Achieving the equivalent of "What if no one died for three days?" every year is a massive achievement on the same scale of the wildest dreams of most of the people on this site.

> What if no one died for three days?

The world would get massively overpopulated very quickly.

Diseases maintain the balance of us with nature, if we eliminate them we are going to run out of food fast.

This isn’t true in any way we could reasonably reach. The world has an insane amount of potential food output. A huge portion of the food the US produces goes directly in the trash instead of being used.

Do you have numbers ? There used to be famines. And countries still fight over water. what is the carrying capacity in terms of food production on earth ? 10 billion, 100 billion ? At a trillion, the world would be at Singapore’s population density I think.

It's highly dependent on assumptions.

The limit is ultimately set by thermodynamics and the need to dissipate waste heat to space. This limit is around 1 trillion people, but this likely requires food be artificially synthesized. Using conventional agriculture, a global limit of 150 billion was set (in a 1979 study referenced in the 1985 book "The Global Possible", page 217), or 47 billion with a US-like diet. Nitrous oxide emission from agriculture is likely to be a long term concern, as this powerful greenhouse gas accumulates.

As always, please do not interpret these statements as advocacy of these outcomes.

What do you mean “as always”… That sounds like ai generated nonsense.

This is where ai currently falls down. It can’t do new analysis.

It's because I have constantly seen that misinterpretation. People seem to think that if I say "X is true" or "X is possible" then I'm saying "I find X desirable". This is a weird non sequitur and seems to be closely related to wishful thinking, that is the non sequitur of thinking that something is true because its truth would be desirable.

In terms of difficulty, perhaps. In terms of significance, it's an achievement on the same scale as sleeping late on the weekend.

I think it's weird (and a bit callous) that you'd so casually dismiss the idea that saving 500,000 lives a year is something significant.

That's easy to say, but not productive. What are the diseases that kill the most people we should be working on?

Cancer kills over 9 million people per year, or 18x strep A. Tuberculosis kills nearly 1.5 million people per year, or 3x. Over 9 million people die from hunger related causes, which while not a disease is 18x strep A. It's not to demean the people who die from strep A, because to each of their families it's a tragedy, but the scale and the fact that it can be treated with common antibiotics means that we can put the effort and resources that would be spent on a vaccine to better use elsewhere.

Nearly all hunger-related deaths are due to the political environment they live in (including wars). Of course such environments also disproportionately include those who cannot gain access to antibiotics as well.

You could argue that vaccines would be hampered by the same environmental issues, but the window of stability necessary to vaccinate a person for life is much smaller and easier than the repeated stability moments required to gain access to antibiotics in a timely fashion for those infected with Strep A.

The question of prioritization of resources is not merely dependent upon the number of those affected, the creation of an effective vaccine is unpredictable. You're better off taking a broad approach in order to maximize the likelihood of success.

> Cancer kills over 9 million people per year

"Cancer" isn't one disease though, it's hundreds, and many of them require completely different approaches to treat.

> Tuberculosis kills nearly 1.5 million people per year, or 3x

So in other words, yes, it would be "worth it" to develop a vaccine for strep A. It would also be worth it to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis. Let's do both.

> Over 9 million people die from hunger related causes, which while not a disease is 18x strep A

Not really relevant. The people who have expertise in developing vaccines and the people who have expertise in "fixing hunger" are not the same people.

> the scale and the fact that it can be treated with common antibiotics means that we can put the effort and resources that would be spent on a vaccine to better use elsewhere

That's not a good way to evaluate where to put resources. To borrow your example, maybe it will take 10x more time and 5x the cost to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis vs. strep A. Then working on strep A sounds like a good allocation of resources.

Just offering that as an example; I of course don't know the relative resource requirements here. But things are not so simple. (Though going back to your cancer example: I feel pretty safe in guessing it would take way more than 18x the resources and effort to cure all forms of cancer than to develop a strep A vaccine.)

And regardless, resources are usually not allocated in the most simple, efficient way. People work on things because they want to, and can find someone to fund them. Funders might want to fund something because they have a personal connection to the thing they're funding. Certainly government grants are given with a bit more rigor than that, but there's a lot of disease-fighting out there that comes from a variety of sources. And that's ok.

Considering that strep A deaths are probably 100x easier to prevent than cancer deaths, this means that’s we should focus on Strep A at least as much as on cancer.

We shouldnt be trying to erradicate diseases which keep population numbers in check. The world will run out of food fast and there will be widespread famine and starvation like the world has never seen before.

Your comments there have no connection to reality. The major population issue facing the world going forward is intractable decline in birth rates leading to population collapse.

Cardiovascular diseases, cancers, respiratory infects.

Strep A is technically solved due to being easily treatable with common antibiotics.

And yet a half million people still get it and die. Doesn't sound "solved" to me ("technically" or otherwise). I'm not sure if mass vaccination campaigns would be more effective than hoping people see a doctor when they get sick (seems like a lot don't) and hoping they are able to pay for a full course of antibiotics (seems like a lot can't), and hoping they actually stick with it and take the full course (many people in general don't).

At least with vaccinations, it's usually one shot every $DECENTLY_NOT_SHORT_INTERVAL, and that's it.

Granted, crazy stupid antivax sentiment is on the rise...