That's context dependent. Where I live it's not a problem that a car takes up space (my car is parked in my home's basement).
Where I typically go to it's a relatively minor problem - most places I go to only need 4 to 5 places to park cars.
Work is in the middle of nowhere, again not an issue except that the government employees have reserved the lot by the building for themselves despite it being large enough to house the contractors as well (the govt. employees want to ensure they get the spots nearest the building).
Should the city of Rome have cars? No. But we don't (nor can we!) all live in a small European city
It also doesn’t illustrate the real scale of space required to operate each vehicle. A car needs several car-lengths of space between them. Bikes can be operated more closely together. At speed all of these vehicles scale up to more space differently.
"A car needs several car-lengths of space between them."
The distance between bumpers actually cancels out (actually it comes out in the car's favor). First notice that in the picture the cars are almost touching, so clearly you mean in fast moving traffic.
In fast moving traffic the carrying capacity of a lane is equal of the inverse reaction time (typically engineers use a large margin of safety and 2 seconds is used -> 1800 cars/(lane hour)).
For bikes, since they travel more slowly, you have to add the time it takes to travel their own length. So the carrying capacity of a lane is 1/(reaction time + length of bike / speed of bike).
The "several car lengths between them" is literally space that exists only because cars have generated themselves by virtue of going very fast (since fast moving vehicles get to where they want to be quicker and therefore get off the road to make space for someone else).
This doesn't mean that cars make sense in dense cities. They don't.
This doesn't means cars don't take more space by virtue of being longer in slow traffic. They do
But it does mean that, if there are "several car lengths between them", they are in fact operating in a more space efficient regime.
In the US road engineers go to strategy for safety is to just make the roads wider. When drivers feel safe they start driving faster than the speed limit. Those roads were designed to be "safe", not fast, meaning high speeds are more likely to lead to worse accidents.
I should know, I've lived here for 14 y years (and, no, I'm not 14 years old).
"Every batch of immigrants provide the fuel for growth and innovation."
So the people already in America are useless? As an immigrant I feel someone should have told me that my children will become sloths.
"Whatever might be the political climate but US is still the country to come if you want to make your dreams come true."
That's really little more than regurgitating a slogan.
Anyway, the duty of the American government is to Americans. My home country's government's duty is to me, and my duty to my home country's government (that's why I refuse to become American - I'm not ready to pledge the oath of allegiance against "foreign enemies" that might include my home country).
Or why are Americans the only people in the world not allowed to have a government and a State that looks out for their interests?
You can't reverse aging, that's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
You might be able to restore the body's ability to regenerate itself. But that's a terrible idea. I shudder at the idea of living to 120, never mind 200. Imagine being born in 1821 and having to live today. Imagine how confusing that would be.
Now start doing the math for how much power (I made it easy, I I'm only asking for the rate) that is required to keep someone alive indefinitely.
Don't cheat! Don't use the caloric needs of a fully grown adult. Their bodies stoically accept a lot of the damage done by entropy. You have expend additional energy to reverse it.
Don't cheat, remember to account for a population growth rate == the current birth rate.
If you don't like having to account for the growth rate, please give a moral explanation for why some select few get to live forever and others croak.
How much power do you need? How are you supplying this power? It's cute to say "Sun". But solar panels (let's assume 100% efficient) require surface area that would otherwise be used by plant and animals for their existence.
So live forever by
1. Radically transforming the Earth into a massive ball of polycrystalline silicon
2. Giving eternity to only a (very) select few.
Reversing the flow of aging is reversing entropy locally, so you're, overall, increasing entropy more outside of your body.
The live forever types are just assuming that energy will be plentiful enough to sustain hundreds of billions of people indefinitely [1] and heat easy to dissipate
[1] The population of the earth is stable at 7 billion only because people have this nasty habit of dying. If we stopped doing that, the population would grow exponentially at the birth rate of 1.7%. Or a doubling every 42 years. In 160 years (not that far off from the current record of longevity) the world's population would hit 100 billion people.
Of course the "live forever" types never mention that eternity is a promise for the privileged, and not for the masses.
Huh? If you were an immortal, you don't just suddenly appear out of time. A person born in 1821 and still alive today would know more about the world than anyone else.
