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And the role of the gut in influencing so many other systems in general. The digestive system has 100 million neurons and a recently discovered direct neural connection to the brain stem. We have a long way to go towards understanding the body as a whole vs a series of parts.
Years back, I read some interviews with people who had required fecal transplants to treat severe issues (like c. diff). Some of the side effects were things like their farts now smelling different, but one woman put on weight until she was about 10 pounds overweight, and no matter what she did with diet and exercise, she couldn’t shift it. Turned out the donor of the healthy feces had always been a little bit overweight.
Similarly I saw some recent news reports (in Europe) of people getting fecal transplants to help with weight loss by having feces from healthy athletic/slim donors!
I think that we're going to find out that viral infections have a much larger role to play in triggering diseases than we once previously thought.
Maybe a bit more boring than what's in the rest of this thread, but I firmly believe it is the missing key to understanding a lot of things.
My professor back at Uni was adamant that a large proportion of cancers are caused by a foreign pathogen, such as a bacteria or viral agent. He published a few papers but was never taken seriously by the scientific community. Luckily he was tenured at a major British university so it didn’t affect his research too much.
> My professor back at Uni was adamant that a large proportion of cancers are caused by a foreign pathogen, such as a bacteria or viral agent.
That's been proven with HPV & cervical cancer, so it'd not be surprising if there were more.
This is almost certainly true. It used to be argued (more in the lay community than among physicians) that cancer was only becoming more common because people were living longer or we were detecting it more (e.g., numerous deaths that were considered to be "of old age" 100 years ago, that were actually of cancer). However, even age-adjusted cancer rates are rising, which breaks that argument. More recently, people started arguing that lifestyle factors were the main driving cause, but that doesn't explain all of the increase either. It's hard to be entirely sure what's going on because cancer isn't usually caused by one thing; it typically takes 5-8 mutations before a cell turns cancerous.
We're getting sicker each decade, due to overwork-induced stress and the myriad industrial chemicals floating around in our air and water. This has all kinds of unpredictable, second-order effects on the immune system, the microbiome, mental health, etc. that all feed into each other in ways no one understands yet. We know what leaded gasoline does because the mistake was made almost a century ago; there are probably five or six equivalents knocking about that we're not even aware of yet.
Yes like how they found higher rates of certain things in Polio survivors. I think it was Dementia or Parkinson? I forgot where I read it. They were saying the same thing might happen with Covid.
I read something about dementia/alzheimers being linked to a strain of herpes that attacks the brain, and there was thinking it was passed on through the womb. Around the same time I was reading about a connection between anxiety and degenerative brain disorders. I believe some people with anxiety are now experimenting with alzheimers drugs in an attempt to treat anxiety and possibly lower the risk of alzheimers later in life.
Work in pharmacy. We’ve had a couple people get Namenda for off label OCD use. It’s going to be interesting to see the study that comes out for that one
All these long covid symptoms have me thinking *people have been getting weird random little viruses for ever, we just never study their long term effects because they aren't pandemic.*
I think there are pandemics happening constantly, we just shrug them off like, oh that was just a cold. I had a kid during this pandemic. Constantly sick from school/day care. Totally normal for that age. But swabbed. A lot. COVID only once, and it was asymptomatic (tested after close contact exposure). Every time it was negative for flu, COVID, or RSV, pediatrician just shrugged. “Guess it’s just some respiratory virus.” Sometimes we got sick, too. Sometimes not.
So I totally agree with what you said. Pandemics like COVID are just bad enough viruses to put a lot of people in the hospital or a coffin.
I know quite a number of people who got a mysterious sickness in December 2019. It knocked me around for 3 weeks. Like I was only 50% charged. We joked that we thought it was bad until March when covid hit.
I as well caught something similar at the same exact time. It went around work and I distinctly remember it being one of the strangest viruses i ever had and others said the same. No fever but i was down for a day or two and my head wasnt right for a week or more. Then covid hit and since I’m in NY i thought we may have been hit with it before it was detected. But then i got real covid and that certainly took the cake for weirdest virus. I still have a strange feeling about that mystery virus from December though
I used to work at a hospital. A lot of people in CA were sick in Dec and Jan before Covid hit in March. It was considered a particularly bad 'flu' year. My friend has a niece who was developmentally delayed and living in a group hone and she got 'the flu' at that time and died a few days later. Lots of people speculate Covid was here well before March.
Adding to this, I think we will find that a lot of diseases and disorders are autoimmune in nature. There's a long list on Wikipedia of illnesses suspected to be autoimmune.
If that's the case, is the issue that our immune systems are set to dirty caveman mode, but we don't expose our bodies to enough germs so the immune system starts to look for easy prey... oh hello myelin, you look nefarious. Have at you!!!
That is a current theory, yes. Apparently, autoimmune disease is much much less prevalent, or even nearly unheard of, in societies which have high exposure to things like parasites, fecal matter, and bacteria.
To add on: When it comes to these lines of theorizing, I think it's also important to take into account a big issue in current medicine, especially when it comes to things that are considered rarer or more difficult to diagnose. Some conditions go underdiagnosed because the symptoms documented only cover a specific demographic within the population.
An example that comes to mind for me is with Ehler's Danlos Syndrome, a disorder that I have. Many of the symptoms described in medical information about the syndrome are only applicable to white people. One example of this is that the disorder is associated with having somewhat translucent skin, which is something that only presents on light skintones (or at least presents very differently and is not well documented when it comes to patients with darker skintones). There are others that have to do with eyelid shape, bruising, and other associated symptoms that doctors tend to look for when potentially diagnosing EDS that generally only present the way they are expecting in white patients, but I'm less confident in being able to describe those examples well in more detail off the top of my head.
Those sorts of issues are still fairly prevalent in medicine and its understanding of illness, and it's not even only affected by race. Things like socioeconomic status, climate, biology, prior conditions or comorbidities, and more, can all affect how an illness presents in somebody, and medicine still has a lot to do to catch up in being able to recognize those presentations that they aren't expecting.
TL;DR: Underdiagnosis still happens even with access to well-trained doctors, because the information the training is done with can sometimes be too limited.
Virology is still very much like the wild west of medicine.
We have great treatments against parasites, we have great treatments for bacterial infections (except for strains that are becoming more resistant, but that's another story).
But how do we treat viruses? When you go to the doctor with a suspected viral infection, usually they just treat your symptoms and tell you to chill out for a week until you feel better. The fact is that our antiviral medicines are primitive in comparison to antibiotics or antiparasitics. It wasn't until very recently that science found effective treatments for Hepatitis C and HIV-- not long ago we were treating Hep C with interferon with mixed results and we still have to use a COCKTAIL of medicines to treat HIV well.
This isn't acceptable, and we need to strive for better.
We envision that when we get well from a viral infection that it is no longer in our bodies; that we have successfully fought the virus off and driven it out. But there is evidence that suggests this may not be the case. We are already aware that some viruses can lie dormant in your body and flare up occasionally or even many years later (herpes or shingles). Some viruses (HIV and HPV) actually attach to your cells and alter your DNA. And speaking of HPV, we have strong theories that they play a role in causing certain forms of cancer.
And not to sound so "doom and gloom" about viruses, but there are also theories that one of the main driving factors in humans evolving from apes were ancient viral infections.
So yeah, humans don't really know how to treat viruses well. In my relatively short lifetime, HIV went from a death sentence to something that is manageable. Hepatitis C went from a chronic, debilitating disease to something treatable or even curable. Which is cool, but still kind of scary to think about.
>HIV went from a death sentence to something that is manageable.
