That your dog, while she appears to love you only because she’s been adapted by evolution to appear to love you, really does love you.
That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have, and thus complex life can persist in a universe with increasing entropy.
That if we wanted to, we surely could figure out which of the 300-ish strains of rhinovirus are circulating in a given area at a given time and rapidly vaccinate people to stop it and thereby finally “cure” the common cold, and though this is too annoying to pursue right now, it seems like it’s just a matter of time.
That if you look back at history, you see that plagues went from Europe to the Americas but not the other way, which suggests that urbanization and travel are great allies for infectious disease, and these both continue today but are held in check by sanitation and vaccines even while we have lots of tricks like UVC light and high-frequency sound and air filtration and waste monitoring and paying people to stay home that we’ve barely even put in play.
That while engineered infectious diseases loom ever-larger as a potential very big problem, we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.
That clean water, unlimited, almost free.
That dentistry.
That tongues.
That radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy but also quickly stop existing—a gram of Rubidium-90 scattered around your kitchen emits as much energy as ~200,000 incandescent lightbulbs but after an hour only 0.000000113g is left—or don’t put out very much energy but keep existing for a long time—a gram of Carbon-14 only puts out the equivalent of 0.0000212 light bulbs but if you start with a gram, you’ll still have 0.999879g after a year—so it isn’t actually that easy to permanently poison the environment with radiation although Cobalt-60 with its medium energy output and medium half-life is unfortunate, medical applications notwithstanding I still wish Cobalt-60 didn’t exist, screw you Cobalt-60.
That while curing all cancer would only increase life expectancy by ~3 years and curing all heart disease would only increase life expectancy by ~3 years, and preventing all accidents would only increase life expectancy by ~1.5 years, if we did all of these at the same time and then a lot of other stuff too, eventually the effects would go nonlinear, so trying to cure cancer isn’t actually a waste of time, thankfully.
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