Your bladder and kidneys need water to function. Initially, your kidneys slow sending water to your bladder which is why your pee turns dark. Then you start losing water in your blood to keep organs functioning but the decrease in blood volume causes your blood pressure to drop. This makes pumping blood increasingly difficult for your heart so your body will start sending less blood to your organs. This starts damaging all your organs and eventually your kidneys stop filtering your blood. Toxins build up in your brain that’s already not getting enough blood and eventually shuts down and you die.
Hi there. I’m interested. I’ve also got a science background (life sciences), it’s my job to communicate well, and I’ve been working remotely on a distributed team for years now, so I know how important communication and coordination are. I’d love to help foster an inclusive and informative community, and I can check Lemmy pretty frequently (multiple times a day). I’m okay using Discord. (I’m already on Slack and Telegram basically 24 hours a day, so it’d be great if that were the tool of choice, but Discord is fine, too.)
As water level decreases, the total amount of sodium stays the same. So, essentially it is increasing in concentration. Too much salt interferes with heart cells’ ability to contract together. So less water = more salt = less heart coordination.
Cardiac arrhythmia due to hypernatremia and hypovolumenia can be fatal. There are many changes that occur, but the effect on the heart will kill ya.
Dehydration can lead to death through mechanisms such as organ failure, blood thickening and reduced blood pressure, electrolyte imbalance, brain swelling, shock, and build-up of cellular waste.
Electrolyte imbalances and upset balance of salts and sugar can cause impaired cellular function, heart problems, neurological issues, kidney damage, and shock, ultimately leading to death.
Let me recommend the books by Greg Egan. Essentially, he takes some basic premise of our universe’s physics, twists it around, and then writes novels exploring what living in such a world would be like. Superb. You can check his website for an idea, but don’t be scared by it. He drops all the physics and math in there, but the novels shy away from that and use metaphors where absolutely needed.
/r/askscience was one of the highlights of Reddit - I’d love to help establish a similar community here in /c/askscience. I especially liked that posts and followup questions were rewarded for being inquisitive, and that off topic/inaccurate responses were removed. Posts on topics I’m familiar with were filled with scientific information, and I learned a lot from posts on topics outside my area of expertise (also the ones in my area of expertise, to be honest).
I have a science background (nuclear physics) and lots of experience communicating with remote collaborators. I’m fairly active on lemmy (on another account, I created this one to be my semi-professional one) and would generally have no problem checking the site at least 3 times a day. And I have no issues with mod coordination over Discord.
I check Lemmy about twice a day, work in and foster a collegial environment, and have a background in science. I can’t say I would be intensely active, but currently there is less than 1 post per day here, so even a little would lighten the load.
We are all very likely doing it now with most of what we believe to be the laws of physics. While they may seem to reasonably explain the phenomena we have been able to observe that represents such an infinitesimal fraction of the universe that the margin for error is astronomical.
My partner is pursuing their PhD in Philosophy and studies history and phil of science and has dealt with this question a bit, so I’ll take a stab from that perspective.
My answer will rely on the possible worlds framework (a la Lewis) along with a tiny bit of knowledge about Newtonian mechanics.
Is it possible to imagine our world with different physics? Yes. Prior to discovering special relativity and quantum effects, we had newton’s Classical Mechanics, which was able to precisely and accurately describe and predict the movement of bodies in Euclidean space. So, if we can imagine our physics without the complications of curved space and quantum effects, we can imagine our world with an alternate physics that has been somewhat rigorously tested.
Additionally, we can easily imagine the world without the curvature of space and quantum effects (which should be clear by the fact that it’s not too long ago that we thought that was the best picture).
Classical Mechanics offers a working physics that just didn’t turn out to be correct in our (curvy) world. However, relying on the possible world’s framework, it would be easy to stipulate a possible world where Newtonian mechanics was true, or even a possible world where physics shifted from one set of laws to the other.