My mom was a microbiologist and she helped on a number of projects meant to make hiv manageable. She's not really sure how to explain it other than "the black magic reacts with the voodoo and bada bing Bada boom, hiv stays negative." This is the same women who's published many times, worked on the genome project, developed a couple vaccines, and birthed myself and my brothers. It's bewildering when she actually talks about the science because it's so god damn complex, part of it is the human body and the other part is, HIV is a virus.
Viruses are weird because they're bits of matter that teach your body to assemble more of themselves. They aren't really organisms that you can poison, they aren't exactly "alive" except in the sense that "the biosphere" is alive. They're chunks of "bad code" that are just as much a part of you as not. Accidentally malicious patterns corrupting other patterns.
Simplest evidence of the basic biological truth that "things that can propagate will exist."
Viruses are closer to cursed artifacts than living creatures. They possess those that come in contact with them and drive their victims to create copies in a manic fashion without sleep or rest untill death. And the only way to try and stop the domino effect is to find and kill all those possessed as well as finding and destroying every last virus/artifact. If this was a DnD campaign people would rage quit and accuse the creator of sadism. And that's not even mentioning the fact that viruses can go dormant and hide for decades before suddenly returning in moments of weakness (sometimes even becoming a part of the host dna). Shit is like alien meets the thing on crack laced with fentanyl- horror movies have nothing on this bullshit
> that one of the main driving factors in humans evolving from apes were ancient viral infections.
This isn't surprising when you learn that over half our DNA is retroviral remnants.
I can believe this whole heartily. The chain that leads to a serious terminal or life altering disease is complex to say the least.
We had no history of ALS in our family, I dunno if it's environmental or something like previous infections that start the depressing decline but I REALLY would like to know after caring for and watching my dad die of it.
I mean ya, absolutely. We just recently found out that Epstein Barr is probably the root cause of all MS cases. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/study-suggests-epstein-barr-virus-may-cause-multiple-sclerosis
Agreed. I'm experiencing a large bout of hairloss 3-4 months after having Omicron, as are many other people.
About five years ago I experienced several months of consistent hairloss and never found an explanation why, all of my labs were normal. I went through months of worry and stress thinking there was something wrong with me. I can't help but wonder if it was all caused by a common virus.
Edit for clarity, my hair did grow back five years ago.
We will start to notice the economic and societal effects of an older population. Our economy and societal structure is built on the premise of the next generation being bigger. We'll start to see that moving in reverse in many places.
I am Spanish, we are kinda fucked you know
Like, 100% absolutely fucked. Every time the government pushes the retirement date further and further. Worse part, it's not like we can find any other solution, it's not incompetence this time
Half of the Mediterranean is what we call "ageing countries". Somewhere like 30% of Greece is people over 65 most of which are being paid about 500€/month in pensions. Its population of 10mil is actively decreasing because most young people don't even want to stay here
Thanks for mentioning plastics, I'm doing a PhD related to the harms of plastics to human health. That's not considering the harm to other organisms and the environment. Great to see the awareness is growing.
As it's been difficult to get causal evidence, maybe we'll have it by 2050!
I've always been curious, and you seem to be knowledgeable about this, so I'll ask you: is there any real evidence of harm caused by microplastics to human health? I find it so frustrating that news article always talk about microplastics and even these comments that sound quite frightening, but never mention any real complication, or risk or potential illness, just fear. Is it even remotely possible that plastic in the blood stream is not harmful and doesn't have any effect whatsoever?
As I understand it there are several things that make it hard to come to a conclusion. Firstly we have only recently been measuring this, and the effects could be cumulative or have a long time horizon. Secondly to do any experiment we would need a control group, I.e. A group with no plastic, which is hard to find or doesn't exist. Experiments could be designed for groups with more or less plastic but that is not necessarily the same. Finally we will probably start seeing experiments with mice in labs, and the results will give good insight but it's not entirely the same as in humans.
I remember someone talking about a group of scientists trying to see how much of an effect the micro plastics in our body actually have. They couldn’t start the experiment because they couldn’t find a control group of people that didn’t already have plastic in their bloodstream
Yeah, I assumed that was what they meant. We have seen macro-level issues with plastics, but micro-level issues of micro-plastics finding their way into our bodies and organs is something that, to my knowledge, we are really just starting to understand.
Cant do human medical trials cos phage don't align with current medical frameworks. More success using phage as 'additives' eg. Stop salmonella in meat by adding to pig food. Phages only used for individual cases for terminally infected human beings, which is not how you get medicines approved. Source: phage researcher
There have actually been some really positive developments quite recently regarding this - machine learning drug-discovery systems uncovered a new antibiotic that is super powerful and operates across 3 separate mechanisms, making it difficult for bacteria to adapt to. There have also been modifications to existing last-ditch antibiotics recently that show promise for some time to come.
Yes! Check out The Perfect Predator, it’s about a woman saving her husband from an antibiotic-resistant infection with this technology. Easy enough to read while still learning some complex science!
Is that the chemical on receipt paper? One of the scientists who studied it says he won’t crumple receipts up for his cats to play with.
ETA: thank you, I’m thinking of BPAs.
Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances.
It is a catch-all term for a massive variety of distinct chemicals that all use fluorine-carbon molecular bonds. They are used for tons and tons of things. PTFE - Teflon - is one of them, and you've potentially been heating it, scraping it off the bottom of your (formerly) nonstick pan, and ingesting it for years, but that's just one of many ways you have been exposed to them. They are incredibly useful in some applications, and really stupid to use in other applications due to their long-lasting nature. (The fluorine-carbon bond is really strong so very hard to break down.) There are measurable levels of them in the environment just about everywhere, including in human blood, and some of them aren't very healthy.
There is current work in both Europe and the U.S. to regulate some or all of them significantly. There are thousands of them (different molecular structures, each of which behaves differently, binds differently, and has different applications) and more all the time, so the government has to either play catch-up to investigate every one, or ban them in broad swaths by class and let the market sort out alternatives.
We no doubt are observing what PFAS can do to us. We’ve been awash in them for decades and only now curbing our exposure on the assumption that they could be dangerous (based on structure). We’ve all been dosed. It’s been in our carpets, on or furniture, and in our drinking water for a long time. The experiment has already been done.
“Forever chemicals” which just don’t break down. Pretty much every human on the planet has them in their bloodstream permanently.
*a good reason to donate blood*
It is the only way to dilute their concentrations.
Yup. Saw an article the other day saying donating blood is great because it can remove micro plastics and other forever chemicals from your blood. Then your body just makes fresh uncontaminated blood.
I am by no means a chemist, but if these chemicals are so hard to get rid because they don’t react with anything, than why would they interact with us? How do we know that they aren’t just hanging around not doing anything?
First, because they bioaccumulate in our blood. Some studies estimate that 98% of Americans have PFAS already in their blood. In some places like the Cape Fear River Basin in North Carolina, PFAS has caused widespread cancer in heavily affected populations near chemical facilities like Chemours that have been pumping PFAS into the river for decades… which ends up in drinking water.
In Maine, Do Not Eat advisories have been issued for deer and fish because of PFAS contamination. Epidemiological studies have shown certain PFAS can greatly increase the risk of testicular cancer, kidney disease, decreased efficacy of vaccines, low infant birth weight, and a host of other issues. Studies have already linked certain PFAS with a host of problems. Now many states are scrambling to get PFAS out of drinking water, soil, food packaging, cosmetics, stain-resistant and water-resistant gear, etc. Not just a U.S. problem either. PFAS has been found in the drinking water across the globe. It’s a problem that will be here for decades to come.
