We keep getting better at curing disease and preventing death, but this makes little difference in our fight against aging, due to its exponential nature.
Almost no age-related disease or condition can currently be prevented or cured. They can be somewhat slowed, but that's about it. A rare exception is cataracts; it can be cured by replacing the eye's lens.
This concept is inspired by established systems like Nordic civilian defense against nuclear threats or lifeboats on ships.
But those systems weren't designed with the survival of humanity in mind, and so, they're obviously going to be much less robust.
I might not have emphasized this sufficiently in the post, but the aim is not to achieve near 100% robustness. Instead, the goal is to provide people with a fair chance of survival in a subset of crisis scenarios.
...My initial intuition is that even if 70% of the units function effectively in a crisis, thi
I just thought of another showstopper that makes the other issues now seem insignificant: how could you ever determine whether or not the suits and shelters work to prevent bacterial contamination? The problem here is that humans are already "contaminated" and another problem is that the world isn't contaminated with a unique kind of bacteria or bacteria-sized particle that you could test for. So, there's actually nothing to test for. Even if you could test for something, how could you even detect one or a few bacteria that got through? I don't see any way...
-air supply leaks: the whole air supply is inside the shelter with a fan at the inside end. Thus, any leak goes from clean to dirty and is not an issue
I'm not sure what you're describing here. Unless you're talking about some sort of closed-loop system (like on a submarine or spacecraft), leaks are always a possibility. Can you share an illustration of what you're trying to describe?
-leaks through membrane (including airlock doors): not a major issue, the positive pressure will not let anything from the outside come inside
It might not be a major issue for ...
This shelter idea has many points of potential failure, possible showstoppers, and assuming a small population of shelters (hundreds or a few thousand), seems extremely unlikely to maintain an MVP for more than a few months.
Points of failure:
Showstoppers:
There would still be term limits: violent death, revolutions, invasions, and so on.
You might want to consider adding additional protection measures (like a respirator), as the effectiveness of some vaccines can be moderate to non-existent. The effectiveness of the flu vaccine in years when its well-matched to the circulating strains is between 40% and 60%, and when the vaccine is not well-matched, it's protection against illness plummets, although it may still offer some protection against complications such as pneumonia. Vaccines don't exist for bad colds and the stomach flu.
Reusable respirators will work well against any fast-spreading pandemic (assuming no ridiculously-long, asymptomatic incubation periods).
There seems to have been plenty of papers on airborne aerosol transmission of the flu and experiments with human subjects strongly suggested that the common cold is transmitted via aerosols. So, this makes it even more surprising that the experts got transmission so wrong and took forever to correct their mistake.
Yes, but your post seemed to focus on the individual, and that's why I didn't mention future humanity.
For humanity, it did go from no doom to maybe doom which is worse. And perhaps it's worse for the individual in the long run too, but that's a lot more speculative.
In any case, there's still some hope left that our luck will last long enough to avoid doom, even if it will be by the skin of our teeth.
Until very recently, it was doom for every individual. Maybe-doom is a vast improvement.
And whatever happens, we'll have the privilege of knowing how human history will have turned out.
The virus most likely leaked from the gain-of-function experiments that they were doing under BSL-2 and not from the BSL-3 or BSL-4 labs.
Third scenario: bat-to-researcher transmission during field work at bat caves or from the bat repository/colony or unaltered bat viruses at the labs in Wuhan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html
It's a tricky situation. As soon as Hong Kong relaxed its pandemic strategy, excess deaths exploded. Since China followed a similar (and even stricter) pandemic strategy, it seemed inevitable that the same thing would happen (all things being equal) and millions would die with many more millions becoming hospitalized. But all things might not be equal; the circulating strains of covid in China might be less lethal than when Hong Kong relaxed its own pandemic strategy. So, it could go either way.
The real problem here is that China is playing Russian roulett...
I was referring to how docs do brain surgery (e.g., infection prevention procedures, what instruments are used, where incisions are made, etcetera) rather than error rates or second opinions. I highly doubt that many non-experts (even a very motivated brain cancer patient) could successfully determine the appropriateness of specific surgical techniques for brain surgery. And since brain cancer is rare, it's low stakes from a societal or even a personal survival point of view (although, it will become high stakes if you'll live a lot longer than the current lifespan).
Nah, bridges (see other reply) and rockets aren't high stakes enough to be worth worrying about.
What kind of demise are you referring to?
Bridge building is nowhere near as important as cryonics (or more appropriately, "brain preservation" technology which may not involved cryonics at all), because brain preservation tech has the potential to save hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people from certain death. Even if you disagree, it is still potentially important for personal survival way more than bridge building.