"Yeah. I was born and lived before the Internet (in its widespread form) existed."
So you're in-between the age of 40 to 60? Let's say you're 60, born in 1961:
- Your local pop radio station often plays a rock song from your adolescence. The Queen of Pop whose posters adorned your room and so scandalized your grand-parents still sings at the Super Bowl.
- The Star Wars movie you geeked out as a teen/young adult has become a billion dollar franchise your grandkids drag you to
- The ATM you learned to use thirty years ago are still around basically unchanged.
- the quarter the tooth fairy left you as a kid that you found in the tin can of boyhood treasures is still accepted as currency
Compare that to a 60 year old person born in 1820.
They have yet to have seen a train: most people in the world at the time lived their whole lives in their villages far from any railroad. China's first railroad was built in 1875, and quickly dismantled. (China, alone, in the 19th century had between 30 to 38% of the world population)
Most likely this person lives in feudally arranged society. The emancipation of the serfs in Russia was in the mid 1800s, and that was the last of the European countries to remove feudalism.
In the anglo saxon world, women were effective properties of their spouses.
The superiority/inferiority of races was obvious to the learned classes.
Slavery was practiced throughout the world except Europe and then the US.
Homosexuality was punishable by execution most everwhere in the world
Sexual roles were well defined and strictly obeyed according to local customs (i.e. they weren't universal norms, but norms existed universally).
The only way to fly was in a hot air baloon. The only people who ever witnessed this lived in Paris or in London
Steel existed but was extremely expensive and not used for construction. Wrought iron was used instead, and it was a brittle mess that resulted in catastrophes. As a result the buildings in urban areas were typically no more than 6 stories high. Religious buildings were much taller, but projects that took centuries to build.
Communicating with someone across the Atlantic took weeks.
Now, let's say our hypothetical person living in 1880 and born in 1820 lived another 60 years.
The airplane is invented and used to devastating effect in multiple wars
The automobile is invented, and by 1940 mass produced.
Throughout the world, therefore, buses provide transport to remote area that aren't serviceable by rail
Skyscrapers pop up.
A world war has impacted most people in the world. A new one has just started.
A communist society exists and has mechanized death killing millions.
Telecommunication, first by wired-telegraph, then by wireless telegraph, and finally by radio exists and enables instant communication across the globe. The most remote villages can receive the BBC world service, often in their native language.
Our gentleman most likely wouldn't be aware of this development but classical physics has been shattered, the concept of time turned upside down. The atomic era has also begun, but most people will be blissfully unaware for another 5 years.
Penicillin is about to revolutionize life expectancy.
I think this person born in 1820 would be very uncomfortable if living today.
So go get vaccinated! If you trust the vaccine that it works, and that it's safe, go get it. I certainly have urged people I know who are high-at-risk and don't share my ethical concerns about them to get the vaccine.
If they're safe and effective, get vaccinated!
If they're safe and not effective, or lossy effective, we have very big problems and vaccinating the hold outs will not change anything
The problem appears to me to be a design problem of the implanted devices, not the iPhone.
Unless I'm mistaken this is what's happening:
1. ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
2.However, this is not trivial since a human body is a bag of salt water. Therefore low frequencies are needed.
3. Low frequencies are very difficult at the necessary length scales with electric fields, so they used the magnetic field instead.
So far, so good. But then they assumed that the person would never be next to a magnet? That's a design flaw on their end, not the iPhone's. There's magnets, and low moving large currents, everywhere!
The should have implemented a primitive type of port knocking.
The actual problem is that EM fields blind the device so that they can't sense the cardiac arrhythmias they are designed to fix, this rendering them useless.
> ICDs want/need to communicate with the outside (at least one way).
My St Jude Ellipse ICD communicates bidirectionally (control inputs in, telemetry out).
I'll leave it to you, a user, that strong EM fields also blind the devices. The signals the ICD is trying to measure are very weak. I can imagine that strong 50/60Hz surge currents really screw things up, especially in single conductor power distribution situations (UK ring circuits, rural farms, etc).
That being said, the article (TL/DR) appears to focus on "static" magnetic fields. The near field charging feature of the iPhone barely makes mention.