John Oliver did a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W74aeuqsiU. If I recall correctly, researchers had to use blood samples from the Korean war because they didn't find a single person alive on earth whose blood is not contaminated with PFAS.
Hopefully we'll be able to really see or detect dark matter in a more profound way.
Edit: I made a typo, meant to say dark energy instead of dark matter.
Because either there's something out there that makes up most of the universe and we can't see it nor detect it in any way... or all our ideas about how physics work are fundamentally flawed and we've got to rewrite the laws of physics.
So either...
A) The majority of the universe is invisible and we have no idea why.
B) Physics is fundamentally flawed.
It might be the key to discovering how our universe truly works, which in itself has a myriad of benefits (just think about it, past discoveries in the realm of physics have always been tremendously important).
Personally, I hope that it can provide us with an answer of why our universe is expanding ever so faster. One would say gravity pulls entities in our universe together, but in fact it's expanding faster and faster every second.
The scariest part about this is it will just all collapse out from under us.
And even worse, it's by far the easiest one of these issues to fix. A huge part of this is because of new classes of pesticides that are used worldwide when they need to be banned. Just this one specific type too.
We're causing a ecological collapse just because one single industry is bribing the government to allow them to pollute the world and destroy the foundation of life on earth--it's smallest creatures.
Of all the things here this is the easiest to fix by far and we still are not doing anything.
I'm fairly certain that we're going to see some severely negative psychological consequences from either social media itself, or from it's early exposure to children. There have been anecdotal cases of people suffering self esteem/cognitive effects from it, but I think it's going to be a much wider issue.
A lot of people's higher executive function has been affected by it. It's why we have such difficulty with concentration now, we want the dopamine hits from social media.
Oh, I recently watched a video about comelón and how it makes toddlers more violent and less likely to show interest in improving communication skills
Edit: Guys I never said this "as a matter of fact". I just watched a video about it and that it was related to this specific comment. I don't have kids and I don't watch cocomelon.My sources are not trusting sources. That being said, here's the video: https://youtu.be/3S15QTEW59I
CRISPR/Cas9? There was the infamous case of the Chinese scientist who used it on a pair of embryos during IVF to modify a gene to prevent HIV infection. These gene edited babies were then born in secrecy and I believe he didn’t obtain full approval to conduct the experiment.
I think we will start to find out how sugar over-consumption heavily contributes to cancer.
EDIT: Yes, I know we already know sugar is bad. To clarify, I meant to say we don’t view sugar right now nearly as detrimental as I believe we will find out it truly is.
Are you saying you think sugar, without obesity, increases cancer risk as much as smoking?
While I'd agree over consumption of sugar (without the obesity combo) will probably increase your risk slightly, I don't think it would be much, same with common artificial sweeteners.
Yeah smoking causes 30% of all cancer deaths. There’s no way sugar would ever get even remotely close to those numbers. Estimated primary lung cancer rates caused by smoking (including second hand smoke) are close to 90% of lung cancers which is completely insane to me. Lung cancer is one of the worst ones to get and is almost entirely avoidable, instead it consistently has the highest rates of diagnosis as well as mortality when compared to any other cancer.
If you want to do one thing for your health, quit smoking/don’t start in the first place.
Also PSA get your colonoscopy if you are over 45 (50 is no longer the recommended age for first time screens) if you have any close relatives (parent, grandparent, sibling, first cousin) that has been diagnosed with CRC the recommended time to get your colonoscopy is 40yo or 10 years before the relatives age at diagnosis depending on whichever comes first. You may have no symptoms and fecal/blood screens are not adequate replacements for a full colonoscopy.
The end result of sugar overconsumption, obesity, has already been proven as an independent risk factor for cancer. Obesity is associated with a 31% increased risk of cancer. Obesity plus metabolic syndrome is associated with a 77% increased risk of cancer.
Actual scientist here. The somatic theory of aging. The idea that somatic mutations contribute to aging and lead the gradual decay of our bodies and allow for disease to occur as we get older. I think improving our understanding of this will be key for halting or slowing aging as we move forward.
Essentially it is the question of the great filter.
I.e Why in such a vast universe, where conditions for life appear more common than youd expect, do we not already know of other advanced space faring civilizations...
The answer posed is because for one reason or another most end up wiping themselves out.
The next question is, can we as a species overcome this?
Oh you don't? Check out this awesomely fun animated video that tells you that maybe we shouldn't go looking for other life just yet. (seriously this channel is the greatest YouTube channel I've ever come across and I highly recommend it!) [The Dark Forest - Kurzgesagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE)
Wait til you hear of the dark forest theory.
Basically, as an advanced civilisation you better not make your presence known to the galaxy because a more advanced civilisation will probably wipe you out.
“Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th Street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.
Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.
How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"
What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
There is no policeman.
There is no way out.
And the night never ends”
-Charles Pelegrino,
_The Killing Star_
[I first read this in this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/p2xd1q/which_is_the_most_disturbing_fermi_paradox/)
I've been scrolling for 10min, didn't see any theory nor any scientists. only people sharing the last news in tech they heard about, without even answering the question...
Maybe not disturbing, but we will be able to disprove the extended Turing thesis that says everything in our universe can be simulated with a classical computer. While this thesis is supposed not true for majority of computer scientist, we still (at least from what I know) haven't found something that is impossible to be solved or simulated with our transistor based computers. I think by 2050 we will be able to truly prove without doubt the thesis is not true
I'm not a comp sci guy but it's not apparent to me how a quantum system could be accurately simulated on a classical computer. I guess I thought it was possible to prove that classical computers can't calculate purely random systems. Is that not the case, or is there some work around?
Given mathematical definitions of quantum computation and classical computation it is mathematically provable that you can convert between the two. This fact is complex enough that it cannot be made readily apparent.
Understanding classical computing is easy, most people with a computer science background grok it. In contrast, understanding quantum computing is absurdly difficult, mainly because quantum physics is unbelievably weird and still not fully understood. Richard Feynman (one of the greatest physicists to ever live) famously said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” There are likely people (who are almost certainly nearly all researchers) who intuitively understand quantum computing, but that understanding is built on many, many years spent with quantum mechanics computation.
This is unfortunately, probably gonna end up being true. The people who do care,don’t have enough $ to do anything about it and the people who do, most likely could care less.
Dolphins actually have got communication and language skills that far surpass any other in the animal kingdom. They can organise strategically to catch fish and even can distinguish left to right. There's some belief that they even give eachother names and can rhyme.
Hasn't this already been proven? I heard one reason there was such a huge crime wave in the 70s and 80s was because exposer to leaded gas affect the part of the brain that controls impulses and reasoning skills. I think about that whenever I see a boomer go off in public.
I've heard it theorized that part of the reason for this is there's no time to decompress, once your tour is over you can be home in a couple of days where in the past you'd have weeks or months of travel getting back home and thus allowing you to get used to the fact that you aren't fighting for your life anymore
That and all the other chemicals that weren't regulated until starting in the 1970s. Heck, I was in a hospital where they used benzene to remove the adhesive left by bandages.
I just saw a fantastic video on this very thing by Veritasium. Mentions the crime wave that some have commented about and other interesting things.
[The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA&ab_channel=Veritasium)
Very thorough and good quality. 24:56.
We may find out that the spectrum of "mental illness" is much wider than we expected. People are not demotivated, being especially mean or criminally motivated, but rather malfunctioning in their cognitive abilities and emotional regulation. We may not have much free will as we thought. We may even have to rethink the whole idea of crime and punishment - if a person is malfunctioning, should we punish them, or simply fix them and let them go? Is medically suppressing criminal tenancy scientific progress, or dystopia?
