My motivation for posting thoughts here is selfish - when I'm right, I
can say "see, I got there first" and when I'm wrong, no one will notice
:)
More seriously, I've gone through multiple computers, phones, and
storage systems and this site is still online. So, as long as I feel
like sharing, this seems like a very good way to back my ideas.
Also see:
My Github repo
Straying from the Google-able [blog]
Me on twitter
Friday, August 16, 2013
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Doctor's drugs
I hope that no one expects to graduate as a physician in the next decade and retire in the same field. I only hope that the field is around long enough for you to pay off your school loans. If you are smart, I think you will have to look for a job developing wearable medical devices after practicing for a decade or two.
Humans are pretty healthy now compared with a thousand years ago, a century ago, or even fifty years ago. In general, if something ails us, we can go to a doctor who can tell us pretty much what it is. We prevent many ailments every day by taking showers, brushing our teeth, and washing our hands. In the future, we will be touching less and getting cleaned more. We will have devices that know our habits and can make healthy recommendations to go along with them. Those devices will know when we excrete and maybe what we have excreted and how much of what we've eaten our body has metabolized. If our devices don't know about a problem, we will be able to tell them about it and they will refer it to a doctor, and eventually make the medical diagnosis for themselves.
I'd trust a robot to know where to put a scalpel before I'd trust a human. So why do humans still operate? Because robots haven't been programmed to do the whole surgery and haven't been engineered to be as dexterous as a human hand stitching a wound. And the future will require less surgery and less stitches when surgery is required. And who controls the robots? Eventually no one. A doctor or technician may review the procedure afterwards to tell you that everything went 'ok', and eventually just to put a human face on a very traumatic process (why else would you be in surgery), and eventually you won't even see a human and just get a bill for a five minute heart transplant.
And you say you want another heart? Why wait for a donor to die so that you can get one organ that has already been used for 25 or 50 years or more when you can get one grown in minutes? And you like smoking, drinking, driving reckless - as long as your brain is intact, you'll be fine. In another century, why not just store a backup of your brain just in case?
Drugs - they only get better. What's the point of drugs: to alter your mental state or cure? Currently both. In time, they will get better, and then they will disappear. In fifty years, the need for drugs to cure medical ailments will be nonexistent. The only medical use for drugs in fifty years will be as prescribed by a psychologist - and even then, rarely. Recreational drugs will always be around. Lots of people enjoy drinking alcohol, this trend isn't going to die just because technology has improved. Furthermore, recreational drugs will improve - as more is learned about the brain and how certain chemicals effect certain parts of the brain, new drugs will be made to react with defined regions and cause real short - this allows for higher sails - and intense reactions of a desired effect.
After drugs are practically nonexistent, people may use controlled radiation or electricity to stimulate a certain part of the brain to cause the desired effect. This radiation or electricity may even come from your clothes (your wearable computer) as part of a computer program that you paid for.
Humans are pretty healthy now compared with a thousand years ago, a century ago, or even fifty years ago. In general, if something ails us, we can go to a doctor who can tell us pretty much what it is. We prevent many ailments every day by taking showers, brushing our teeth, and washing our hands. In the future, we will be touching less and getting cleaned more. We will have devices that know our habits and can make healthy recommendations to go along with them. Those devices will know when we excrete and maybe what we have excreted and how much of what we've eaten our body has metabolized. If our devices don't know about a problem, we will be able to tell them about it and they will refer it to a doctor, and eventually make the medical diagnosis for themselves.
I'd trust a robot to know where to put a scalpel before I'd trust a human. So why do humans still operate? Because robots haven't been programmed to do the whole surgery and haven't been engineered to be as dexterous as a human hand stitching a wound. And the future will require less surgery and less stitches when surgery is required. And who controls the robots? Eventually no one. A doctor or technician may review the procedure afterwards to tell you that everything went 'ok', and eventually just to put a human face on a very traumatic process (why else would you be in surgery), and eventually you won't even see a human and just get a bill for a five minute heart transplant.
