Science!!!

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Researchers at Stanford University’s School of Medicine have developed two low-cost iPhone adapters that provide images of the eye that usually require specialist ophthalmology equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars. The university hopes that it will be useful both for primary care physicians in the U.S. as well as rural medical centres in developing countries.

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empire said:
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Researchers at Stanford University’s School of Medicine have developed two low-cost iPhone adapters that provide images of the eye that usually require specialist ophthalmology equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars. The university hopes that it will be useful both for primary care physicians in the U.S. as well as rural medical centres in developing countries.

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Well thats cool, hopefully they don't get caught up in patent infringement...
 
zebehm said:
Has this same exact thing not been predicted every decade for the last several centuries?
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I could type pages and pages on this topic, but I'm going to try to keep it short.

No single report ever made me take this opinion. It was years of reading, observing, and thinking on a wide variety of subjects as diverse as, though not inclusive to, sociology, geography, philosophy, physics, and history. It's a possible future I've seen coming for a long time. Granted, I didn't create a complex mathematical model like NASA did, but the fact that they have now made one confirms a lot of what I had thought could happen over the years might happen in our near future.

Over the last several centuries, there weren't 7 billion people overpopulating this planet with unsustainable lifestyles. There was no global economy with the accompanying global supply chain that civilization relied on to keep up and running. There was no advanced technology that caused us to be reliant on, and thus strip, the planet's resources and change the climate enough to threaten our ecosystem. There were no weapons that could destroy the ability for intelligent life to flourish on this planet.

The sociological aspects, in this case concentration of wealth by an elite class, combined with my strong belief in cynicism and the difficulty of getting any large group of people to work towards a common goal and this perfect storm they talk about becomes a distinct possibility. I personally believe that anyone who doesn't see this as a distinct possibility is either uninformed, willfully ignorant, or just plain intellectually incapable of thinking on such a "big picture" level.

And just to make it clear, this is not the future I want to see. I'm not trying to fulfill some pessimistic fantasy I have in my head. It's the future I've dreaded since my mid 20's, and it seems to be coming closer to reality year by year.

Edit: For clarification, I'm using cynicism in this case as the tendency to believe that people act in their own self-interest.
 
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RoyalSubject said:
*snip*

And just to make it clear, this is not the future I want to see. I'm not trying to fulfill some pessimistic fantasy I have in my head. It's the future I've dreaded since my mid 20's, and it seems to be coming closer to reality year by year.

Edit: For clarification, I'm using cynicism in this case as the tendency to believe that people act in their own self-interest.
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I don't understand why people don't seem to think the fact they've said it's going to happen for decades is a telling sign it WON'T happen. Will things have to improve? Of course. But at what point do you say "you know what, I was wrong, it'll turn out fine." The answer is generally never. People simply don't own up to that.
At some point there's just a confirmation bias which will never allow you to see anything else.
 
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FishMonger said:
I don't understand why people don't seem to think the fact they've said it's going to happen for decades is a telling sign it WON'T happen. Will things have to improve? Of course. But at what point do you say "you know what, I was wrong, it'll turn out fine." The answer is generally never. People simply don't own up to that.
At some point there's just a confirmation bias which will never allow you to see anything else.
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First, I didn't say "it was going to happen" for decades. I saw it as a distinct possibility a decade and a half ago, at which point I started observing what needs to change. If you think I don't want to see signs of positive change, you're crazy. The problem is that I don't see meaningful change occurring in the time frame necessary to halt the path that I, and now NASA, think we are on.

Climate change is now a fact that we are seeing in action across the world, but on a global scale we're still arguing about whether it's real or not while countries like China are building infrastructure using the same old technology that got us here in the first place. Running out of petroleum resources at some point in the future, which that global supply chain is absolutely dependent on, is now a fact, but instead of shifting our energy usage to something sustainable, we argue about when we'll run out of petroleum and invent fracking which pollutes our ground water to push that date out. The wealth gap has grown over the last decade and a half and continues to grow today. The global population continues to grow.

When the wealth gap shrinks, when we make a meaningful global shift to sustainable energy use, then I'll be happy not to say I was wrong, but "Whew...we managed to rein in our **** ups, and fix things before we wiped ourselves out." More than anything, I hope I can say this one day.
 
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