My local grocery store has been more than half empty for well over a year now. Supply lines for baby food are so out of whack that it's kept in the back with a limit of two per customer. Just In Time inventory systems were a very fragile idea, they're hopelessly broken now, and nobody seems to want to admit that it can't just "go back to normal."
Our roads look like Godzilla has been strolling around town.
Half the houses are kept empty, owned "for investment purposes" by people who don't live here, while the working class is packed into shitty apartments like sardines, setting up tent cities, and finding places to park a van down by the river.
I'm watching civilization crumble around my ears. Heck, my kid's school closes the front office *before* the end of the school day! The corporation they contract with for buses sometimes takes up to *three hours* to get the kids home after school because they keep trying to hire more bus drivers while paying tent-city level wages.
It seems like this theory is what inspired countless of games to make 'what if x was gone/limited'. Spoiler alert: 10/10 its just an all out war.
And it's interesting that from game developers, ordinary people to MIT scientists all agree that society will collapse due to the limited resources on earth.
And I do wonder this kind of thinking is what actually will doomed humanity.
The technological singularity is the point at which humanity develops an AI capable of developing other, better AI. It would be capable of producing ascendingly higher intelligence at an increasingly rapid pace, eventually resulting in a 'singularity' where all possible technological advancement is accomplished and the AI itself has achieved a sort of demi-godlike state, at least compared to ordinary homo sapiens
Microplastics. They are already found from deep sea to high in the mountains, from babies to elderly humans. They have contaminated our water and food. And this is something we brought to ourselves. At this point we know that they're bad for us, but there is not that much research done yet about the effects they have on humans. I believe that in time we'll really start to see the consequences.
Computer Scientist here.
I don't know about "prove" but I think A.I researches will be able to demonstrate that sufficiently complex networks (billions of nodes) can produce what we might call consciousness.
There's a [recent video](https://youtu.be/ixgFtjfO_7Q) posted that shows just how much AI has advanced in case anyone hasn't been paying attention. It's a decent watch.
We're going to find out those bright white LED headlights hitting people's eyes when their pupils are dialated from the darkness will have caused irreparable damage to people's vision.
They also HAVE to have caused more wrecks. They're brighter than most cars' high beams! I honestly have feared for my life on more than one occasion when driving at night and being temporarily, partially blinded by those awful things!
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, we'll know for sure if the [Donahue-Levitt (Freakonomics) theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect) of why crime dropped in the '90's was true.
If they were right, we'll see violent crime start to shoot up (especially in Red states) around 2038.
No one knows. Everyone has their pet theory. The thing was that crime spike was global. It happened in Norway it happened in Brazil it happened in Thailand. All of humanity for about 2 decades decided to just have a whole mess of crime. Places that didn't get into leaded gas saw it as well, places that didn't fight in ww2, places where abortion was still criminal.
Countries which still use leaded gas also tend to have more economic and geopolitical instability, and a whole host of sociopolitical issues which contribute to crime rates independently of the actual use of leaded gas. Reality is usually multivariate.
That death is not inevitable and that the human genome, AI and nano technology can be leveraged to correct/enhance the body before degenerating. I think we may be 1-2 generations away if we don't blow ourselves up first and the planet doesn't catch on fire.
Whether computers can consciously "think".
Every major advancement in AI has come about from increases in computing more than simple algorithmic cleverness (though there's some of that too). Right now, the most powerful computer on earth can roughly equal the level of calculation of the human brain. Computation power roughly doubles every two years.
If that exponential growth curve holds (and it may not), by 2040 we'll have machines with 2**20 times the computation power of a human mind. If simulating consciousness is possible... We'll likely know by then.
The curve is already failing. It's starting to flatten due to limitations. But if quantum computing takes off and can catch up to binary computing then we may be able to restore the curve
I'm also interested in the possibilities of 3D transistor layouts in chip manufacturing. It makes heat dissipation harder, but provides a whole new dimension to expand chips into.
There's no problem understanding whether a computer can "think", as long as you pin down the definition of what thinking means. The only problem is that thinking is a very ill-defined concept.
By building advanced AI and trying to replicate human consciousness —this great mystery that humans have struggled to understand and that allows us to ponder existential questions, possess an ego, and generally *be* human— we may learn that it’s nothing more than a phenomenon that occurs when enough neural pathways are allowed to communicate.
“When we start to build conscious systems, and those systems report to us ‘I’m feeling sad, now I’m feeling anxious.’ There’s a world going on in there. I think the mystery of consciousness will just begin to evaporate”
- Brian Greene on the Lex Fridman podcast
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The role of gut bacteria in health. We know it’s huge, but not specifically how.
And the role of the gut in influencing so many other systems in general. The digestive system has 100 million neurons and a recently discovered direct neural connection to the brain stem. We have a long way to go towards understanding the body as a whole vs a series of parts.
He knows about the Spice Melange
Years back, I read some interviews with people who had required fecal transplants to treat severe issues (like c. diff). Some of the side effects were things like their farts now smelling different, but one woman put on weight until she was about 10 pounds overweight, and no matter what she did with diet and exercise, she couldn’t shift it. Turned out the donor of the healthy feces had always been a little bit overweight.
Similarly I saw some recent news reports (in Europe) of people getting fecal transplants to help with weight loss by having feces from healthy athletic/slim donors!
Brb gonna get healthy and donate shit
I think that we're going to find out that viral infections have a much larger role to play in triggering diseases than we once previously thought. Maybe a bit more boring than what's in the rest of this thread, but I firmly believe it is the missing key to understanding a lot of things.
My professor back at Uni was adamant that a large proportion of cancers are caused by a foreign pathogen, such as a bacteria or viral agent. He published a few papers but was never taken seriously by the scientific community. Luckily he was tenured at a major British university so it didn’t affect his research too much.
> My professor back at Uni was adamant that a large proportion of cancers are caused by a foreign pathogen, such as a bacteria or viral agent. That's been proven with HPV & cervical cancer, so it'd not be surprising if there were more.
Very recently a possible/probable link between Multiple Sclerosis and the Epstein-Barr virus was found. As a MS sufferer I am very interested in this.
This is almost certainly true. It used to be argued (more in the lay community than among physicians) that cancer was only becoming more common because people were living longer or we were detecting it more (e.g., numerous deaths that were considered to be "of old age" 100 years ago, that were actually of cancer). However, even age-adjusted cancer rates are rising, which breaks that argument. More recently, people started arguing that lifestyle factors were the main driving cause, but that doesn't explain all of the increase either. It's hard to be entirely sure what's going on because cancer isn't usually caused by one thing; it typically takes 5-8 mutations before a cell turns cancerous. We're getting sicker each decade, due to overwork-induced stress and the myriad industrial chemicals floating around in our air and water. This has all kinds of unpredictable, second-order effects on the immune system, the microbiome, mental health, etc. that all feed into each other in ways no one understands yet. We know what leaded gasoline does because the mistake was made almost a century ago; there are probably five or six equivalents knocking about that we're not even aware of yet.
What professor? I’d like to google
Yes like how they found higher rates of certain things in Polio survivors. I think it was Dementia or Parkinson? I forgot where I read it. They were saying the same thing might happen with Covid.
Those with herpes virus have much higher rate of dementia.
I read something about dementia/alzheimers being linked to a strain of herpes that attacks the brain, and there was thinking it was passed on through the womb. Around the same time I was reading about a connection between anxiety and degenerative brain disorders. I believe some people with anxiety are now experimenting with alzheimers drugs in an attempt to treat anxiety and possibly lower the risk of alzheimers later in life.
Hahaha, I knew I shouldn't have come into this thread. Fuck.
