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Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

TIL discovering viral novelty is common:

> Viral novelty doesn’t surprise Elodie Ghedin of New York University, who looks for viruses in wastewater and in respiratory systems. More than 95% of the viruses in sewage data have “no matches to reference genomes [in databases],” she says. Like Abrahão, she says, “We seem to be discovering new viruses all the time.”

You don't know what you don't know, I guess. That also means there is an invaluable wealth of genetic knowledge out there that we haven't recorded yet. I can't wait to see what insights are revealed once we've catalogued that missing 95%.

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As a species we've barely scraped the surface of understanding this earth. Consider: we haven't even scratched the crust of the planet. Not to mention the infinite space beyond.

This is sorta why it makes me even more mad that our species is more concerned about silly political arguments rather than investing large fractions of our GDP into Science, educating more scientists and unleashing them on the mysteries that the world has to offer.

Instead the greatest minds of our generation are now focused on selling ads. It feels so pointless.

Our species is concerned with power.

And money gives you power. The greatest minds are focused on making money for themselves and someone else.

Ads make money unfortunately. Knowledge about our planet earth does not.

I guess when we advance our production techniques so much that we can produce with little effort and automatically almost everything then we can transit to a post-scarcity society where the society can put an emphasis on curiosity, spiritual and intellectual development (and entertainment, of course) instead of material wealth. Automation, AI and new form of sustainable energy would make this possible.

> This is sorta why it makes me even more mad that our species is more concerned about silly political arguments rather than investing large fractions of our GDP into Science, educating more scientists and unleashing them on the mysteries that the world has to offer.

Science costs money and resources. Politics enables money creation and resource extraction. The capacity of our current society to do science is greater than in any society in history. That’s no accident. It’s the direct result of the environment created by our political decisions.

The Soviet Union is a great counter example. For a short time, it was at the forefront of science, thanks to the state directing resources to science. It was only due to the untimely death of the head of its space program, for example, that the Soviet Union didn’t beat the United States to the moon. But did the Soviet Union cure AIDS? Create the Internet? Create smartphones? No. It’s politics weren’t sustainable, and it collapsed, and in the long run, its capacity to do science turned out to be quite limited.

So maybe our “silly political arguments” serve a function after all?

I think the point you’re trying to make is that political stability of the US is a necessary condition for the promotion of sustained scientific activity, and I agree with that.

What I disagree on is that the silly political arguments have anything to do with that political stability. Arguments about abortion, tax cuts and gun laws seem to be the thing that animates most Americans which I would argue aren’t really things that make the country stable; on the contrary they actively harm the populace (if the conservative position on these issues is to be taken). Again the scientific consensus tells us what is the right choice (increase access to improve women’s health, increase taxes to reduce inequality and decrease availability of firearms to reduce gun violence).

What I’m sad is that the issues that animate most Americans aren’t that of eg discovering the vastness of space or combating climate change (perhaps this is changing?).

Abortion law, however, is a direct efficiency tax on the populace due to having to raise disowned children.

> Instead the greatest minds of our generation are now focused on selling ads. It feels so pointless.

Don't forget the ones playing zero sum games, like high frequency trying.

The short book "A Planet of Viruses" includes this little fact and more, it's a good read for people who want an ELI5 introduction to what's known. My only change would be to have more pictures, but there's always the internet for that.

that's not just true for viruses, it's true for pretty much anything. we've barely scraped the surface in terms of sequencing microbes, fungi, plants, birds, fish, ..., not to even consider variation at the population (or god forbid, somatic cell) level.

Back in the day, you only knew about microorganisms and viruses that you knew how to grow. And that apparently excludes about 99.9% of stuff.

In Biology 101, I recall that we cloned bacteria from sewage, and then cloned a bacteriophage. But the instructors were very careful that we cloned E. coli :)

And we are driving huge percentages to extinction before they are even recognized.

Discovering "novelty" is common for anything small. Viruses, bacteria, nematodes, ants, gnats, whatever.

To be catalogued, whatever it is has to be noticed first. The world is much too big for that to happen to most things.

> “We seem to be discovering new viruses all the time.”

Seems like a fun field to go into if you want something named after yourself (and your family, and your friends, and your pet)

Everyone should have a DNA sequencer at home.

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