My general heuristic is that the higher the stakes (especially for personal and societal survival), the more you need to check the expert consensus (especially for softer sciences such as medicine, sociology, and economics). Examples where expert opinion should be checked (and is or was probably wrong or misguided): cryonics, certain pandemic mitigation strategies, aging research, geoengineering. Examples where expert opinion probably shouldn't be checked very often by non-experts: brain surgery, bridge building, rocket engineering, archeological excavation.
In most situations (with some exceptions like going to the dentist) and for nearly everyone (with some exceptions like people living in a nursing home), the level of risk remaining after taking reasonable efforts to protect oneself seems miniscule.
I suspect we mostly agree about this, and the apparent disagreement was caused by a misunderstanding.
So, let me clarify: what I tried to say is that as long as individuals can protect themselves, there is no compelling reason for society to force others to protect individuals or for others to voluntarily protect individuals in those situations in which individuals can protect themselves (I probably should have been more explicit about this to avoid any confusion). For instance, if you need a root canal, you obviously can't protect yourself by wearing a res...
You seemed to be talking about mask mandates versus individual responsibility, and that's what I replied about. If you think my reply didn't address your comment, can you rephrase it or point out why you think my comment wasn't responsive?
If there were no reasonable ways (e.g., lack of respirators and/or vaccines) for an individual to protect themselves against covid, society could force everyone to protect individuals. The only reason why mask mandates (and associated NPIs) were ever a thing was that there were no other reasonable ways of protecting against covid. Now, there are other reasonable ways of protecting against covid, and that's why mask mandates aren't a thing anymore.
The CDC also says:
Most of these products have an ear loop design. NIOSH-approved N95s typically have head bands. Furthermore, limited assessment of ear loop designs, indicate difficulty achieving a proper fit. While filter efficiency shows how well the filter media performs, users must ensure a proper fit is achieved.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/respirators/testing/NonNIOSHresults.html
Anything that has earloops (this includes most of the KN95s that I've seen and all KF94s) can't be a respirator, because it's nearly impossible to form a seal between the filter material and the face with the low amount of tension that earloops provide. There will be massive air leakage and the filtration efficiency will be much less than 95% (the minimum standard for most respirators), regardless of the filtration efficiency of the filter material itself.
For kids, options exist that are likely to be lot better than anything with earloops. Some KN95s do ha...
The masks in your photo don't look like respirators.
Also, KN95s aren't respirators.
If respirators are widely available (even in the absence of vaccines), the responsibility for protection (especially for voluntary activities) falls on the person that doesn't want to get infected.
If someone wants to protect others, they should wear ventless (or vented-but-filtered) respirators. Non-respirator masks provide little to no protection.
Also, this is a good time to practice using respirators to mitigate against much worse future pandemics which may kill or disable the young at similar rates to the old.
An elastomeric respirator or PAPR paired with N100-equivalent filters should provide the best available protection and should significantly reduce risk.
Here's the reasoning:
Even if you're not concerned for your own safety but you live with older people, you still might want to wear an elastomeric respirator or DIY PAPR when going out in order to protect them and encourage them to do the same.
For me, the bottomline of this masking study is that if you wear a respirator only for a relatively small amount of time in a hospital setting, you might as well go maskless, because you'll just get infected when you're not wearing a respirator (because non-respirator masks don't work well at preventing covid due to poor face seals, inferior filter media, etcetera).
If current covid policies (lockdowns and tracing) are relaxed, millions of Chinese could die. China's CoronaVac vaccine doesn't appear to be nearly as effective as the Western alternatives at two doses. Why a third dose hasn't been more widely distributed yet is unclear. Respirators could also eliminate the need for current policies, but most experts still seem reluctant to recommend them for dumb reasons. There might also be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "China is more effective and tougher than the rest of the world" attitudes floating around.
Here's another reason I forgot to mention:
And to be clear, I don't think any of these reasons are enough (although, this somewhat depends on when in the pandemic these reasons were used) to justify not recommending the use of elastomerics.
It's mostly too late for intervention #1. Now, everyone knows about these issues. However, it may do some good to replace a lot of old experts with much better ones like Zeynep Tufekci. Tufekci wasn't perfect (never mentioned elastomerics), but she quickly got a lot of things right (even took lab leak seriously) and for the right reasons.
Intervention #2 has more merit, but I fear that the lack of urgency will take over and it will take too long to deploy elastomerics and/or PAPRs (which have certain advantages over elastomerics) at scale. This is starting ...
The one you suggested seems even better.
It might be a better alternative to surgical masks for children, but it's not necessarily better for adults. First, it's not independently certified (by NIOSH, for instance). And second, it lacks an exhaust valve which could make it significantly less comfortable to use for extended periods of time due to increased humidity.
A better alternative for adults is the 3M 6000 series with the optional 3M 604 exhalation valve filter, if you care about filtering the valve's exhaust.
N95 masks
KN95 masks
These aren't elastomeric respirators.
I can think of many reasons why elastomeric respirators haven't been widely used.