And you say you want another heart? Why wait for a donor to die so that you can get one organ that has already been used for 25 or 50 years or more when you can get one grown in minutes? And you like smoking, drinking, driving reckless - as long as your brain is intact, you'll be fine. In another century, why not just store a backup of your brain just in case?
Drugs - they only get better. What's the point of drugs: to alter your mental state or cure? Currently both. In time, they will get better, and then they will disappear. In fifty years, the need for drugs to cure medical ailments will be nonexistent. The only medical use for drugs in fifty years will be as prescribed by a psychologist - and even then, rarely. Recreational drugs will always be around. Lots of people enjoy drinking alcohol, this trend isn't going to die just because technology has improved. Furthermore, recreational drugs will improve - as more is learned about the brain and how certain chemicals effect certain parts of the brain, new drugs will be made to react with defined regions and cause real short - this allows for higher sails - and intense reactions of a desired effect.
After drugs are practically nonexistent, people may use controlled radiation or electricity to stimulate a certain part of the brain to cause the desired effect. This radiation or electricity may even come from your clothes (your wearable computer) as part of a computer program that you paid for.
Save the planet
So, the earth is going to look like hell in 50 to 100 years? No. I think we will start making the earth cleaner in 50 years. We will start with air purification. We will get so good at cleaning out the stuff that we have put into the air that we will turn these massive machines from cleaning the atmosphere of buildings to cleaning the atmosphere of our planet Earth.
Clean water? This problem will be quite a bit harder to solve. Most will agree that the best state to revert earth back to would be somewhere around the year 1000. We will probably use sea shells to extract a decently accurate chemical content for ocean water and rocks to give us selenite data that we might not have gathered from ice today.
Ice caps? I'm sure that we will have melted most of the northern ice caps before we ever think about making them anew. This is shameful for geologists who would have been able to learn much about earth that will by this time been long ago melted into oblivion, but there's nothing we can do about this. The other downside of refreezing Arctic ice is that it will also revert coastlines and may destroy harbors, swamps, and other low waterways that will then be supporting life.
Animals? Darwin was right - creatures do evolve. Creatures have and will continue to evolve to adapt to humans and what we do to the planet. By reverting the planet, we will also need to revert animals via genetics and behavior. Will we be able to bring back extinct animals? Sure, but will we want to? Will it be a good thing to do to earth? Might animals that have been extinct for decades be more harmful than introducing a foreign creature into an ecosystem half way around the planet and that becomes an invasive species?
If we are to do it right, cleaning our planet might take as much as 200 to 300 years. What most, whose computers have simulated the worst prospects in their models of the earth have failed to realize is that it will be possible to undo most if not all of the hazards that we have created. Sure, we will have a generation of kids who might only see a sunset through a pane of glass and we might have to reintroduce as many as 50% of land mammals into their environment - but it'll be doable.
Clean water? This problem will be quite a bit harder to solve. Most will agree that the best state to revert earth back to would be somewhere around the year 1000. We will probably use sea shells to extract a decently accurate chemical content for ocean water and rocks to give us selenite data that we might not have gathered from ice today.
Ice caps? I'm sure that we will have melted most of the northern ice caps before we ever think about making them anew. This is shameful for geologists who would have been able to learn much about earth that will by this time been long ago melted into oblivion, but there's nothing we can do about this. The other downside of refreezing Arctic ice is that it will also revert coastlines and may destroy harbors, swamps, and other low waterways that will then be supporting life.
Animals? Darwin was right - creatures do evolve. Creatures have and will continue to evolve to adapt to humans and what we do to the planet. By reverting the planet, we will also need to revert animals via genetics and behavior. Will we be able to bring back extinct animals? Sure, but will we want to? Will it be a good thing to do to earth? Might animals that have been extinct for decades be more harmful than introducing a foreign creature into an ecosystem half way around the planet and that becomes an invasive species?
