"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.
Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.
You never know if we will need that arsenal against asteroids.
And everyone knows lasers are the solution to errant asteroids. Perhaps attached to evil sharks :)
There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.
My entire point was that the bomb wasn't a given in it's day (in spite of what the retrospective belief seems to be), just because something is out of our grasp now doesn't mean we won't reach it if we try.
That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational and mindless optimism.
The fundamental discoveries necessary for the nuclear bomb weren't discover until after Leo Szilard [0] proposed the weapon. Given that none of us were alive between 1906 and 1945 it's hard to fully grasp how the scientific understanding evolved over those 39 years.
Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard's vision but that vision was in no way a given. If it weren't for WWII, and Einstein's support, Leo would not have been able to garner the $2 Billion (1940's money) in support that was necessary to build the bomb.
Even then, there was a coin-toss level certainty that it would do anything.
Similar to Einstein's work preceding the discovery of Fission and the Atomic bomb. We have a great deal of work in biology around aging, telomere's, transcription errors, and more that hasn't been leveraged by the medical industry for varying reasons.
I'm not ready to be a naysayer on this topic, historically as a species we've had remarkable success in accomplishing things that were considered impossible before we did them.
That's totally different than the current situation with say cancer. In the world of physics and engineering, a "coin-toss" shot at working is actually a pretty well-developed idea. There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
> By the time someone wrote a check, the basic mechanism of the runaway fission reaction was understood.
I find that to be a gross simplification. I would challenge that the basic mechanisms of the fission reaction were as well understood then as we understand the basic mechanisms behind cancerous mutations now.
> There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
Over what time-horizon? We've achieved a great deal in the last 100 years that would have received less than a coin-toss probability if one were to be having this same argument in the early 1900s. The Haber Process [0] is a great example of something that we had no way of expecting we could accomplish (the energy efficiency aspect) before it happened.
What would you prefer Zuckerberg does with his money? I mean, he could build a massive yacht like Jobs before he died... As a species we have consistently accomplished feats that were as unlikely as the mitochondrial symbiosis that allowed us to exist in the first place, is there a reason to discount our abilities to continue this trend?
The relevant time is right now. If the U.S. government had said "yes, we can do it!" and invested $20 billion in building an atom bomb in 1915, they would've pissed that money away. It would've been mindless optimism. Doing it after fission had been discovered was a calculated investment.
The issue is that we're quite a few "Nobel-worthy" inventions away from curing Cancer.
I mean, biologically we're not in the equivalence of 1950's physics. We're holding in 1300's physics.
I saw that someone once compared curing Cancer to landing on a moon without knowing basic Newtonian physics.
I expect that before we cure cancer, we'd have found ways to cure all "normal" diseases, have "designer babies" without side-effects, have "instant, proof-perfect medicines", etc.
I'd want his to work on those issues.
Right now it'll probably end up like Google X. A great lab, makes great prototypes, but practically get left behind by incremental technology.
The question if Nagasaki would work, which is why they did Trinity.
The theory was there when the Manhattan project started - it was an engineering hurdle, not a scientific one.
Manhattan Project : Curing Cancer :: Apollo : Warp Drives
Nagasaki was the second practical test of the plutonium implosion method.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html
Edit: Reflecting on this, without quantum mechanics (which stemmed from Einstein's relativity work), Oppenheimer would not have had the mathematical tools that were heavily leveraged building the bomb. The bomb is more than throwing together two sub-critical pieces of material, knowledge from quantum mechanics was critical in the prediction of which fissile materials could yield a functional weapon (of which there are very few).
A population of cells is more complex than an atom as it requires more parameters to be fully specified. It is also harder to predict because there are several levels of non-linear feedback interactions within an environment that can never be fully given ahead of time. A population of cancerous cells is more complex than a population of cells because their dynamics are not stationary in time. Unlike a typical population of healthy cells, cancerous ones are able to, in effect learn and more effectively than even the immune system. Extend this to the full class of cancers to see why a simple mathematical theory of the kind we find in atomic physics is highly implausible.
As such, we have an object of higher descriptive and predictive complexity than atomic physics. Searching for this theory will take longer and is much, much more difficult in a formal sense.
Could you elaborate as to why you believe that?
Having worked on both biological and physical simulations the limits from a ground-up perspective are quite similar. While there are no well-understood analytic forms to describe biological systems, unlike in quantum systems, the fundamentals of the problem are the same: we can't predict things because there are too many interactions to easily model.
There is a whole world of non-traditional techniques opening up with increases in computational capacity.
We also don't know to what extent quantum computation would aid predictive modeling of protein interactions. It's possible that there are no leaks at the classical level of abstraction as to hurt predictability. But the problem still remains that experiments to fix parameters are hurt by the fact that the system is changing under you and interacts in a complex way with its environment which can't be known ahead of time. So the computational complexity is not necessarily easier (in a practical sense) even if we assume that there is no utility in modeling quantum effects.
One very theoretical idea of solving cancer (per cancer) would involve searching for a 'problem', an insult, outside of the learnability class of evolution which also does not harm healthy cells. This is computationally likely harder than BQP. Anything less, even if equipped with a quantum computer, would be evolved out of and with any survivors less attackable. Any way you look at it, it is a far harder problem than working out fission.
That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars.
So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.
[0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf
[1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj...
The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.
The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today.
The Manhattan project cost was "about $26 billion in 2016 dollars" according to the Wikipedia article. They are short $23B.
That's where this part comes in:
"The more people believe we can cure all disease in our children's lifetimes, the more likely the government is to invest in it"