If we believe the evidence that physics could be otherwise, we might conclude that the laws of physics are relative to a world and a time (and, importantly to metaphysicians, not more fundamental than those two things).
I think a working physics lacking space-time or motion might be impossible to imagine.
I don’t have the study to back this up, but personally for me it has a lot to do with how heavy I am. When I’ve been thinner I’ve been much more tolerant of humidity and heat.
This argument, as far as I know, relies on the nature of time dilation. You see as your velocity increases closer and closer to the speed of light, time itself begins to slow down. This is not an analogy or some fancy math trick, this is a real thing you can measure in the lab. As you get closer and closer to the speed of light time slows more and more. Such that as you reach the speed of light (again this is physically impossible at least for anything with mass) you can think of time as stopping. So for light or anything that moves at the speed of light they’re kind of isn’t such a thing as time, but I digress.
So (again even though it’s actually impossible), what happens as you start to go faster than light? Does this trend continue? If it does that would mean that time starts to reverse. And once you see that faster than light travel might imply time reversal, it should be easier to understand how this would violate causality. Because how do you get event A caused by event B when event B was before even A?
Quite frankly, all of them, as in literally all of the levels. e.g., viruses are not considered "alive" in the classic sense, but they sense things sometimes & change their behavior accordingly. A single protein can do it too, like in mad cow disease / scrappy (called "prions"). Even a tiny snippet of DNA can make logical circuits akin to computer ones, implementing AND, OR, XOR, NOR, operations etc., plus feed-forward loops (& feed-backwards, and all other sorts).
Possibly even subatomic particles, and maybe even quarks (or strings?) do the same - e.g. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle where you start to interact with something and then that changes it already so that you cannot measure other aspects of its previous "natural state". Okay that's not so much a "decision" as a "reaction" - but as you are questioning, what really distinguishes the two, REALLY?
Bacteria can sense a molecule (like sugar), literally start growing a tail (no joke!), and then swim towards it. All entirely chemically, and we have the technology to literally just kinda 3-D print all that at the molecular level (it takes an existing flagellum but once that is added to the mix, it can grow just like a crystal, by extension / copying of the old pattern).
Most of what we considered to have made humans "special" in the word turned out to be false - e.g. chimps & gorillas can "talk" (it's hard for their throats to make our kinds of sounds, but given the right apparatus they can get the job done), and think in abstract terms, and do math, and all kinds of things. Of course, humans ARE special - we are the only things on planet earth that if aliens came, could attempt to nuke them in orbit, and we literally light up the night sky! But there's a whole continuum of "dust" that share a lot of properties with us, in various ways. I'm not sure if animals have the same kind of subconscious vs. conscious interplay going on as we do, but if you have a pet and stare at it trying to work through a decision, you KNOW that it's doing the same as us, at a fundamental level. And then each time you go a level deeper, the similarities kinda never end...
Such questions may never even find answers, at least in our lifetimes, but it sure does seem worthwhile to ask anyway... it sharpens us, so keep digging!:-)
You've stumbled upon the basis of the debate between free will and determinism. imo, we are merely under the illusion that we're making our own choices. The universe is one infinitely complex system of falling dominoes, with each choice and action just being the result of the parameters set by the ones preceding it. We are all made up of the same basic building blocks, and are thus just subatomic systems obeying the laws of thermodynamics... it just happens to be the case that when a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it is able to think about itself - we are quite literally the universe experiencing its own existence.
Why is this? I don't know. Nobody knows. Consciousness and 'the ability to experience' is one of the most elusive and complex questions facing science and philosophy today. It's my personal belief that there is certainly 'something' more to this whole cosmic experience, but I'm not convinced by religion's answers and believe 'it' to be something so vastly incomprehensible and foreign, we'd never understand it even if the mystery were revealed to us. It isn't something I like to think about too deeply, because unfortunately, it opens up an infinite regress of questions we will likely never have the answers to.
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