Comment by tcj_phx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tcj_phx | Hacker News Reader

It was about 300 years from William Harvey's publication of his insights into the circulation of the blood before bloodletting fell out of common use. De Motu Cordis was published in 1628 - 'An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings'. The last medical text recommending palliative bloodletting was published in the 1920's (iirc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Harvey#De_Motu_Cordis / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercitatio_Anatomica_de_Motu_...

I found a paper by some medical historians that said medicine became useful between 1910 and 1912: where a random person going to a random doctor with a random condition was more likely to be helped than harmed.

And in our traditional lack of foresight we forgot to account how such medical advances would explode the population count and now there are more humans than rats, it should have been obvious that more contraceptives would be needed (including promiting their usage of course); now we have many one problems thanks to such carelessness, global warming being the biggest one.

I don't think that's actually true, people knew about the population increase, and eventually the obvious problem with food was worked on (machines to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, pesticides, large farming machinery, weather prediction, record keeping and communication, futures). A population level of at least 7 billion is probably required if you want people to have the specialization and research capacity of 2018, even with education and medical improvements (that have actually gotten worse since 2018).

What you need is enough people with access to education, and enough of a safety net to risk innovation. Given that there are a lot of people in the world who still have no access to a university level education and are living paycheck to paycheck, I'd speculate that you could possibly get away with half or even less the 2018 population in order to maintain 2018 technology in a system that actually worked on merit.

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