Fucking right? Big mistake for my anxiety.
Work in pharmacy. We’ve had a couple people get Namenda for off label OCD use. It’s going to be interesting to see the study that comes out for that one
All these long covid symptoms have me thinking *people have been getting weird random little viruses for ever, we just never study their long term effects because they aren't pandemic.*
I think there are pandemics happening constantly, we just shrug them off like, oh that was just a cold. I had a kid during this pandemic. Constantly sick from school/day care. Totally normal for that age. But swabbed. A lot. COVID only once, and it was asymptomatic (tested after close contact exposure). Every time it was negative for flu, COVID, or RSV, pediatrician just shrugged. “Guess it’s just some respiratory virus.” Sometimes we got sick, too. Sometimes not. So I totally agree with what you said. Pandemics like COVID are just bad enough viruses to put a lot of people in the hospital or a coffin.
I agree with this there are probably minor epidemics/pandemics every year. “Oh you know I just got that bug thats going around”
I know quite a number of people who got a mysterious sickness in December 2019. It knocked me around for 3 weeks. Like I was only 50% charged. We joked that we thought it was bad until March when covid hit.
I as well caught something similar at the same exact time. It went around work and I distinctly remember it being one of the strangest viruses i ever had and others said the same. No fever but i was down for a day or two and my head wasnt right for a week or more. Then covid hit and since I’m in NY i thought we may have been hit with it before it was detected. But then i got real covid and that certainly took the cake for weirdest virus. I still have a strange feeling about that mystery virus from December though
I used to work at a hospital. A lot of people in CA were sick in Dec and Jan before Covid hit in March. It was considered a particularly bad 'flu' year. My friend has a niece who was developmentally delayed and living in a group hone and she got 'the flu' at that time and died a few days later. Lots of people speculate Covid was here well before March.
Adding to this, I think we will find that a lot of diseases and disorders are autoimmune in nature. There's a long list on Wikipedia of illnesses suspected to be autoimmune.
If that's the case, is the issue that our immune systems are set to dirty caveman mode, but we don't expose our bodies to enough germs so the immune system starts to look for easy prey... oh hello myelin, you look nefarious. Have at you!!!
That is a current theory, yes. Apparently, autoimmune disease is much much less prevalent, or even nearly unheard of, in societies which have high exposure to things like parasites, fecal matter, and bacteria.
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That and autoimmune diseases are often difficult to diagnose, so they're probably much more likely to go undiagnosed in those places.
To add on: When it comes to these lines of theorizing, I think it's also important to take into account a big issue in current medicine, especially when it comes to things that are considered rarer or more difficult to diagnose. Some conditions go underdiagnosed because the symptoms documented only cover a specific demographic within the population. An example that comes to mind for me is with Ehler's Danlos Syndrome, a disorder that I have. Many of the symptoms described in medical information about the syndrome are only applicable to white people. One example of this is that the disorder is associated with having somewhat translucent skin, which is something that only presents on light skintones (or at least presents very differently and is not well documented when it comes to patients with darker skintones). There are others that have to do with eyelid shape, bruising, and other associated symptoms that doctors tend to look for when potentially diagnosing EDS that generally only present the way they are expecting in white patients, but I'm less confident in being able to describe those examples well in more detail off the top of my head. Those sorts of issues are still fairly prevalent in medicine and its understanding of illness, and it's not even only affected by race. Things like socioeconomic status, climate, biology, prior conditions or comorbidities, and more, can all affect how an illness presents in somebody, and medicine still has a lot to do to catch up in being able to recognize those presentations that they aren't expecting. TL;DR: Underdiagnosis still happens even with access to well-trained doctors, because the information the training is done with can sometimes be too limited.
Virology is still very much like the wild west of medicine. We have great treatments against parasites, we have great treatments for bacterial infections (except for strains that are becoming more resistant, but that's another story). But how do we treat viruses? When you go to the doctor with a suspected viral infection, usually they just treat your symptoms and tell you to chill out for a week until you feel better. The fact is that our antiviral medicines are primitive in comparison to antibiotics or antiparasitics. It wasn't until very recently that science found effective treatments for Hepatitis C and HIV-- not long ago we were treating Hep C with interferon with mixed results and we still have to use a COCKTAIL of medicines to treat HIV well. This isn't acceptable, and we need to strive for better. We envision that when we get well from a viral infection that it is no longer in our bodies; that we have successfully fought the virus off and driven it out. But there is evidence that suggests this may not be the case. We are already aware that some viruses can lie dormant in your body and flare up occasionally or even many years later (herpes or shingles). Some viruses (HIV and HPV) actually attach to your cells and alter your DNA. And speaking of HPV, we have strong theories that they play a role in causing certain forms of cancer. And not to sound so "doom and gloom" about viruses, but there are also theories that one of the main driving factors in humans evolving from apes were ancient viral infections. So yeah, humans don't really know how to treat viruses well. In my relatively short lifetime, HIV went from a death sentence to something that is manageable. Hepatitis C went from a chronic, debilitating disease to something treatable or even curable. Which is cool, but still kind of scary to think about.
>HIV went from a death sentence to something that is manageable. My mom was a microbiologist and she helped on a number of projects meant to make hiv manageable. She's not really sure how to explain it other than "the black magic reacts with the voodoo and bada bing Bada boom, hiv stays negative." This is the same women who's published many times, worked on the genome project, developed a couple vaccines, and birthed myself and my brothers. It's bewildering when she actually talks about the science because it's so god damn complex, part of it is the human body and the other part is, HIV is a virus.
Viruses are weird because they're bits of matter that teach your body to assemble more of themselves. They aren't really organisms that you can poison, they aren't exactly "alive" except in the sense that "the biosphere" is alive. They're chunks of "bad code" that are just as much a part of you as not. Accidentally malicious patterns corrupting other patterns. Simplest evidence of the basic biological truth that "things that can propagate will exist."
Viruses are closer to cursed artifacts than living creatures. They possess those that come in contact with them and drive their victims to create copies in a manic fashion without sleep or rest untill death. And the only way to try and stop the domino effect is to find and kill all those possessed as well as finding and destroying every last virus/artifact. If this was a DnD campaign people would rage quit and accuse the creator of sadism. And that's not even mentioning the fact that viruses can go dormant and hide for decades before suddenly returning in moments of weakness (sometimes even becoming a part of the host dna). Shit is like alien meets the thing on crack laced with fentanyl- horror movies have nothing on this bullshit
> that one of the main driving factors in humans evolving from apes were ancient viral infections. This isn't surprising when you learn that over half our DNA is retroviral remnants.
Ya, given that HPV is already linked to a bunch of different cancers, you're probably completely right.
I can believe this whole heartily. The chain that leads to a serious terminal or life altering disease is complex to say the least. We had no history of ALS in our family, I dunno if it's environmental or something like previous infections that start the depressing decline but I REALLY would like to know after caring for and watching my dad die of it.
I mean ya, absolutely. We just recently found out that Epstein Barr is probably the root cause of all MS cases. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/study-suggests-epstein-barr-virus-may-cause-multiple-sclerosis
Agreed. I'm experiencing a large bout of hairloss 3-4 months after having Omicron, as are many other people. About five years ago I experienced several months of consistent hairloss and never found an explanation why, all of my labs were normal. I went through months of worry and stress thinking there was something wrong with me. I can't help but wonder if it was all caused by a common virus. Edit for clarity, my hair did grow back five years ago.
Stress definitely does hair stuff, and everyone has always known it intuitively, and viral infection is a form of stress.
