Code center > Suggestions
Muscles, Fat, and Chloroplasts
EricL:
Just FYI, I don't have to agree with something to implement it. Many things impact the list of things and the order of my to-do list. I have my pet projects to be sure, but if there is strong consensus on something, it gets added to the list pretty high... So don't think discussion is in vain. It's more a democracy then you might think...
Numsgil:
In addition to what AGP said, the largest reason to add fat is that it would be implicitly allowed when a metabolism is set up. Simply collect large numbers of substances with high free nrg. Not adding it would just mean it gets added in a round about way later
Fat can be more specialized than current body. We could have it store 100 nrg instead of 10, or even 500 nrg.
In real organisms, they tend not to use ATP for long term storage solutions because sugars are more compact, they tend to take up less volume/ less osmotic pressure, etc. If we give nrg a volume, then fat becomes a reasonably way to decrease volume.
Zinc Avenger:
I like that idea (it occurred to me too as I was reading above only to realise Numsigil got there earlier and posted it before me ), it is a little counter-intuitive (you'd think a fatter bot would be larger) so perhaps "fat" isn't the best name for it?
In real life muscle has a high cost to form but it is actually more efficient to retrieve stored energy from muscle than from fat once you have already invested in the muscle. So to add another suggestion to the melange: Currently the maximum rate of body increase/decrease is capped. By changing it slightly to make the cap dependent on the "input" substance instead of equivalent nrg you can make muscle slow to form but quick to break down. Like so: 10 nrg > 1 muscle, 1 muscle > 10 nrg, with a cap of 100 nrg or 100 muscle converted per cycle. So the maximum muscle that can be formed each cycle would be 10 muscle, but in any cycle 1000 nrg can be liberated from muscle. Obviously the numbers could do with a little tuning but I hope they illustrate my point.
Numsgil:
I don't think that's right. But I'm having a hard time finding anything about this, so I can't be sure.
My basic biology from years ago told me (I think) that the body doesn't burn muscle until its reached the final stages of starvation because the caloric requirements to build muscle are so much higher than the calories you get from burning it. But I may also be confusing protein with muscle.
Can anyone find a reliable source to get the relative values for real world muscle and fat caloric requirements for building, storage efficiency (in terms of both caloric upkeep and calories stored per mass or per volume), and calories recieved from burning, so we can have a relative idea of how the whole process works in real life?
Zinc Avenger:
My assertion that muscle is broken down for preference comes from an A-Level Biology course I took about a decade ago so, I am not sure I can back it up convincingly!
The following quote is from The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy http://www.merck.com/mrkshared/mmanual/sec...chapter2/2b.jsp
Free fatty acid levels rise as fat is released from adipose tissue to provide energy. Blood glucose falls and is maintained at a lower level by synthesis of glucose in the liver from amino acids released from muscle. Plasma amino acid levels rise initially as muscle is broken down but then fall as starvation proceeds, with essential amino acids decreasing more than nonessential amino acids. Plasma insulin is low, glucagon is high, and serum albumin is near normal as long as muscle is broken down to provide amino acids for protein synthesis in the liver. Protein catabolism, in general, decreases with starvation, reflected by a reduction in urinary urea and total nitrogen.
It is not entirely clear above, but it seems that muscle is broken down quite early in the process rather than as a last resort. So I guess it isn't the first resort but it would appear not to be among the last tissues cannibalised for its component amino acids.
My reasoning has always been that high energy density structures are always easier to break down for energy than they are to create. Compare wood with the atmospheric carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that it was created from - its easier to extract energy from wood than it is from an equivalent amount of free atmospheric gases.
While yes muscle is fantastically inefficient as a method of storing energy, it is a very rich source of energy once the effort of constructing it has been accomplished. That's why carnivores require less volume of food than herbivores - muscle (protein and fat) has a much higher energy level than vegetables (cellulose and sugars). I think I'm wandering a little off topic here, so I'll stop this now.
I'm perfectly willing to concede that I'm arguing from half-remembered and misunderstood schoolboy science classes from a decade ago
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