I'm guessing these "breakthroughs" have always been just around the corner. I recall having a conversation with my dentist almost 20 years ago about things that were up and coming that were about to make our lives a lot easier in terms of saving and strengthening and building tooth enamel but none of what he described ever came.
We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized.
If you want to know what the near future holds look at what was discovered thirty years ago.
I can appreciate this example, though in the specific context of teleportation, there'll probably be a few decades tacked on to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising from the question of whether or not the person arriving out of the other end is in fact the same person.
(I'm of the position that it doesn't matter, but still... anyway, this entire thought was just a tangent off an example)
Admittedly, the closes to teleportation I've ever felt was my first trip on a cruise ship. I went to sleep in one city, and when I opened my eyes I was suddenly in a city hundred miles away. It was magic. I also still felt like myself.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1189358...
Which tells us that sentient consciousness and identity is mostly about the continuity of a signal across only some cells (nerves), and mostly rides on top of standing waves supported by those special cellular processes, at frequencies of oscillation faster than the underlying polarized/ionic chemical processes.
Then your copy claiming your job, your house, your wife and your children. Just as you would do.
Also if the transport process takes 20 lightyears, when do you send the ACQ? Will your original walk around for 20 years and then have an automated kill switch?
This sounds like a great scenario to me. I'm sure I would get along just fine with a duplicate of myself, and we could live together and get a lot more done. It sure would help a lot with avoiding burnout at work: we could take turns going to work, me one month and him the next month for instance. But two of us sharing one wife might be a bit much for her, so it'd be a lot better if we brought a second woman into the mix and lived as a polyamorous foursome (though this might be easier if we could create a teleportation clone of the wife too). It'd also be great having a double to help me on house projects, hobby projects, working on a side business, etc. And you mentioned kids: having an extra adult around the house to deal with them can only be a help, and since it's actually another me and not some other person, we're guaranteed to get along, have the same views on parenting, etc.
Honestly, I don't see any downside to this situation at all.
But I am 90% certain that if my spouse had a duplicate, they would be yelling at each other all the time.
It would be interesting to correlate answers to the question "If you had an exact duplicate, with the same body as you, the same thoughts as you, and the same memories as you up until yesterday, how would you get along?" with various aspects of psychology.
Why would your spouse be jealous of your clone? She'd now have two of you, so she's more likely to get attention when she wants it.
“Oh yes,” said Frankie, “but we’d have to get it out first. It’s got to be prepared.” “Treated,” said Benjy. “Diced.”
“It could always be replaced,” said Benjy reasonably, “if you think it’s important.”
“Yes, an electronic brain,” said Frankie, “a simple one would suffice.”
“A simple one!” wailed Arthur.
“Yeah,” said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, “you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”
“I’d notice the difference,” said Arthur.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Frankie mouse, “you’d be programmed not to.”
- Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Not actually about teleportation, but still apropos IMHO.
Who knows what will wake up from that?
It presents this exact same dilemma. Up until that point I never really considered the potential ethical ramifications of teleportation.
I mean, cloning things has its advantages too. Could be a good idea for some people to deliberate screw up the process and drastically cut down on their daily workload. Or perhaps as a way for the less ethical to not kill or work alongside their accidental copies, but ship 'em off to join the army or something.
Teleportation going wrong can be just as exciting as prospect as it working out fine. Cloning has a lot of useful applications as well.
At what point do we start being afraid to fall asleep?
There's a pun in there.
They are a barrier to entry, and they are a measure to ensure safety of new cures. It's a tough balance.
It seems to me that the safety aspect is currently very strong, on the expense of long time-to-market and high barrier of entry to market.
That would not mean staying where we are, it would mean starting to slowly go backwards in the tools available for health care (because e.g. some antibiotics are slowly becoming inefficient and new ones should be developed - and currently the world is not doing enough of that.)
See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095020/
http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/27/how-to-survive-a-plagu...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/ray-filar/silen...
The first interval seems frozen, but I think this is Parkinson's law at work. Today's scientists and engineers have the best technology in History, and they're pursuing the boldest endeavors by that very fact.
Personally as someone as a kid was going up out-back Australia who's parents and care giver didn't put fluoride tablets into the water because it caused the water to `taste bad`. As a result I have screwed up teeth. Discussed this with this with my parents years later. Their reasoning for my teeth problem was poor diet and eating sugary food (Completely ignoring the fact they tossed the tablets into the bin).
Fast forward into the future with a family and two children I don't have soft drink, fruit juice in the house. Who would of known, all the kids teeth are great since our last dentist visit.
OTOH I've heard teeth are especially poor around Portland Oregon where they don't fluoride the water. I'd simply say the jury is still out.
I tend to think of iq claims specifically with a particularly large grain of salt: it's an index of society that people follow closely and is related to many, many factors.
"Systemic fluorides can also give topical protection because ingested fluoride is present in saliva, which continually bathes the teeth providing a reservoir of fluoride that can be incorporated into the tooth surface to prevent decay."
It also says fluoride ingested during teeth-formation is incorporated into the teeth.
morbidly?
It's actually phenomenal how little dental research has ever reached consumer behavior or dental care.
