A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

This reminds me of a gem of a comment from about a month back, about a dead simple Russian guidance system from a Cold War-era missile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389285

Actually, someone even commented in that thread about how it was similar to biological mechanisms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390619

What I find fascinating is the extreme efficiency of what is effectively an electric motor, reaching nearly 100% efficiency. At human scale we struggle with heat dissipation and friction

Article stopped exactly where stuff got interesting.

This whole "protons entering bacterium and being pumped out" is exactly the ancestor of the mitochondria, that's what it does, except now the "outside" is the inside of the parent cell.

Relevant Smarter Every Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSm9gJkPxU

at the scale that it operates, the flagella is more a drill than a propeller

there's a good richard feynam video about how things feel when they're that small https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c

For some context, a billion years at a 20 minute breeding cycle is 26.3 trillion generations.