Comment by reliablereason
4 hours ago
Initially i asked a AI for standard values but here is a proper source:
- Negentropy concept revisited: Standard thermodynamic properties of 16 bacteria, fungi and algae species ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00494)
> Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.
Yes. Clearly it grew as it grew, but the question is what drove/powered the growth.
> Initially i asked a AI for standard values
Don't do this, and don't then share the resulting numbers as fact publicly without disclosing you just asked a chatbot to make up something reasonable sounding.
If the chatbot refers to a source, read the source yourself and confirm it didn't make it up. If the chatbot did not refer to a source, you cannot be sure it didn't make something up.
The property measured in the source you linked, "enthalpy of formation", is not the same as the energy required to grow 1g of biomatter. One clue of this is that the number in the paper is negative, which would be very strange in the context you requested (but not in the context of the paper). For the curious: "A negative enthalpy of formation indicates that a compound is more stable than its constituent elements, as the process of forming it from the elements releases energy"
You're feeding yourself (and others) potentially inaccurate information due to overconfidence in the abilities of LLMs.
If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
I hear you.
It was really just food for thought.
> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?
They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).
> It was really just food for thought.
It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.
General rule of thumb: If you're going to ask an LLM and then make a post based on that, simply don't post it. If we wanted a randomly generated take on this, we would just ask an LLM ourselves.