Personally I only drink RO water as tap water tastes bad to me, but I use a fluoride mouthwash (Crest) every night after brushing and flossing.
It really has to do with toothbrushing and diet. Water fluoridation is just a way to get to the people who refuse to brush their teeth.
I've also heard that early modern humans had fairly good teeth for their age despite the presumed lack of dental care, presumably also due to differences in their diet from us.
You know how dentists say "Hey, I can tell you drink a ton of soda, you need to stop"? I would get told this every time I'd go in for a cleaning, despite not drinking any soda and very little fruit juice/other sugary drinks for many years, 90%+ water only.
Fast forward 20-something years, and 2 of my daughters have had to undergo a dental rehab similar to mine at very young ages (though not quite as young as me), despite the stringent dental regimen my wife enforces to prevent this fate. There's no doubt that they got my bad teeth genes.
We're talking young kids here, ages 2-3 at the time of the operation (I was 18 mos. when I went down). They don't eat an inordinate amount of sugar, and as I stated above, my wife is very thorough with their dental hygiene. The water is fluoridated where we live. A lot of kids this age surely have much worse diets and much worse dental hygiene, but their teeth seem to be problem-free for many years.
Personally, I've had tons of fillings, 7-ish root canals, two teeth fully extracted because they were past saving, and several that badly need work and I'm not even 30 yet. Pretty much the only people living with worse teeth are opiate addicts.
I hope I win the lottery some day so I can get a mouth full of implants and be done with it. I hear the going rate for this is about $75,000.
A lot of people refuse to believe that genetics play any role, but that's absolutely not consistent with my experience, nor the opinion of most of the dentists I've had.
Here's an article that reviews the literature on diluted bleach rinsing: http://www.rdhmag.com/articles/print/volume-35/issue-6/colum...
My parents enforced our dental care and we went to the dentist regularly when I was young. Always once a year checkup and twice a year cleaning and still I had regular dental issues.
In the second grade I can recall being brought out of class to a tooth-care specialist the school brings in to teach kids who seem uncared-for to brush their teeth. I brushed twice a day.
When I was fifteen I remember being yelled at by my dentist about how I don't look after my teeth because I had "16" cavities (the dentist, mind you, in my later years I realized was actually a bit of a hack -- all of his work fell out of my mouth and left me in terrible pain).
Around this time the dentist put me on regular fluoride mouth washes -- I went home with a bottle of some god-awful "cherry" flavoured stuff. I _still_ had repeated problems.
Fast forward to the present -- I've had one infected wisdom tooth, one infected molar -- both had to be removed. I have one half-decayed wisdom tooth that will be extracted soon. This fall I've had to have 4 fillings (some of them were put off for a while mind you).
The next year I am pending a root canal and a crown, and my dentist also has informed me that (at age 30) I require jaw surgery or I face the possibility of regular migraines due to molar wear.
I floss, brush, and use mouth wash daily. I don't eat much sugar. My parents actually raised us on a lot of raw vegetables (my mother grew, and I was raised in rural southern Ontario in Canada -- something of a agriculture belt).
The only neglect would be that my parents could not afford braces when I was young.
There has got to be some genetic aspect. Or does Hacker News as a consensus believe in shit luck?
I think I first heard about them on HN. BLIS and K12 are the keywords, if I remember correctly.
Either some leap of logic or information is missing there or you're drawing the wrong conclusion from your data
It depends on the natural amount of fluorine in the water, if there's sufficient, then it's fine.
It's only in the relatively few areas where there is a deficiency that it's a problem.
And of course it also depends on diet.
Offsetting your claim are studies which show that where people exclusively drink rain water, there is a higher incidence of tooth decay.
I'm not one of those "fluoridation is a government plot to make everyone pliable" crazies. Just saying that it's far, far more important to BRUSH YOUR TEETH than to have a fluoridated water supply. Just seems to me like water fluoridation is just one of those crazy things Americans and places America has influenced do (such as using the customary measure system and circumcising their male children - sure if you dig deep enough you can justify it, but plenty of people get along just fine without it)
I think the point is that fluoridation is often unnecessary because of the natural amount of fluoride in the water.
Cavities do not form without cariogenic bacteria, provided with a food supply of simple sugars. If you have such bacteria, there are several ways to inhibit cavity-formation, such as by chemically hardening bioapatite with fluoride ions, or by re-mineralizing tooth enamel.
Communities would be better served by mutans eradication efforts, even though they could cost far more than the $1/person-year that fluoridation costs.
If I had the cash and political backing, I would put mutans-specific bacteriophages and tricalcium phosphate in a municipal water supply. I'd then subsidize dental office visits for persons in the affected area, such that anyone desiring fluoride treatments can get them at no additional charge, and offer gratis chlorhexidine/xylitol mouth rinse after every visit.
Kill the S. mutans; end cavities.
That's not really true in and of itself -- fluoridation won't fix damage done by bad hygiene or diet. As someone else mentioned, genetics and other factors all play a part too.
I'm sorry you missed out on that, teeth problems are shitty
20 years ago, all of this would sound like science fiction to me.
What one really wonders at, is technology where there were technical failures, but were really a small distance away from success for lack of combination the right bit of information to push it over the edge - but are now locked away in storage in some proprietary corner somewhere.