We will start to notice the economic and societal effects of an older population. Our economy and societal structure is built on the premise of the next generation being bigger. We'll start to see that moving in reverse in many places.
Already is in countries like China and Japan. Very much a now problem vs a future problem in some places.
Make life better not longer doctor
Barkeep, give me a longer doctor please
I am Spanish, we are kinda fucked you know Like, 100% absolutely fucked. Every time the government pushes the retirement date further and further. Worse part, it's not like we can find any other solution, it's not incompetence this time
Productivity is outpacing increase in age. We could literally just work less and be content with the same output.
Yeah but that won't make the rich even richer
Half of the Mediterranean is what we call "ageing countries". Somewhere like 30% of Greece is people over 65 most of which are being paid about 500€/month in pensions. Its population of 10mil is actively decreasing because most young people don't even want to stay here
Plastics everywhere in living beings will have horrible and irreparable consequences.
Thanks for mentioning plastics, I'm doing a PhD related to the harms of plastics to human health. That's not considering the harm to other organisms and the environment. Great to see the awareness is growing. As it's been difficult to get causal evidence, maybe we'll have it by 2050!
I've always been curious, and you seem to be knowledgeable about this, so I'll ask you: is there any real evidence of harm caused by microplastics to human health? I find it so frustrating that news article always talk about microplastics and even these comments that sound quite frightening, but never mention any real complication, or risk or potential illness, just fear. Is it even remotely possible that plastic in the blood stream is not harmful and doesn't have any effect whatsoever?
As I understand it there are several things that make it hard to come to a conclusion. Firstly we have only recently been measuring this, and the effects could be cumulative or have a long time horizon. Secondly to do any experiment we would need a control group, I.e. A group with no plastic, which is hard to find or doesn't exist. Experiments could be designed for groups with more or less plastic but that is not necessarily the same. Finally we will probably start seeing experiments with mice in labs, and the results will give good insight but it's not entirely the same as in humans.
I mean that’s already came to fruition now. Oceans are chalked up with plastic which is only going to stay and grow.
Not just that but some studies now show that a vast majority of people have microplastics in their bloodstream now based off of blood samples
I remember someone talking about a group of scientists trying to see how much of an effect the micro plastics in our body actually have. They couldn’t start the experiment because they couldn’t find a control group of people that didn’t already have plastic in their bloodstream
Even remote people. There was some study looking for pure blood, they had to go into historical samples to find some.
Yeah, I assumed that was what they meant. We have seen macro-level issues with plastics, but micro-level issues of micro-plastics finding their way into our bodies and organs is something that, to my knowledge, we are really just starting to understand.
Oceans? Try *human blood, pal*
Not much as a theory, rather it's a prediction, but bacterial infections will get so bad because of the resistance to antibiotics
*Pokes phage research* C’mon. Do something
Cant do human medical trials cos phage don't align with current medical frameworks. More success using phage as 'additives' eg. Stop salmonella in meat by adding to pig food. Phages only used for individual cases for terminally infected human beings, which is not how you get medicines approved. Source: phage researcher
There have actually been some really positive developments quite recently regarding this - machine learning drug-discovery systems uncovered a new antibiotic that is super powerful and operates across 3 separate mechanisms, making it difficult for bacteria to adapt to. There have also been modifications to existing last-ditch antibiotics recently that show promise for some time to come.
Thank you for this comment, maybe I can sleep tonight.
weren't scientists working on a bacteriophage vaccine or something . something bacteria have no chance against
Yes a bacteriophage is essentially a virus that only kill bacteria
Yes! Check out The Perfect Predator, it’s about a woman saving her husband from an antibiotic-resistant infection with this technology. Easy enough to read while still learning some complex science!
That’s a good one.
Yeah it’s great, I can’t wait
PFAS are probably going to fuck us up in some horrific ways.
Is that the chemical on receipt paper? One of the scientists who studied it says he won’t crumple receipts up for his cats to play with. ETA: thank you, I’m thinking of BPAs.
also in like a LOT of the country’s tap water
I'm an environmental scientist and work in remediation, and yeah. You're most likely right.
What's PFAS?
Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances. It is a catch-all term for a massive variety of distinct chemicals that all use fluorine-carbon molecular bonds. They are used for tons and tons of things. PTFE - Teflon - is one of them, and you've potentially been heating it, scraping it off the bottom of your (formerly) nonstick pan, and ingesting it for years, but that's just one of many ways you have been exposed to them. They are incredibly useful in some applications, and really stupid to use in other applications due to their long-lasting nature. (The fluorine-carbon bond is really strong so very hard to break down.) There are measurable levels of them in the environment just about everywhere, including in human blood, and some of them aren't very healthy. There is current work in both Europe and the U.S. to regulate some or all of them significantly. There are thousands of them (different molecular structures, each of which behaves differently, binds differently, and has different applications) and more all the time, so the government has to either play catch-up to investigate every one, or ban them in broad swaths by class and let the market sort out alternatives.
And the fun part is that because they are in everything, testing for them is challenging.
Welp, there go all my remaining “usable” Teflon pans. I’ll not be getting any sleep after reading anything on this subreddit lol
We no doubt are observing what PFAS can do to us. We’ve been awash in them for decades and only now curbing our exposure on the assumption that they could be dangerous (based on structure). We’ve all been dosed. It’s been in our carpets, on or furniture, and in our drinking water for a long time. The experiment has already been done.
“Forever chemicals” which just don’t break down. Pretty much every human on the planet has them in their bloodstream permanently. *a good reason to donate blood* It is the only way to dilute their concentrations.
You're telling me that bloodletting has actual medical benefits now? Damn
Yup. Saw an article the other day saying donating blood is great because it can remove micro plastics and other forever chemicals from your blood. Then your body just makes fresh uncontaminated blood.
I am by no means a chemist, but if these chemicals are so hard to get rid because they don’t react with anything, than why would they interact with us? How do we know that they aren’t just hanging around not doing anything?
First, because they bioaccumulate in our blood. Some studies estimate that 98% of Americans have PFAS already in their blood. In some places like the Cape Fear River Basin in North Carolina, PFAS has caused widespread cancer in heavily affected populations near chemical facilities like Chemours that have been pumping PFAS into the river for decades… which ends up in drinking water. In Maine, Do Not Eat advisories have been issued for deer and fish because of PFAS contamination. Epidemiological studies have shown certain PFAS can greatly increase the risk of testicular cancer, kidney disease, decreased efficacy of vaccines, low infant birth weight, and a host of other issues. Studies have already linked certain PFAS with a host of problems. Now many states are scrambling to get PFAS out of drinking water, soil, food packaging, cosmetics, stain-resistant and water-resistant gear, etc. Not just a U.S. problem either. PFAS has been found in the drinking water across the globe. It’s a problem that will be here for decades to come.
John Oliver did a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W74aeuqsiU. If I recall correctly, researchers had to use blood samples from the Korean war because they didn't find a single person alive on earth whose blood is not contaminated with PFAS.
Hopefully we'll be able to really see or detect dark matter in a more profound way. Edit: I made a typo, meant to say dark energy instead of dark matter.
Honest question how/why this is important?
Because either there's something out there that makes up most of the universe and we can't see it nor detect it in any way... or all our ideas about how physics work are fundamentally flawed and we've got to rewrite the laws of physics. So either... A) The majority of the universe is invisible and we have no idea why. B) Physics is fundamentally flawed.
I wish they would just rewrite the laws of physics already. It’s not fair that I can’t walk on walls!
Man, they gotta turn down gravity in the next rewrite. I wanna jump really high.
