DrAwkward wrote:I made a similar comment to my lady when i saw this article last night. "Ya know, religious nuts are going to be pissed if science takes away god's punishment for promiscuity."

They already are pissed, that's why they're blocking things like HPV vaccines from being approved by the FDA. Supposedly, curing HPV in women (which in turn possibly saves them from developing cervical cancer) would turn them into big sluts.

The other day a bunch of us were talking about how "old" we felt, and how our ages were thrown into sharp relief when we had co-workers admit stuff like this:

Not knowing what a 7" record was.
They had always had a personal computer in their house.
They had always been aware of HIV/AIDS.

This last one is, to me, the most depressing of all. I remember the tail end of "free love" and the drug-fueled Studio 54 orgies (but was, alas, too young to actually participate) and remember realizing the complete and total lifestyle changes that had to be adopted to avoid getting infected. It was a really big deal.

Nowadays, I get the impression that younger people can't really grok just how big a deal it was/is. Maybe I'm wrong.

burun wrote:I get the impression that younger people can't really grok just how big a deal it was/is.

I guess that I am young enough not to use the word "grok" in everyday conversation.

Then again, I've never read "Stranger In A Strange Land".

Like many influential works of literature, Stranger made a contribution to the language: specifically, the word "grok." In Heinlein's invented Martian language, "grok" literally means "to drink" and figuratively means "to understand," "to love," or "to be one with." This word rapidly became common parlance among SciFi fans, hippies, and computer hackers, and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary among others.

A cure for AIDS would be in the interest of the pharm companies, people. If you think they make more money off of AIDS-related drugs than they do off of the gazillion other things they sell, then maybe it would seem logical that they're looking to have everyone on the planet die of AIDS so they can make their money off their AIDS-related medecines. But if they make more money off of, say, the pills that you take every day for your birth control, or your migraines, or your sleeplessness, or your blood pressure or your etc etc, then don't you think they'd rather have you around for another X decades, so you can buy all that stuff, which is where they actually make their money?

Take off the tinfoil hats, people.

Here's the real problem. Get hypothetical with me.

There is this amazing mystery drug, and taking it will cure you of AIDS or cancer, or any number of other serious diseases that plagues mankind. Kinda like what was the impetus for this thread. Let's say it's real, and it works. The pharm companies are thrilled, because unless it somehow cures your allergy to cats or your problems with the ol' dingly dangly or whatever, you're now gonna be buying their meds for an extra couple decades. So they're HAPPY about that. The problem is...

People now live to an average life expectancy of 85 years old! Social security and medicare are decimated faster than normal. Unemployment is through the roof, because there are less people dying from cancer, so the number of 50-year-old people around is higher than ever. Housing prices skyrocket. Garbage dumps overflow at an alarming rate; pollution is off the charts. Traffic congestion in major cities is unbelievable. Why? Because people aren't dying like they're supposed to. Already people are living unnaturally long, due to our top-notch medical industry. Go ahead and take away some of the biggest causes of death, and see where that leaves us.

It's not about offending God by tinkering with diseases He made to kill so-and-so. It's about we've already totally fucked up the natural order of things. And the more we do it, the more problems are gonna arise. Problems like too-much-garbage, and too-much-pollution, global warming and all that, these issues are directly tied to the size of the human population on the planet. If there were only 100,000 people using nasty 2-stroke engines and throwing out all kinda plastic, the Earth could handle that for way, way longer than it can handle that same behavior from 6 Billion or 20 Billion people. It's already pretty crazy out of control. Curing AIDS and cancer would throw things so far out of whack, I think that none of us really know all of the problems that would arise.

I know that sounds terrible, and not the least bit humanistic. But to me it's pretty sensible. What this planet really needs are things that will *slow* the rate of growth of human population. Not things that will ultimately leave us with more and more and more people over 50 or 70 or 90 years old who can maybe not walk so good, but will for sure never die of diseases that are ultimately around for a reason. Death is a totally natural part of the whole Cycle Of Life thing. Human predisposition to do anything to thwart that totally natural process is something I find unsettling at best.

scott wrote:A cure for AIDS would be in the interest of the pharm companies, people. If you think they make more money off of AIDS-related drugs than they do off of the gazillion other things they sell, then maybe it would seem logical that they're looking to have everyone on the planet die of AIDS so they can make their money off their AIDS-related medecines. But if they make more money off of, say, the pills that you take every day for your birth control, or your migraines, or your sleeplessness, or your blood pressure or your etc etc, then don't you think they'd rather have you around for another X decades, so you can buy all that stuff, which is where they actually make their money?

