Why we couldn’t stop the virus
A rocket capable of flying passengers from London to Dubai in under 29 minutes, shared flying cars that can be ordered up like we order a Uber and which nanoscale motes will float through our bloodstream collecting data are some of the innovations that await us in the next decade as the technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined according to Peter H Diamandis and Steven Kotler The authors of The Future Is Faster Than You Think. The drugs will destroy the inflammation-producing zombie cells that are believed to cause ageing, ten to 12 years from now and we could reach longevity and escape velocity.
Yet we couldn’t stop a global pandemic coronavirus in 2020 and banned from travelling to next town as we are struggling to understand and why the elderly die while tended by medics desperate to find basic protective clothing as we are facing the reality of COVID-19
The convergence of many technologies- artificial intelligence, quantum computing, sensors, robotics, virtual reality, biotechnology, 3D printing, blockchain and global gigabit networks can’t get the vaccine to fight Covid-19.
IN 2018, when an Astronaut on a mission to space station broke his finger he did not have wait for a splint to be delivered from Earth, as the astronauts flipped on their 3D printer, loaded in some plastic feedstock, found splint in their blueprint archive and created what they needed and by 2023, we may have 3D printed transplant organs.
Chad Rigetti, a California-based quantum computing entrepreneur said: “ Instead of building a large-scale wet lab to explore the properties of hundreds of thousands of compounds on test tubes, you are going to be able to do much of that exploration inside a computer”.
Out of every 5, 000 new drugs investigated only five made it to human testing only one was approved. The average medicine was taking 12 years to get from laboratory to patient.
The US medical system the authors say “ it’s reactive, not proactive. Doctors make after-the-fact interventions, fighting a rearguard battle.”
WE are still scrabbling in the dark over Covid-19 even after the fright of Sars, Mers, and Ebola and why are we so unprepared.
The Future Is Faster Than You Think, by Peter H Diamandis and Steven Kotler by Simon & Schuster $28/ £20, 384 pages.