I think the "disable ICD" being a simple magnetized reed switch for an implantable medical device is a bit silly. At least tap a code into that reed switch a little!
The entire medical devices industry tackles this issue just fine (for example, I have a percussion vest for respiratory therapy that uses strong magnets, and there's no shortage of warnings).
For the record, I volunteered for a COVID vaccine trial.
"mRNA vaccines have been tested in humans since 2011"
So barely 10 years. A study on a dozen or so participants, all white, college aged men with largely identical diets. I guarantee you that not one participant in the 2011 study was pregnant. (Btw, I looked at your reference. A Bush era press release was less manipulative. There wasn't a single peer-reviewed reference. All press releases and from interested parties)
Compare that with other vaccine technologies for which we have centuries of data, and inoculation in general for which we might have a thousand years worth of safety data.
Or did we forget about all the inconvenient facts about drug testing? We appear to have forgotten all the research done about regulatory capture and all the ineffective and unsafe pharmaceuticals the FDA approves.
But, nvm. #BelieveTheScience and de-platform anyone who asks inconvenient questions. And let's compartmentalize away the replication crisis modern science is going through.
Also, for some of us 10 years is not very impressive at all. "It's not new, nRNA has been around since the 90s!" is a massive value judgement for the word "new". Not all of us work developing webpages with 3 month old technology stacks!
Do you believe it's possible for a sufficiently advanced society (think Star Trek) to develop a vaccine for a novel virus in a short period of time? What do you think this would look like?
I don't think a society can be as "advanced" as Star Trek. Societies are hard. To abuse CS terminology, they're NP-hard (or harder?). Star Trek seems to have only external threats, all internal problems are solved. The most boring problem a real society has is that of production and it is definitely NP-hard (see Hayek?). Star Trek has not only solved that at galactic scales, but has solved much hard problems than production.
Nor I don't think Star Trek is advanced in the sense that I would consider it "progress" vs. just change. I view Star Trek as the propaganda reel of (not for, of) a techo-distopia. Vulkans and that Data android fellow freak me out more than the Klingons whose society, while brutal, I can understand. I see more humanity in a Klingon because I can see a human society degenerating into the Klingons'. I don't see any humanity in Vulcans.
Btw, their technology bores me. Their tech is either impossible (warp drives). Surpassed (communicators). Or fraught with angels-dancing-on-pins philosophical questions (the "beam me up scotty" machines)
So, with the caveat that you used ST as an example and I'm definitely not a Trekkie, let me address your question:
No, I don't.
Biological systems are far more complicated than any system mankind has made. Every "cure" or therapy is really a very good whack-a-mole with hopefully lots of statistical information to back it up.
Take blood. It has hundreds, if not thousands, of components. Some are in pg/dL level of concentrations (that's 10^-12g / 100ml). See this chart [1]. How can we every really understand all the interactions among those various components?
That is not to say that I'm a bio-luddite (I am, but that's besides the point). Take penecillin. It's brutal on the body, but is one of the most important discoveries in human history. It has saved millions, if not billions, of lives. Im very grateful for penicillin, and yet, what an illustrative example! We gave too much penicillin with too much abandonment. So now, we have anti-biotic resistant bacteria. And, almost 90 years after it's first discovery we're finally starting to understand it's role in the havoc in our gut flora.
Btw, gut flora is another, fascinating, example of how complicated bio-systems are. We're evolved to depend on a symbiotic relationship with a gut flora that we've destroyed over the last 70 years of anti-biotics and cheap sugar.
So, while I think ab-initio methods (what Star Trek does) can inform and accelerate drug discovery (I worked on that briefly in my PhD), ultimately, no, I don't think we can ab-initio drugs through the whole pipeline (need-->development-->safety_evals-->approval).
Or they have other reasons for not getting it, reasons that are personal/mocked/dismissed by others, and the emergency approval was the easiest way to get these street preachers to make like a tree.
I feel that modern computers are so powerful that they are productivity sappers. For me to be productive, I think a system with low latency but otherwise very limited would be the best.
It's like what a friend said in college about getting a dual monitor setup: "Your productivity doubles until you realize you can watch movies on the other one"