Take off the tinfoil hats, people.

Here's the real problem. Get hypothetical with me.

There is this amazing mystery drug, and taking it will cure you of AIDS or cancer, or any number of other serious diseases that plagues mankind. Kinda like what was the impetus for this thread. Let's say it's real, and it works. The pharm companies are thrilled, because unless it somehow cures your allergy to cats or your problems with the ol' dingly dangly or whatever, you're now gonna be buying their meds for an extra couple decades. So they're HAPPY about that. The problem is...

People now live to an average life expectancy of 85 years old! Social security and medicare are decimated faster than normal. Unemployment is through the roof, because there are less people dying from cancer, so the number of 50-year-old people around is higher than ever. Housing prices skyrocket. Garbage dumps overflow at an alarming rate; pollution is off the charts. Traffic congestion in major cities is unbelievable. Why? Because people aren't dying like they're supposed to. Already people are living unnaturally long, due to our top-notch medical industry. Go ahead and take away some of the biggest causes of death, and see where that leaves us.

It's not about offending God by tinkering with diseases He made to kill so-and-so. It's about we've already totally fucked up the natural order of things. And the more we do it, the more problems are gonna arise. Problems like too-much-garbage, and too-much-pollution, global warming and all that, these issues are directly tied to the size of the human population on the planet. If there were only 100,000 people using nasty 2-stroke engines and throwing out all kinda plastic, the Earth could handle that for way, way longer than it can handle that same behavior from 6 Billion or 20 Billion people. It's already pretty crazy out of control. Curing AIDS and cancer would throw things so far out of whack, I think that none of us really know all of the problems that would arise.

I know that sounds terrible, and not the least bit humanistic. But to me it's pretty sensible. What this planet really needs are things that will *slow* the rate of growth of human population. Not things that will ultimately leave us with more and more and more people over 50 or 70 or 90 years old who can maybe not walk so good, but will for sure never die of diseases that are ultimately around for a reason. Death is a totally natural part of the whole Cycle Of Life thing. Human predisposition to do anything to thwart that totally natural process is something I find unsettling at best.

Pretty interesting Scott. So people SHOULD be allowed to suffer slowly from some of the worst diseases on the planet just to maintain natural order? I don't quite follow. If there is a cure for AIDS that not only stops the main virus but also keeps it from mutating I think that that is a great idea.

There is no way to avoid the fact that at some point we're all going to do die, and if we expect it to happen naturally, it's time and place will be out of our collective control. But what about people suffering of HIV/AIDS that are 20-60? Don't they deserve a "new lease on life". I see nothing wrong with letting nature take it's course, but I certainly think that it is in the best interests of society as a whole to find a cure for an epidemic such as AIDS.

-Jeremy

Overpopulation is an issue, sure. That's why people need to stop having so many babies.

Fewer new people will = lower unemployment, more wealth/benefits to distrubute, etc. And in the meantime those who are around can still benefit from the magical mystery anti-AIDS and cancer drug.

Personally, and i know this is really overgeneralizing things, but i think our society looks at life and death in a far too black-and-white way. Quality of life should be a higher priority than quantity of life.

Overpopulation? What. The. Fuck.

This is the estimated population of Botswana in 2020 without drug treatment-->



Beyond my stomach turning over, not treating AIDS will cripple economies/social structure. You're looking at the wrong end of overpopulation, tmh.

Bumble, I'm talking about the global population, not that of specific countries in Africa that are being royally fucked by AIDS. In terms of the problems I'm bringing up, it is the most industrialized nations with the highest populations that contribute to these issues, not a nation like Botswana. In terms of the world population, and the world's problems with pollution-type issues, Botswana probably doesn't even register.

oucheh wrote:Pretty interesting Scott. So people SHOULD be allowed to suffer slowly from some of the worst diseases on the planet just to maintain natural order? I don't quite follow. If there is a cure for AIDS that not only stops the main virus but also keeps it from mutating I think that that is a great idea.

There is no way to avoid the fact that at some point we're all going to do die, and if we expect it to happen naturally, it's time and place will be out of our collective control. But what about people suffering of HIV/AIDS that are 20-60? Don't they deserve a "new lease on life". I see nothing wrong with letting nature take it's course, but I certainly think that it is in the best interests of society as a whole to find a cure for an epidemic such as AIDS.

