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Mandatory for now. Given enough time, I believe mankind will effectively cure all disease.
by suby 6y ago
Mandatory for now. Given enough time, I believe mankind will effectively cure all disease.
- coldtea 6y agoGiven enough time it's also possible manking will regress or kill itself or plateau. We haven't made any deals with the universe for limitless progress... Not that you said we did, but many kind of think like that's the case, for hand wavy reasons, like "the sky is the limit", "human ingenuity is limitless", etc...
- tshaddox 6y agoIt’s pretty obvious and (I think) uncontroversial that humanity could cause its own demise or fail to prevent external causes (like large celestial object impacts). What does seem controversial is the claim (which I adhere to) that it is also possible for humanity to solve every problem that they meet.
- wadkar 6y agoSomething along the lines of “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> Given enough time What are you even talking about? Humans have existed something like 200,000 years. In 500,000 years from now (or less), evolution will have changed us into something entirely different.
- adrianN 6y agoSo? If we put some effort into it we might maintain cultural continuity, which is imo what matters more than how our bodies look like (if we still have any). The better rebuttal is that currently it looks like we'll crash the planet's ecosystems and with them technological civilization within the next century or two, long before we've reached the point of curing all disease.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> we'll crash the planet's ecosystems Species will evolve to thrive in the new ecosystem. Perhaps that will be a subset of humans evolving into something else, perhaps not. But life won’t disappear because we raise global temperatures.
- adrianN 6y agoI don't care too much about the ecosystems, I care about our civilization. That is orders of magnitude more likely to disappear than life (or just the human species) because we raise global temperature, deplete topsoil, deplete aquifers, poison everything with substances that last millennia, cut down forests, deplete fish stocks, etc etc.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI would not get too attached to our civilization. Can you imagine how many there must have been in 250,000 years? Include the ones from Neanderthals and other homo species, too. And they’re all gone. Ours will be, too. How can we possibly secure a civilization for, say, 1M years?