Crispr-Based Covid-19 Tests Are Coming

spectrum.ieee.org

6 points·samizdis··3 comments

This feels like groundbreaking technology, and detectable with the phone camera! I’m amazed at how our species acts in the face of imminent threat.

Going on a tangent, I feel like so many discoveries can be attributed to difficult situations pushing our resources in a single direction, that it might be worthwhile to simulate some sort of malign event somehow on a planetary scale.

Imagine if you will, wargaming a realistic alien invasion with all the world governments... what advances would result not only in technology but international cooperation, supply chain management, resource distribution etc.

You should take a look at Denis Villeneuve's Arrival(2016) if you haven't already. It explores this concept in a very peculiar yet thought-provoking way.

That aside, I think that If in the future somehow manage to make effective use of VR/AR for purposes other than entertainment, such virtual environments could be used to simulate suchevents. It would be reminescent of today's Fortnite events, but with much more serious repercussions.

However one should keep in mind that such events could have traumatizing and demoralizing effects on our civilization. Although temporary these effects might constitute a major setback.

Thanks for the reply and the suggestion. Just adding to the idea, basically everything we do leaves society scarred in a way or another. Societal, cultural, economical, we’re not in a ‘solved’ phase of anything. The ARVR you mentioned could help us accelerate our progress in the matter, at the expanse of our wellbeing. I feel it’s a choice we constantly make as a species, and more often than not we choose sacrifice for velocity.

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