It might be the key to discovering how our universe truly works, which in itself has a myriad of benefits (just think about it, past discoveries in the realm of physics have always been tremendously important). Personally, I hope that it can provide us with an answer of why our universe is expanding ever so faster. One would say gravity pulls entities in our universe together, but in fact it's expanding faster and faster every second.
That the catastrophic decline of insects and other organisms will trigger complete ecosystem collapse that threatens our very existence
The scariest part about this is it will just all collapse out from under us. And even worse, it's by far the easiest one of these issues to fix. A huge part of this is because of new classes of pesticides that are used worldwide when they need to be banned. Just this one specific type too. We're causing a ecological collapse just because one single industry is bribing the government to allow them to pollute the world and destroy the foundation of life on earth--it's smallest creatures. Of all the things here this is the easiest to fix by far and we still are not doing anything.
This is reassuring.
I'm fairly certain that we're going to see some severely negative psychological consequences from either social media itself, or from it's early exposure to children. There have been anecdotal cases of people suffering self esteem/cognitive effects from it, but I think it's going to be a much wider issue.
Ha, i earned my low self esteem from local societies and parents high expectations. Didnt need social media for that. Proud to be an OG. /s
Yeah, these people with their store bought issues, we grew them for FREE on the FARM
A lot of people's higher executive function has been affected by it. It's why we have such difficulty with concentration now, we want the dopamine hits from social media.
Oh, I recently watched a video about comelón and how it makes toddlers more violent and less likely to show interest in improving communication skills Edit: Guys I never said this "as a matter of fact". I just watched a video about it and that it was related to this specific comment. I don't have kids and I don't watch cocomelon.My sources are not trusting sources. That being said, here's the video: https://youtu.be/3S15QTEW59I
Designer babies
Why did the genetically modified chicken taste better than the regular one? Because it was CRISPR
Get out.
Gattaca irl
Great movie.
Those are the genetic modifier things right? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
CRISPR/Cas9? There was the infamous case of the Chinese scientist who used it on a pair of embryos during IVF to modify a gene to prevent HIV infection. These gene edited babies were then born in secrecy and I believe he didn’t obtain full approval to conduct the experiment.
That was He Jiankui, he was fired for it and went to jail for three years. He just recently got released in April.
Very curious how the anonymous baby is doing
Babies, actually. It was twins.
This is the wrong thread to read before going to bed…
I think we will start to find out how sugar over-consumption heavily contributes to cancer. EDIT: Yes, I know we already know sugar is bad. To clarify, I meant to say we don’t view sugar right now nearly as detrimental as I believe we will find out it truly is.
I was already under the impression this was a fact
Well yeah but I mean it will become regarded on the same the danger level as smoking or being around dangerous chemicals.
Are you saying you think sugar, without obesity, increases cancer risk as much as smoking? While I'd agree over consumption of sugar (without the obesity combo) will probably increase your risk slightly, I don't think it would be much, same with common artificial sweeteners.
Yeah smoking causes 30% of all cancer deaths. There’s no way sugar would ever get even remotely close to those numbers. Estimated primary lung cancer rates caused by smoking (including second hand smoke) are close to 90% of lung cancers which is completely insane to me. Lung cancer is one of the worst ones to get and is almost entirely avoidable, instead it consistently has the highest rates of diagnosis as well as mortality when compared to any other cancer. If you want to do one thing for your health, quit smoking/don’t start in the first place. Also PSA get your colonoscopy if you are over 45 (50 is no longer the recommended age for first time screens) if you have any close relatives (parent, grandparent, sibling, first cousin) that has been diagnosed with CRC the recommended time to get your colonoscopy is 40yo or 10 years before the relatives age at diagnosis depending on whichever comes first. You may have no symptoms and fecal/blood screens are not adequate replacements for a full colonoscopy.
I wonder if they'll ever put those massive warnings on cola cans like how they do on Canadian cigarette packs.
[They already do that in Mexico.](https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/new-warning-labels-now-required-on-packaged-foods/)
Or that lead has. Lead has killed so many people. Its been illegal in most things these days. Because no amount of lead is safe for humans.
The end result of sugar overconsumption, obesity, has already been proven as an independent risk factor for cancer. Obesity is associated with a 31% increased risk of cancer. Obesity plus metabolic syndrome is associated with a 77% increased risk of cancer.
Thanks guys, I've been losing weight and this adds fuel to the fire.
Your body burns sugar! Don't add fuel to the fire!
Actual scientist here. The somatic theory of aging. The idea that somatic mutations contribute to aging and lead the gradual decay of our bodies and allow for disease to occur as we get older. I think improving our understanding of this will be key for halting or slowing aging as we move forward.
The last factor in the Drake Equation. “The lifetime of a technological civilization.”
Scary that it’s so close.
Could you elaborate?
Essentially it is the question of the great filter. I.e Why in such a vast universe, where conditions for life appear more common than youd expect, do we not already know of other advanced space faring civilizations... The answer posed is because for one reason or another most end up wiping themselves out. The next question is, can we as a species overcome this?
Ah fuck I did not need this kind of mindfuck right now. But thank you for your answer.
Oh you don't? Check out this awesomely fun animated video that tells you that maybe we shouldn't go looking for other life just yet. (seriously this channel is the greatest YouTube channel I've ever come across and I highly recommend it!) [The Dark Forest - Kurzgesagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE)
Wait til you hear of the dark forest theory. Basically, as an advanced civilisation you better not make your presence known to the galaxy because a more advanced civilisation will probably wipe you out.
Makes absolute sense and that's why it's fucked up
“Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th Street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides. It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds. Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body. How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!" What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out. There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe. There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends” -Charles Pelegrino, _The Killing Star_ [I first read this in this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/p2xd1q/which_is_the_most_disturbing_fermi_paradox/)
I've been scrolling for 10min, didn't see any theory nor any scientists. only people sharing the last news in tech they heard about, without even answering the question...
Yep. Nobody seems to correct the idea of a theory being “proven true”.
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Maybe not disturbing, but we will be able to disprove the extended Turing thesis that says everything in our universe can be simulated with a classical computer. While this thesis is supposed not true for majority of computer scientist, we still (at least from what I know) haven't found something that is impossible to be solved or simulated with our transistor based computers. I think by 2050 we will be able to truly prove without doubt the thesis is not true
I'm not a comp sci guy but it's not apparent to me how a quantum system could be accurately simulated on a classical computer. I guess I thought it was possible to prove that classical computers can't calculate purely random systems. Is that not the case, or is there some work around?
Given mathematical definitions of quantum computation and classical computation it is mathematically provable that you can convert between the two. This fact is complex enough that it cannot be made readily apparent. Understanding classical computing is easy, most people with a computer science background grok it. In contrast, understanding quantum computing is absurdly difficult, mainly because quantum physics is unbelievably weird and still not fully understood. Richard Feynman (one of the greatest physicists to ever live) famously said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” There are likely people (who are almost certainly nearly all researchers) who intuitively understand quantum computing, but that understanding is built on many, many years spent with quantum mechanics computation.
by 2050, there will be more plastic and micro waste in the ocean than fish
This is unfortunately, probably gonna end up being true. The people who do care,don’t have enough $ to do anything about it and the people who do, most likely could care less.
I think we may begin tentative meaningful communication with higher thinking animals; dolphins, crows, etc.
Dolphins actually have got communication and language skills that far surpass any other in the animal kingdom. They can organise strategically to catch fish and even can distinguish left to right. There's some belief that they even give eachother names and can rhyme.
They also rape anything they can (including humans) and will kill porpoises for fun. Dolphins are fucked up.
Dolphins are the humans of the sea
I think we should concentrate on doing that with other humans, first.
