Hacker News Reader

Comment by actsasbuffoon | Hacker News Reader

True, but I imagine they have to say the former dramatically more often than the latter.

Imagine in the near future [+] when telling someone they have cancer is the same as telling them they have strep throat: a minor inconvenience. We're still in the dark ages of treating cancer (ie radiation, chemo, and surgery).

[+] 20-30 years

In 30 years we'll all be too busy looking for dry land.

No shit. Extra bonus if it has any usable topsoil left...

We'll be eating genetically engineered meat. As in lab grown muscle tissue, no need to even raise and then kill a cow. We can use the land reclaimed from animal husbandry applications.

While this is probably (hopefully) an exaggeration, I think you're dead right. The downvotes seem reflective of a delusion in the tech community that we will find a technological solution to any and all of the global problems we are likely to face soon. I wish people were more concerned about this.

> The downvotes seem reflective of a delusion in the tech community

The downvotes seem reflective of the reality that the vast, vast majority of present landmass will be perfectly dry with a 10m rise in sea levels.

Climate change risks are bad enough. Hyperbole doesn't make it any scarier, and is unnecessary.

If you think sea level rise is the only problem and, if it were, you think 10m is not enough to lead to complete societal meltdown in some places, then we clearly need more hyperbole.

Even if the ice caps completely melt, finding dry land isn't going to be a problem. We'll have plenty of other problems, but that's not one of them.

You could be right; it's totally possible that in 20-30 years telling someone they have [antibiotic resistant] strep is the same death sentence as telling them they have cancer.

I'm not really sure. Many forms of cancer are treatable if detected early. The question is mostly around how early they are discovered. Certainly many kinds of cancer are more likely to be discovered when they are already advanced. :-(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com