I wonder whether we humans will ever see a moment like that again - sans the nazis. i.e. I wonder whether humans will ever amass that level of expertise to solve a survival of the species problem in such a short period of time.
I could imagine scenarios where civilization depended on our ability to create energy or grow food on a scale that required ramping up fission or fusion reactors really fast. For instance, an asteroid or volcanic eruption blocks out the sun and we need to figure out how to keep our cities from starving.
Another technological approach to avert starvation in the same sort of ecosystem collapse scenario is to develop and implement human hibernation, like the cryo-sleep pods from science fiction movies. Thus we drastically reduce the calorie needs of the average person, so that a much smaller population can try to work out the problems and get the world back into a state where it can support a larger population. (There was a movie called Downsizing that was about that kind of solution, except that in the movie they literally shrank people so that their demands on the ecosystem are dramatically reduced, and cost of living is almost nothing.)
It might take me being further from covid for how similar it is to the Manhattan project response to really sink in. Might be too “fresh.”
Maybe this is a chance to learn something about those times. So until the bomb was dropped, the public wouldn’t have had any conception of it being a way out of the war. Yet if the war was in decline when the bombs dropped, I suspect we can agree the bombs did make the finality pretty certain. (Edit-I would argue the bombs absolutely did end the war in a way that wasn’t assured without them dropping, but that’s a point for another time.)
As someone living through covid, the vaccine was something we all were essentially waiting around for while others developed it. We’re aware of it, even if we don’t know how much work was needed to develop the mRNA vaccines. So in WWII your average person could have perceived much more terror from not even fathoming the end of the war at various points.
My knee-jerk was that hibernation doesn't save a ton of calories - a passive day and a highly active day are only a factor of 2 different (something I learned when getting my resting calorie spend as a volunteer medical test subject).
But, pausing aging - that's different than just sleeping all day and keeping your caloric spend to base. If you aren't aging I suspect no calories can be spent.
Is that possible? I know there are the "Walt Disney's head is frozen to be revived later" concepts, but do we have any evidence it is possible to pause aging entirely?
I'd bet that controlled and sustained fusion is closer. And, that seems like fantasy.
If I understand correctly, one of the barriers to the science-fiction approach of freezing people is that ice crystals form and destroy tissue if one were to actually literally freeze a person. In order to survive that, you'd need some way of inhibiting ice formation. Maybe it could be solved by injecting people with some non-toxic antifreeze solution, or immersing them in fluid at such high pressures that ice doesn't form, or you could just maintain a temperature just above freezing. And then there's the problem of how to thaw a person back out. I don't know if that's solved, but I guess there is a body of knowledge around reviving extreme hypothermia cases.
Less extreme forms of hibernation might look like medically induced coma or like a bear hibernating through the winter. I don't know if bears age significantly while they're sleeping. I'd guess that they age somewhat, but at a slower rate than normal.
In a morbidly curious way, I wonder what society's reaction and government reactions would have been in the emergence of an airborne pathogen MUCH worse than covid19. Not some fanciful human species killing event like in "The Stand", but with a potential to kill 10-20% of the planet if left unchecked.
I hope that wealthy countries' reactions to finding a vaccine, cure and preventing the spread would make the Manhattan Project look like building a back yard tool shed, but I don't know for sure how we would have handled the global catastrophe.
It did kill people - of course - due to the criticality experiments - but that was in part caused by cavalier experimentation by a researcher (over the objection of colleagues at the time to boot).
Contrast to biotech: you can't do human targeted biological experimentation without humans. At it's core you put lives at risk doing the most mundane things in biotech. You can easily wind up killing people trying to develop something and the further you're reaching the more likely it is. We don't have disposable, non-sentient human bodies to experiment on with complicated biotechnology and won't for a very long time.
Also, was your introduction to wandering earth the movie? If so I suggest reading the trilogy.
Indeed nature of the story is to focus on individuals. Still for example interstellar, you fully follow the dad/daughter and all that tubular space station building just happens completely off screen. And its assigned to the brilliance of the daughter instead of the coming together of people (how i interpret it!) curious how you view that for example :)
I think the 3body problem has a similar theme, the protagonist is central to the story, without him stuff does/doesnt happen, but the infrastructure (which in the main happens off camera) is built and deployed by the many not an individual, of course some solutions (trying not to spolier anything) are dependant on one individual.
I guess my point is that there isnt much difference between western and chinese sci-fi but chinese sci-fi also has to please the chinese government to be allowed to be published, so that also needs to be considered.
You could say a similar thing about the atomic bomb: the science was well established, but actually building one was still a pretty big undertaking.
1938 to the Trinity test in 1945 was about seven years.
Going by the wikipedia article on RNA vaccines, people have been experimenting with them since 1989, but there was a major advance in 2010 on getting mRNA into cells without triggering an immune response. Even then, there were a lot of attempts at treating various diseases and viruses that didn't pan out. So, it sounds like mRNA vaccines were kind of a long slow slog of running into problems and fixing them, whereas in the case of the atomic bomb, the idea was around for a long time but no one really knew how to get started until suddenly they did, and they immediately got busy building it.
Turns out giving billions of people multiple doses is actually a hard problem.
The very few EU facilities have to supply the entire rest of the world (sans RU, CN). And now the US is talking about doing a third dose per patient before exporting any doses at all.
mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.
1. preventing suicide by ecocide is next
I study WW2, and just off the top of my head, the Manhattan, B-29 and V-2 projects took longer and cost around $2 billion each in 1945 dollars. The economies involved spent over 50% of GDP on war materiel. So no, corona wasn't even the biggest war project.
> We shut down huge tracts of human life and attendant economies to save the lives of the oldest and weakest. We're still doing it.
I'm not sure it was a good tradeoff, and I would say there wouldn't have been a lockdown if there was enough ICU capacity, which BTW didn't seem to increase in the past year (China built new hospital buildings, but I don't know if they were equipped.)
I would argue that corona was the first smartphone pandemic, which pushed control down from the federal govt. to state govt. and individuals, causing sensationalism and distraction (ie. "do masks work or not?", "omg the number of patients increases every day!", "how is this going to affect my White House run (Newsom)", etc.)
> mRNA is bigger than a bomb, and fully peer reviewed.
WW2 arms were amply demonstrated.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021031...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/two-thirds-epidemiol...