If we are to do it right, cleaning our planet might take as much as 200 to 300 years. What most, whose computers have simulated the worst prospects in their models of the earth have failed to realize is that it will be possible to undo most if not all of the hazards that we have created. Sure, we will have a generation of kids who might only see a sunset through a pane of glass and we might have to reintroduce as many as 50% of land mammals into their environment - but it'll be doable.
Walk in the Park
In the not too distant future we will be breathing cleaner air in doors than we will have access to outside. This is attributed to pollution that will have been produced in the advancement of our technology.
When we think of taking a walk in the park, will it be on the ground? When we want to go to the beach, will it be at the coast line of some continent or island? When we go camping, will it be in a national forest? No, I think not.
As we build bigger buildings, we have noticed them heating the immediate area around them significantly. Some have started planting trees and other natural foliage to try to minimize the amount of heat these buildings will radiate. As the size of our buildings increase, so may the vastness of the forests on them. And as we realize the impacts of suburbs, small towns, and urban sprawl the value of untouched land will increase past any monetary value. We will build up in already industrial cities and we will eventually build over their parks, we will take out their side walks in favor of walking bridges higher and higher up that may span buildings. So, when you wake up tomorrow, you may be taking the elevator up to go walk the dog at the park.
There are currently fake beaches, ski slopes, and parks in buildings, but they are far and few between. What will change the number and vastness of these fake resorts? Filth. We are polluting, we will continue to pollute, but we don't want to choke on our own pollutants by going to the beach. As technology in air purification improves, we will find a better experience and more health reasons to stay indoors. We will build vast beaches, mountains, and forests on buildings to supplement the great out door experiences that earlier generations had and would have liked to share with the next generation.
Have you ever gone camping? Well, you've got about 50 years to try it, and about 25 years where you can still go places to be one with the wilderness. One might argue that since so many people enjoy hiking and camping, and since more and better air and water purification technology will exist, that people will still go camping in 75 and 100 years. I'd submit that; 1. though a good person might try to prevent it, camping still has some small environmental impact, 2. who wants to go camping with planes overhead, cell phones ringing, and the reoccurring noise of engines running, and 3. the impact of camping will cause laws to be made to inhibit it.
When we think of taking a walk in the park, will it be on the ground? When we want to go to the beach, will it be at the coast line of some continent or island? When we go camping, will it be in a national forest? No, I think not.
As we build bigger buildings, we have noticed them heating the immediate area around them significantly. Some have started planting trees and other natural foliage to try to minimize the amount of heat these buildings will radiate. As the size of our buildings increase, so may the vastness of the forests on them. And as we realize the impacts of suburbs, small towns, and urban sprawl the value of untouched land will increase past any monetary value. We will build up in already industrial cities and we will eventually build over their parks, we will take out their side walks in favor of walking bridges higher and higher up that may span buildings. So, when you wake up tomorrow, you may be taking the elevator up to go walk the dog at the park.
There are currently fake beaches, ski slopes, and parks in buildings, but they are far and few between. What will change the number and vastness of these fake resorts? Filth. We are polluting, we will continue to pollute, but we don't want to choke on our own pollutants by going to the beach. As technology in air purification improves, we will find a better experience and more health reasons to stay indoors. We will build vast beaches, mountains, and forests on buildings to supplement the great out door experiences that earlier generations had and would have liked to share with the next generation.
Have you ever gone camping? Well, you've got about 50 years to try it, and about 25 years where you can still go places to be one with the wilderness. One might argue that since so many people enjoy hiking and camping, and since more and better air and water purification technology will exist, that people will still go camping in 75 and 100 years. I'd submit that; 1. though a good person might try to prevent it, camping still has some small environmental impact, 2. who wants to go camping with planes overhead, cell phones ringing, and the reoccurring noise of engines running, and 3. the impact of camping will cause laws to be made to inhibit it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)