We’re going to solve antibiotic resistance non-magically. Some people are dying while we work on that, and more will die, but there are large groups of people who have next to no medical care already, without them all dying.
Global warming is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and unlike antibiotic resistance there is little to no upside to incremental improvement. You invent an antibiotic replacement that works on a small subset of diseases, you rescue a bunch of lives. You reduce carbon emissions by a small fraction of the total and the most vulnerable ecosystems of the world are still gone forever and the inland ice still melts and drowns the most populated areas of the world.
Antibiotic resistance.
Yes, I’m being crotchety and selfish.
I will most likely be dead before GW really impacts on my life, but I don’t want to spend the remaining time fighting a bug.
Antibiotic resistance is not the same thing as eliminating sterile medical practice. Even if we lost the use of antibiotics altogether, we would still have a far better understanding of how and why to keep injuries and surgical procedures clean, and how to support our immune systems, than we did even 100 years ago. We’d still be far better off than we were in the mid nineteenth century.
I’m going with fixing the climate change option today. Although I suppose if we supported the antibiotic fix, people on the coasts could move inland, and farming methods could be readily converted to greenhouse aquaponics.
Eliminate Global warming. Much huger impact on human life in first world. Vastly huger impact on human life in 3rd world (and 2nd world?). Mega huge impact on life on Earth.
Clearly, global warming will lead to huge migrations of people from unlivable places (underwater, desertified, or just too hot) at a time when droughts and weather catastrophes will be stressing the “nicer” places. Conflict is inevitable. Just looking at diseases alone, I think far more people will die from infectious disease related to global warming than will be saved by antibiotics.
Also, as noted above, there are practices we could adopt to manage development and use of antibiotics better which DON’T require magic. Fixing antibiotic resistance this way would be like wasting your genie wish on a 2-lane highway to Hawaii.
There must be a dozen more pressing/vexing problems that should rate higher than antibiotic resistance.
Someone told me that antibiotic resistant bacteria are usually less competitive than non-resistant bacteria in an antibiotic free environment. So antibiotic resistance can almost fix itself. If I get to do something by magic, I’d fix global warming which is going to be really complicated and difficult to fix, as well as more catastrophic.
Indeed. I suspect we spent most of my time on this planet pushing it past the tipping point. Right now, it looks for all the world like our grandchildren will be fucked, no matter what we do.
I am assuming the magic technology to cure global warming would be more transferable than new ways of overcoming bacterial evolution, so I pick global warming. Practical fusion, better storage batteries, or whatever.
