the gut. I think being able to represent things like that would be a plus.
I think the overall direction is good, but I would caution against thinking of neural capacity too much like a “complexity limit”. Like I said before, it makes perfect sense for things like muscles (more/finer control) and senses, but there are also lots of complex things that can IRL evolve (and we will likely need to have in Thrive) without needing management via the nervous system, only more energy. Looking at plants for example.
As for the capacity itself, once you have a brain, you would expect you can do a lot by just increasing the size of the brain.
I am also not sure how I feel about “big jumps in neural capacity”. Evolutionarily, you would expect new abilities to evolve in tandem with the neural capacity to handle them. Perhaps they could be less big jumps, and instead unlocks for gradually increasing the capacity more?