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AlexWest

- Antibiotic alternatives (we're going to need them fast)

- As another poster mentioned, how do we suck the carbon from 150 years of burning fossil fuels out of our atmosphere?

- Cognitive enhancement

- Re-wilding - rebuilding devastated ecosystems in the Anthropocene with engineered biodiversity

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The best alternative to antibiotics is more antibiotics - a flood of more antibiotics, more than we could ever use up. The best way to do that is support automation and other efficiency gains and individual projects in mining the bacterial world for novel antibacterial weaponry. That used to be impractical, but now that there is, as of 2015, a way to culture the 99% of bacteria that couldn't be cultured before, it is now very practical to look for everything we might need in biomedicine in the bacterial world. See:

https://edge.org/response-detail/26701

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41850/...

I should have said "alternative antibiotics"

I can't imagine that approaching ecology from a perspective of re-wilding will be of much benefit. The wild is happy to take over a space that isn't kept civilized (for instance, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl), so you quickly end up with a situation where you want to be able to predict the consequences of any actions you take against the existing ecology, which is anyway how we are managing 'wild' spaces.

Unfortunately many of the effects of humans are long-lasting. The elimination of buffalo, for instance, or the loss of most wolf populations in North America which lead to the explosion of deer, IIRC. I am quite interested in the possibilities of selective breeding to replace extinct species, and the major die-off currently happening could have negative effects we have not yet even begun to see.

"how do we suck the carbon from 150 years of burning fossil fuels out of our atmosphere?" Stop destroying forests, stop burning fuels, start growing more plants. The real question is, how to accomplish these.

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