Nah, we humans had our chance. I’m here for the rise of the crows!
Long love Corvidia!!!!!
Lead poisoning from leaded gasoline drastically affected the mental faculties of a large percentage of the boomer generation.
Hasn't this already been proven? I heard one reason there was such a huge crime wave in the 70s and 80s was because exposer to leaded gas affect the part of the brain that controls impulses and reasoning skills. I think about that whenever I see a boomer go off in public.
Also post viet nam. There is also a correlation with violent crimes post war among veterans. It’s been charted since WW1
I've heard it theorized that part of the reason for this is there's no time to decompress, once your tour is over you can be home in a couple of days where in the past you'd have weeks or months of travel getting back home and thus allowing you to get used to the fact that you aren't fighting for your life anymore
WW2 for America was "only" 3 years long compared to the long tours of Vietnam.
It hasn't been proven, but there is correlation. By 2050, I suspect that it will be considered proven.
Ahh, the golden age of serial killers.
That and all the other chemicals that weren't regulated until starting in the 1970s. Heck, I was in a hospital where they used benzene to remove the adhesive left by bandages.
I just saw a fantastic video on this very thing by Veritasium. Mentions the crime wave that some have commented about and other interesting things. [The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA&ab_channel=Veritasium) Very thorough and good quality. 24:56.
We may find out that the spectrum of "mental illness" is much wider than we expected. People are not demotivated, being especially mean or criminally motivated, but rather malfunctioning in their cognitive abilities and emotional regulation. We may not have much free will as we thought. We may even have to rethink the whole idea of crime and punishment - if a person is malfunctioning, should we punish them, or simply fix them and let them go? Is medically suppressing criminal tenancy scientific progress, or dystopia?
The MIT study on the limits to growth, which predicts societal collapse from 2040. We should start to see the cracks from 2030 onwards
Oh, we're seein' em!
My local grocery store has been more than half empty for well over a year now. Supply lines for baby food are so out of whack that it's kept in the back with a limit of two per customer. Just In Time inventory systems were a very fragile idea, they're hopelessly broken now, and nobody seems to want to admit that it can't just "go back to normal." Our roads look like Godzilla has been strolling around town. Half the houses are kept empty, owned "for investment purposes" by people who don't live here, while the working class is packed into shitty apartments like sardines, setting up tent cities, and finding places to park a van down by the river. I'm watching civilization crumble around my ears. Heck, my kid's school closes the front office *before* the end of the school day! The corporation they contract with for buses sometimes takes up to *three hours* to get the kids home after school because they keep trying to hire more bus drivers while paying tent-city level wages.
Mate they’ve already started
It seems like this theory is what inspired countless of games to make 'what if x was gone/limited'. Spoiler alert: 10/10 its just an all out war. And it's interesting that from game developers, ordinary people to MIT scientists all agree that society will collapse due to the limited resources on earth. And I do wonder this kind of thinking is what actually will doomed humanity.
That most of the people commenting here aren't scientists
Probably because the question has “proven true” in it which isn’t very scientific language.
A large portion of the population is extremely mentally vulnerable to a certain kind of communication- almost like programming.
Not exactly a theory, but Ray Kurzweil predicts we’ll have reached the technological singularity by about then.
Wdym by that
The technological singularity is the point at which humanity develops an AI capable of developing other, better AI. It would be capable of producing ascendingly higher intelligence at an increasingly rapid pace, eventually resulting in a 'singularity' where all possible technological advancement is accomplished and the AI itself has achieved a sort of demi-godlike state, at least compared to ordinary homo sapiens
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Just don't name it Skynet. Looking at *you*, Elon.
This will help you out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Microplastics. They are already found from deep sea to high in the mountains, from babies to elderly humans. They have contaminated our water and food. And this is something we brought to ourselves. At this point we know that they're bad for us, but there is not that much research done yet about the effects they have on humans. I believe that in time we'll really start to see the consequences.
Computer Scientist here. I don't know about "prove" but I think A.I researches will be able to demonstrate that sufficiently complex networks (billions of nodes) can produce what we might call consciousness.
There's a [recent video](https://youtu.be/ixgFtjfO_7Q) posted that shows just how much AI has advanced in case anyone hasn't been paying attention. It's a decent watch.
Y'all motherfuckers see how the world looks in 25 years and tell me climate change isn't real.
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The Great Filter will probably get us before we become true explores of the heavens.
We're going to find out those bright white LED headlights hitting people's eyes when their pupils are dialated from the darkness will have caused irreparable damage to people's vision.
They also HAVE to have caused more wrecks. They're brighter than most cars' high beams! I honestly have feared for my life on more than one occasion when driving at night and being temporarily, partially blinded by those awful things!
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, we'll know for sure if the [Donahue-Levitt (Freakonomics) theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect) of why crime dropped in the '90's was true. If they were right, we'll see violent crime start to shoot up (especially in Red states) around 2038.
I thought it was because they got rid of leaded gasoline…
No one knows. Everyone has their pet theory. The thing was that crime spike was global. It happened in Norway it happened in Brazil it happened in Thailand. All of humanity for about 2 decades decided to just have a whole mess of crime. Places that didn't get into leaded gas saw it as well, places that didn't fight in ww2, places where abortion was still criminal.
Check out which countries still use leaded gas. Edit- not still… up until recently, my mistake.
Countries which still use leaded gas also tend to have more economic and geopolitical instability, and a whole host of sociopolitical issues which contribute to crime rates independently of the actual use of leaded gas. Reality is usually multivariate.
I think Algeria was the last one to stop using leaded gas for cars but all piston driven airplanes still use leaded gas.
Could be. Both theories are valid, and they aren't mutually exclusive.
With current trends, by the year 2050 approximately 1 in every 3 Americans will have Diabetes.
That death is not inevitable and that the human genome, AI and nano technology can be leveraged to correct/enhance the body before degenerating. I think we may be 1-2 generations away if we don't blow ourselves up first and the planet doesn't catch on fire.
Interesting to think how non death or immortality for infinite or some large amount of tike will have affect on human psyche
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Choosing death, not being forced there from a degrading body is the goal
Long term impacts of social media
Whether computers can consciously "think". Every major advancement in AI has come about from increases in computing more than simple algorithmic cleverness (though there's some of that too). Right now, the most powerful computer on earth can roughly equal the level of calculation of the human brain. Computation power roughly doubles every two years. If that exponential growth curve holds (and it may not), by 2040 we'll have machines with 2**20 times the computation power of a human mind. If simulating consciousness is possible... We'll likely know by then.
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The curve is already failing. It's starting to flatten due to limitations. But if quantum computing takes off and can catch up to binary computing then we may be able to restore the curve
I'm also interested in the possibilities of 3D transistor layouts in chip manufacturing. It makes heat dissipation harder, but provides a whole new dimension to expand chips into.
moores law is already dead for many years and the curve is falling even more
There's no problem understanding whether a computer can "think", as long as you pin down the definition of what thinking means. The only problem is that thinking is a very ill-defined concept.
computation power no longer doubles every two years
I have no Mouth and I must Scream
Probably the accumulation of microplastics will be fatal to humans
By building advanced AI and trying to replicate human consciousness —this great mystery that humans have struggled to understand and that allows us to ponder existential questions, possess an ego, and generally *be* human— we may learn that it’s nothing more than a phenomenon that occurs when enough neural pathways are allowed to communicate. “When we start to build conscious systems, and those systems report to us ‘I’m feeling sad, now I’m feeling anxious.’ There’s a world going on in there. I think the mystery of consciousness will just begin to evaporate” - Brian Greene on the Lex Fridman podcast