Got curious about something: which organism has the lowest water content under normal living conditions? (excluding things like tardigrades in space). Seems tough to answer. The kangaroo rat appears to be one candidate, but I can't find a number for it.
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I also find it curious that the average across organisms seems to be about 70% which is also the % of earth covered by water... wonder if that's a coincidence. Is an aquatic biochemistry essential for DNA-based life? Or an artifact of life evolving in water?
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Also, I recall reading somewhere that human water content ranges from 75%+ in infants to less than 40% in the elderly... so we basically dry out as we age and then get actually desiccated after death if left to decay
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theory: we're actually still aquatic creatures. We just carry the aquatic environment around with us now. Life crawling onto land was like colonizing space in spaceships for single-cell life
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great bags of water think alike
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the big difference between biological and artificial life is not carbon vs. silicon but wet vs. dry embodiment. Computers and robots are so much drier than us they are solid state life forms. We're liquid state. Yin vs. yang.
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