Broomstick wrote:Laproscopic gallbladder removal involves only a very few, tiny cuts - but one of the complications is liver failure followed by either transplant or death. A small cut in the wrong place, or poorly done, can certainly have life-threatening consequences. There is also the possibility of a poor reaction to anything introduced into the body, and there is always a problem of infection in any surgery.
Accidentally cutting or nicking the wrong duct in a process that is refined compared to past methods but still fundamentally cutting into somebody with knives?
Today:
Laparoscopic gallbladder removal: mortality rate highly variable but like 0.2%.
An improvement over the old open gallbladder surgery, far smaller incisions, made possible by the Laparoscope technology with a miniature video camera so the surgeon can see inside.
It's relatively safe by current standards for a major surgery (removing a whole organ centimeters in dimension), so much so that many publications for the public gloss over the risks entirely. Yet the patient loses weeks of their life on average if you average out a 0.2% mortality rate. The vast majority of patients survive fine, but one out of every few hundred dies and loses the remaining decades of their life.
Obviously it's not just random, depending on the age of the patient, the carefulness of the surgeon, and more, yet it's still a major risk. If a car design crashed and killed everybody onboard every 500 trips, that'd be a big deal. People don't think of the risk as equivalent to if it had the nuisance of a month-long hospital stay, but it is truly the equivalent average harm in the aspect of average lifetime lost, even though not literally that.
Tomorrow?:
I wouldn't pretend to be able to tell the details of the best way, but there may be a still better way to eliminate gallstones and prevent their occurrence. What if there was no need to make any incisions or true surgery at all?
(While that's not an entirely new idea, with rare past usage of MTBE solvent chemical injected through a needle, that had issues from extreme pain to the gallstones coming back later, while oral medication taken over years also has its own weaknesses, as does ultrasound).
Example: What if microrobots could be swallowed in an acid-resistant pill capsule entering the stomach, controlled to crawl up the duct, eliminate the gallstones, and stay there afterward to stop reoccurrence? What if such could be done without the incisions and surgery of today? What if it could be refined until it didn't have the same risks and mortality rate of current surgery?
It's not impossible, but I think it highly unlikely. As I said, removable appliances are much more likely and, while the risks of catastrophic injury in regards to implants may be rare, the mere fact that they can be catastrophic will make people less inclined to run them for mere convenience.
Depending on how many multipurpose functions and extra capabilities the implants add, they might be more than mere convenience connotates. Yet certainly the degree of risk is important. That in turn depends on unknown details of future technology. If an implant can work while not deep into the body, it is easier made safe.
Your gallbladder removal surgery example involves cutting inches deep into the body. If something could be only a little beneath the skin and not involve major incisions, that all would help (as compared to your example of removing an organ centimeters in dimension).
Certainly there's major competition from what can be done without implants. Communication isn't a strictly implant-requiring application, so that makes it technologically harder to be worthwhile, though that doesn't rule it out.
Oh, I believe the price - it's the amount required and the total cost that I dispute. There are people who fly personal blimps now - last time I spoke to one he said it cost him $3,000 to fill up his ship for a flight. I had no reason to doubt his claim, and as he had actual experience in owning and flying such an aircraft I tend to trust his statement.
Bulk usage of helium is such a specialty today that there's no telling how much it would cost from a small distributor in a random location. It would vary. How often do they get a truck of helium? How much do they need to charge to their limited number of customers to make the shipment worthwhile?
$2 per cubic meter is rather only the cost in bulk from big suppliers. I doubt he used $3000 of helium at that price rate. The resulting 1500 cubic meters would be more than needed for a minimal blimp, rather displacing 1900 kilograms of air (which is 1.3 kg a cubic meter, STP) and lifting up to 1700 kilograms of structure, hardware, and passengers. Unless he had a blimp far larger than that required to lift one or two sub-100 kilo passengers even with a fair extra margin, more likely he just got helium from a distributor costing more than the bulk price elsewhere.
So maybe he paid $3000 but most likely to a comparatively expensive local supplier.
Besides, even $3000 is still pretty affordable unless you're assuming it leaks out at a rate requiring replacement too often.
Initially, yes, but the cost of helium will be the major, on-going expense. There is no envelope material that completely elminates leakage.
Leakage rate is utterly dependent on the materials. Depending upon what we assume on the details of the design and the future mats, it could be whatever you expect, or it could be 10% or 1% as much.
Assuming we're still talking about planet Earth, why the hell would we dome a city
It's a common sci-fi idea. Mostly that's because it looks cool. Yet there is a major advantage. Bigger objects lose less heat relative to their volume, less surface area proportionally, like a bear is better off in the Arctic than an insect. People have done the math before and determined you could reduce heating and air conditioning energy requirements by some huge amount like 10x.
Flying blimps in the nice weather inside is merely a side benefit if you built a domed city anyway for other reasons. Incidentally, if there was undesirably high leakage of helium from blimps inside, the helium concentration inside might get well above the 5 parts per million in the atmosphere outside, so you might look into recycling it after leakage, putting some sort of membrane collection system in the ducts of your heating & air conditioning system.
EDITING: I see your new post. You can't make pre-judgments without math that much regarding domed cities. I've seen an article before doing the math on cost payback times. Obviously they face barriers to being built starting with municipal governments being about the least innovative entities imaginable, explaining why not done so far, but they are a possibility, not a guaranteed future but a possibility.
<snip>
I read your post, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but replying point-by-point would just doom this to an exponentially increasing overflow of verbosity with each new exchange, breaking down paragraphs down line by line. I went overboard already.
I'm interested in what people think of as cool or hearing the creative or wild ideas of other people (which are less likely if each had to go through hours of proof to even be brainstormed), but it's not my job to try to rigorously prove something will happen in the vague future.
You may not have heard - I'm having an exceedingly bad week. I'll try to minimize the influence on my non-related postings.
Oh, ok.
I will also state that a 20 mph recreational blimp is EXTREMELY limited - you'd be better off in so many ways with a powered parachute that goes the same speed but requires far less in materials and space for storage.
Depends on whether being able to hover is a big part of the attraction.
Of course, you ARE talking about pure recreation, at least in part, so you can be very choosey about when you fly. I just wanted to point out that what is perceived as a gentle breeze on the ground can be quite a different thing once you're off the ground.
Yes.
Actually, we already have UV sterilization in both research labs and in hospital isolation wards, including your idea of incorporating it into ductwork used to transport air. Currently, cost is a factor but there is also the aspect that absolute sanitation isn't required in most of daily life.
Indeed.
Mostly, it's consumer resistance. Raditation sterialization is used for spices, medical devices, and the US mail (the anthrax scare started that). There are irradiated foodstuffs available in the US, but they are not commonly sold due to lack of demand and consumer fear/resistance.
Now that likely changes over generations.
People accepted household microwaves pretty well not because most are good at understanding any type of radiation but since the faster-cooking convenience motivated them to put aside their potential objections. Convenient irradiated milk that doesn't take up refrigerator space until use has the potential. As more people hear of other people drinking it unharmed, gradually it may become accepted in more countries.
