Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Miyamoto 4620 days ago
Awesome. One very (very very) small step closer to creating a pill to help the flushing process so we may sleep less, or not at all.
3 comments

Seems unlikely. Essentially all animals with a brain sleep, even flies. You'd need to find a pill that could do something that not one animal was able to evolve to do over hundreds of millions of years. Something that was extremely calorie intensive is all I can imagine.
I appreciate your logic, but there is a wide variety of needed levels of sleep among different animals, and even among different individual humans which tells me that some are more efficient than others at sleeping (maybe clearing toxins?).

As efficient as evolution is, the ability not to sleep as much may not be a huge determinant in reproduction. Just 100 years ago, people worked all day, then relaxed and slept. There was little to no demand for not sleeping at all from a survival standpoint.

The main reason people want to stay awake all night now is to work more and advance their careers. You don't need that for survival.

Further, Pharma companies have done some amazing things. While I agree that it is unlikely soon, I am confident that if humans are around in 200 years, it becomes much, much more likely.

What is likely to be true is the pharmaceuticals will allow a conscious choice among a menu of tradeoffs, on a daily basis.

Such tradeoffs might be possible now, for those with sufficient discipline, but switching between very different ones is too hard.

All animals are extremely vulnerable when they sleep. Yet they all do it.
> a pill to help the flushing process

I'm afraid this will require nanobots.

I'd be happy with a pill that speeds up the sleep/recovery process - it seems easier to achieve and it wouldn't go against millions of years of evolution...