[ExI] kiwis keeping it real

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 3:32 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> As far as helping life people out of poverty nothing science and
> technology has discovered seems to have made a dent.
>

That is factually incorrect. In 1950  63% of the world's population lived
in extreme poverty but today, even though the population is three times
larger, only 9.6% live in extreme poverty. And there has never been a time
in history when human beings live longer or were better educated than right
now.

> However, I do see, in Nigeria I think, a geneered bean is going to really
> help the famines they have. I read previously that many African countries
> have banned GMO crops.  Talk about  - I just can't think of a good metaphor
> for the terrible decisions those are.
>

It isn't just backward African countries that have made ridiculous
anti-scientific decisions, the highest elected official in the largest
economy in the world has made speeches about how vaccines cause autism.
With the possible exception of the flush toilet vaccines have saved more
lives than any other invention in history.

> When I think about particle accelerators (they want another one!) and the
> enormous cost of the things,
>

25 years ago some physicist publicly testified before Congress and said the
US shouldn't build the Superconducting Super Collider because the money
could be spent in other ways that would advanced physics research more;
they were right but that turned out to be the correct answer to a question
that was never asked, the politicians just wanted to get reelected and if
the SSC couldn't help with that they lost interest.
So the SSC ended up being canceled, but that didn't help science because
the money was not spent on other science projects, it wasn't spent on
anything. Today I think if you had $20 billion to spend on physics research
you could spend it more wisely than on building a new colossal particle
accelerator, such as on new Neutrino and gravitational waves detectors, but
once again that's not the point. And 20 billion may sound like a lot of
money but not to a country that spent 2500 billion dollars to destroy
weapons of mass destruction that never existed.

> I think that if you have so many people dying of diseases, starving,
> dying of dehydration because of water availability, you cannot justify pure
> research to the extent we are doing now.  Genetic modification is going to
> save hundreds of millions of lives and make many more more enjoyable.  billw
>

But genetic modification would not be possible today if decades of pure
research had not been done first.

> As to what is going to happen in November.  I just dunno.  Blank.
>

Unfortunately I don't draw a blank, I can imagine all sorts of nightmare
situations that could occur on November 3 2020 and on January 20 2021. I
keep being assured by some that such things would be physically impossible
to happen because a fragile paper document in a glass case in Washington DC
would always protect us from them, but I'm not so sure that totem really
has such magical powers.

John K Clark
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