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Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by oaiey on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:15AM (#28129847)
I am not worried only about better healthcare. Population growth, climate change, waste, .. so many more thing to worry.

For me humanity is up for a massive shrinking. Either because we do it or (some decades later) mother earth does it.

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by programmarchy on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:20AM (#28129900)
What do you make about Elon Musk's prediction that the biggest threat in the future may actually be population collapse [1], rather than overpopulation?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44Klhl81K7g

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by ceejayoz on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @12:18PM (#28130687)
I'd give it about as much credit as I gave his "COVID will be gone by April 2020" tweets.

The man is phenomenally effective in certain engineering contexts and deserves to be listened to if he's talking about rocket engines or something. He's no more credible in public health and population modeling than any other rando.

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by spywaregorilla on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:28AM (#28130019)
I would say that while it is a plausible hypothesis, Elon Musk has no particular reason to be seen as a credible source in this space, and that opening with that citation feels like its asking for discussion on the merits of Elon vs. the idea itself.
Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by programmarchy on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:34AM (#28130102)
Fair enough, I'll refer to his most salient point:

A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian. So if life extension technology gets implemented with something like mRNA technology, then it seems like that would have to be balanced out by higher birthrates.

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by inglor_cz on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:56AM (#28130411)
Personally, I think that artificial wombs will be operational before widespread aging reversal.
Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by spywaregorilla on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:43AM (#28130224)
We don't need to worry about mRNA vaccines doing this. You'd need to actually reverse aging. Stopping diseases one by one will never work. They're simply not preventable in the long term.

The population dynamics of such a situation would be dwarfed, imo, by the political and wealth inequality problems. Society is structured firmly around an average human lifespan.

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by programmarchy on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @02:36PM (#28132495)
Just to clarify, I didn't mean mRNA technology in the sense of vaccines, but rather gene therapy techniques that could reverse or slow down aging processes. Like the top post in this thread mentioned, there are new mRNA medicines coming out to treat cancer, for example, and if that pans out and the technology is really up and running then I imagine things like life extension would be on the table.
Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by spywaregorilla on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @05:10PM (#28134597)
Nah don't get your hopes up. "Treat a cancer" is very different from a general cure for cancer, which is simply never going to be possible with a generic injection or anything like that. These approaches will fundamentally ever work.

Life extension in the sense of average lifespan marginally increasing is possible, but in the sense of reducing aging is a very very different problem.

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by long_time_gone on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @12:41PM (#28131015)
==A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian.==

Using the word "enslaved" will successfully paint anything as a dystopian future, that doesn't mean it is the inevitable path of mRNA vaccines. If we have life-extension technology, maybe people will start having more kids, maybe twins/triplets will become more common, maybe the poorest countries will never achieve the technology, nobody knows.

Maybe this puts some context around it. The first nuclear power plant came online in 1951. 70 years later, only 32 countries have nuclear power plants and the content of Africa has 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by te_chris on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:22AM (#28129924)
Worth checking out the book The Great Demographic Reversal
Re:BioNTech alone could lift German economy by 0.5% this year by programmarchy on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:31AM (#28130054)
This looks very interesting, just picked a copy on Audible. Thank you for the recommendation.