#1 is a double-edged sword; it might help avoid #3 and #4 but might also avoid #2 (immortality). Although x-risk might be lower, billions will still suffer and die (assuming human-created medicine doesn't progress fast enough) in a present and future similar to #3. OTOH, future humanity might run resurrection sims to "rescue" us for our current #3 situation. However, I don't know if these sims are even possible for technical and philosophical reasons. From a self-preservation perspective, whether #1 is good or bad overall is not at all clear to me.
This is what happened:
Wrong expert opinion (no airborne transmission) → respirators not recommended → multiple lockdowns until vaccines became widely available → millions of dead people, massive economic and social disruption
This could have easily happened:
Fast expert opinion change (no airborne transmission → airborne transmission) → use first lockdown to manufacture respirators for everyone → use respirators until pandemic burns out or vaccines and therapeutics become widely available → thousands of dead people, only one lockdown, minimal economic and so...
Just wear a respirator and be done with it.
Another factor to consider is how much outside air a ventilation system pulls in. This would help further dilute out the aerosols.
...More worrisome are the 23.1% of people who wanted to take the flight while known to be positive. Thus, almost one in four people who follow a cautious doctor who writes frequently about Covid in the style above think that a known symptomatic Covid case should still go to a terminal and get on a flight. How many more of the general population must think the same way? That it’s fine to go around exposing people when you’re sick?
Well, maybe it’s not as clear cut as all that?
This is certainly a rather strong ‘planes are safe for Covid’ position, where it would
Technically, the best protection is a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) which is a fancy way of referring to a respirator connected to an oxygen tank, but that thing too impractical and overkill for most people.
The amount of protection offered by a positive air pressure respirator (PAPR) depends on what kind of hood is being used and may offer about the same (or more) protection than a reusable elastomeric respirator. Assigned Protection Factor (APF) is a measure of the level of protection offered by types of respirators; PAPRs range from 25 to 1,0...
There are several elastomeric respirators that are ventless or that have add-on vent filters. I've heard that some of these respirators are not that comfortable to wear for long periods of time due to increased humidity, rather than pressure drop or C02 accumulation. I've tried a 3M 6000 series respirator with the 3M 604 exhalation valve filter, and I've noticed no significant increase in breathing difficulty, but I didn't use it long enough to determine if humidity accumulation is a problem.
Ventless disposables can also have humidity issues, so you're probably better off with an elastomeric anyway.
You're right; I missed your end-of-post recommendation.
Yes, I'm saying that the newer variants can easily get past cloth and surgical masks but are highly unlikely (but not impossible due to faceseal leaks) to defeat elastomeric respirators equipped with P100 filters. This is due to the fact that P100 filters filter out nearly all particles, so the contagiousness of a virus doesn't matter that much. Here's another way to think about it: during a poison gas attack, what would you choose, a water-soaked handkerchief or a gas mask?
The whole thing (facepiece a...
This means that the reason to require masks at dances is to allow people to attend for which it would otherwise be too risky.
Or urge the people that think it's too risky to attend to wear a respirator, instead of requiring everyone to wear one.
A group wearing surgical masks poses a risk to individuals (wearing the mask of their choice) that is roughly (per microcovid) 1/4 as risky as if the group were fully unmasked.
Microcovid is (still!) using outdated data (2020 and older) that doesn't take into account the current covid variants that are far more contag...
Decreased social interaction can be a showstopper but sometimes it isn't; so, I think a case-by-case policy would be more reasonable than a general stay-at-home-no-matter-what recommendation. In the party scenario, the choice is between attending and not attending (I'm assuming that there's no remote party option like VR chat or something). For some parties (like birthday parties), attending might be better even if social interaction is reduced. For others (like indoor dinner parties), it might not be worth attending. In the job scenario, many jobs can't b...
Yeah, Paxlovid might not be as good of a cure as was initially thought due to the issue of relapse. How much of a problem this really is seems unclear.
symptomatic people (should) stay home
This is kind of OT, but I'm going to ask anyway: under what conditions do you think that symptomatic people should stay home? If a person's symptoms are debilitating, staying home is the obviously correct choice. But if a person's symptoms aren't debilitating and wears a ventless respirator (and can tolerate it and it doesn't interfere too much in what they're doing), I don't see why they should stay home.
Since respirators are widely available and have been for some time now, I don't see any reason for mask mandates; a person wearing a respirator will be protected regardless of how many people around them wear masks. Plus, the masks most people wear (cloth and surgical) aren't effective anyway.
Sure, I could have added the caveat "if you don't die of anything else first (and most people won't)," but I wanted to keep the caveats to a minimum. Perhaps a general caveat would be that these statements should be understood to apply to most people alive today. About two thirds of deaths are caused by aging (100k out of 150k per day) and in the developed world, it's 90%.