Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

Re:Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100 by prewett on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @06:44PM (#12552927)

"Build an atomic bomb" is a lot more specific than "cure all diseases." In fact, "cure all diseases" is kind of the opposite of a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based). Whereas, to goal to build a device capable of detonating via nuclear fission is pretty specific, particularly to a physicist. Also very measurable and highly time-based.

Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.

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Re:Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100 by scrollaway on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @07:55PM (#12553300)

I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that it's easy to say "x is very specific" if you know exactly what x is after-the-fact.

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Re:Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100 by prewett on Thursday September 22, 2016 @12:15AM (#12554305)

True, and a good point to make. My understanding of the difficulty of the atomic bomb was that everyone knew what to do (smash enriched uranium together such that was more than a certain mass), but they had a lot of difficulty getting the spherical detonation right. So the problem wasn't unknown from the physics side, but was rather an engineering problem. Compare to "cure all diseases," which we don't even know how to do theoretically.

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