-Jeremy

I'm not advocating suffering, or advocating that people die slowly, or saying that there shouldn't be a cure for AIDS. The two points I was trying to make were

1) I don't think it makes any sense to suggest that pharm companies would rather have people die of AIDS when they could sell people a cure for it and then sell them all manner of other drugs for the extra decades that the person would live

and

2) Every step mankind gets closer to removing major causes of death is on the one hand a good thing for the people who will now not die from those causes, but on the other hand is a bad thing in that it will significantly amplify many or all of the population-related problems that exist on a worldwide level, with a fixed volume of space and resources.

So there are some minuses that go along with the plusses. And the minuses can end up being just as catastrophic if not moreso, with regard to sustainability of human life on planet Earth.

Maybe science will find a cure for garbage. And for toxic emissions. And for energy demands. And for the fixed quantity of physical space on this planet.

These are things that will have to happen if the human race is to continue expanding in size and living to older age.

Ugly as it may sound, I think there is an age range where people are generally (with exceptions) burdens to society versus contributors to it. Maybe it's something like burden from age 0 to 16, contributor from 16 to 60, burden from 60 to 120, something like that. I'm just making numbers up here, but I think there's some generalized merit to the sentiment. Things like social security and medicare are good examples. If you believe what was said in the State Of The Union Address, then within just a couple decades, the funding for maintaining old folks will have gigantic financial costs, what did Bush say, something like 60% of the entire Federal budget?!? As causes of death are removed, this situation becomes worse and worse.

And the only way to have enough money coming in to take care of the elderly will be to have ever more and more people being born, so there are always enough young folks around to support the old folks who can't do anything to support themselves. This system will necessarily eventually fail, it cannot be sustained, because there is a fixed amount of livable space on this planet. Maybe it's 500 years off, or maybe it'll be more clearly worrysome before the end of our lifetime, but there will come a day where this continued expansion of the size of the human population will be realized to be a dead end. Unless we cover the entire planet with skyscrapers that are 100 stories tall, eventually there will simply not be enough space for us.

As ugly as they are, diseases and wars are things that keep this in check.

Prisons. I didn't even think to bring up prisons! They're a problem at play here, too. And crime in general, I think, will be more of a problem as overpopulation's ill effects are amplified more and more.

I don't want anybody to die of AIDS, or cancer, or anything painful. That's a dream world. In the real world, there is a battle on, and on the one team you have human beings who will reproduce at an unsustainable rate for whatever reason, and on the other hand you have things fighting to keep the balance, which in our case are diseases and the like. In the case of lions or tigers or some animal of your choosing, if their population expanded beyond a certain point, it would be kept in check by lots of them starving to death because there is only so much of a food supply to sustain them. That's how nature works. In our case, we can genetically engineer foods in a lab that could easily feed the entire planet worth of humans and then some. And we don't really have natural predators so much anymore, big nasty animals that eat us if they catch us. We've conquered them, too, with guns and the like. So diseases and natural disasters are a couple of the only things nature has left to keep us in check, to keep us from destroying the planet.

I didn't design this system. It is maybe random happenstance that this is how Earth turned out, or maybe it's like this for a reason, nobody really knows. Unless you dispute the notion of evolution (which few people around here would), diseases like AIDS that can evolve like mad are, in a warped sense, the pinnacle of life, or maybe anti-life, on this planet. We like to think of humanity as being A-number-one, the top of the food chain. Diseases tell us otherwise.

Again, I am not pro-AIDS. And I'm not against fighting it, either. I'm just saying there are a whole different set of problems that come with winning the battle agaist disease, the increased and more-aged human population, and they can potentially result in the worsening of quality of life for *everyone on the planet*.

hey, at least the botswana traffic nightmare will be solved! look on the bright side!

bumble wrote:Overpopulation? What. The. Fuck.

scott wrote:What this planet really needs are things that will *slow* the rate of growth of human population...Death is a totally natural part of the whole Cycle Of Life thing. Human predisposition to do anything to thwart that totally natural process is something I find unsettling at best.

breathing and eating thwart the natural process of dying. i'm still going to do it.
some people's nature is to live a long and happy life. other people go to medical school and try to grant that same opportunity to others. salut, medical professionals! i appreciate you!

scott wrote:Again, I am not pro-AIDS. And I'm not against fighting it, either. I'm just saying there are a whole different set of problems that come with winning the battle agaist disease, the increased and more-aged human population, and they can potentially result in the worsening of quality of life for *everyone on the planet*.

A whole different set of problems that come with saving those peoples lives? Like what? They end up being asshole drivers? Don't recycle? There are more old people? By your argument, these people dying is actually a worthy sacrifice for the betterment of the entire society. Sorry, I don't buy it.

-Jeremy