How this pandemic will save millions of lives. Nanites
 

I recently finished the TV series Travelers. It is a series about people from the future traveling back to our time trying to save us from destroying the earth. They had advance medical procedures using nanites and now it's a reality. The show was first produced in 2016. The following is a TED Talk.

Kathryn A. Whitehead: The tiny balls of fat that could revolutionize medicine | TED Talk

Well, Ben Franklin would have to travel forward in time to give this information and I do not understand these words; TED Talk and Nanites.

I do highly concur with old Ben when he said; An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I don't hang with time travel. I enjoy fantasies on TV..........but I am counting on you to make this post a little clearer. Sir/Madam.

Wait. This woman has the greatest Curriculum Vitae.....look here...Carnegie Mellon, MIT...and on and on. Wowser.

Kathryn A. Whitehead - Biomedical Engineering - College of Engineering - Carnegie Mellon University

My comments about the TV series was just to imply that, when I watched the show, I thought it was just fantasy, but then I watched the TED Talk video. Did you watch the video?

Oh the good old days to go back to whale oil lamps and buggy whips

Did anyone read the Michael Crichton book, Prey?

Self-aware nannites. Joy.

They better come quick.

Oh darn. Another thing I hafta watch. My ear buds are wearing out.

IMO this is problem, lots living in fantasy land. :welcome:

This TED talk, only ten minutes long, is an excellent, understandable description of mRNA and what it is doing for us now and can do in the future. Well worth watching.

TED talks have been around since 1984. There's really no reason why you would not have ever heard of them. You can even find them on bing.

Perhaps if you watched the video you would learn it's not fantasy. It has already happened.

Look up Project Looking Glass...use Duckduckgo.com to avoid google banning.

If it has already happened then why haven't I won the lottery wouldnt My Future self want me to be rich?

I've seen the "Travelers" series and knew before I started watching it that it was SyFy. I also watched "Dumbo" when I was a child, but have never expected, but still waiting for elephants to fly.

Tell me that the Covid vaccine is little tiny metal robots and I will decline a booster shot. Actually, at this time I am prepared to decline the booster anyway.

Why? And what is google banning?

Thanks for the link to the TED talk. I was interested in learning the technology of mRNA. It may be way over most people's interest level. I spent 30 years in Pharma so it was music to my ears.

If the subject of nanites interests you, give Greg Bear’s SF novel “Blood Music” a read. One of my all-time favorites.

Blood Music (novel) - Wikipedia

Fantasy? Not on a bet. Imagine life if all the scientists and inventors sat on their butts .
Phones on our wrists? Fantasy? Pills that save life? In ancient times herbs were used. Those herbs were the foundations for medications you take. Oh and many were persecuted for using them. to heal. Edison was laughed at. Ben Franklin was eccentric. Washing hands was once thought of as evil. Hey what about the Fantasy that occurred when someone invented a pipe and bowl to dispose of your human waste. Necessity IS the Mother of invention. Too bad narrow minded thinkers are not interested in learning history . Thank you to the poster for shaking a stagnant mind! We need as a human race to move forward. Without science and without learning we are doomed.

She was using metaphors and similes to bring it through on a level non-scientific people could understand. Most people would realize that the whole story is a lot more complicated.

Thank you, Ben Franklin. I will watch the Ted Talk later, but, for now, I looked up this brilliant scientist. . .

Kathryn Whitehead’s work as a “drug delivery engineer” is finding a way to deliver cancer treatment to target only the bad cells while leaving the healthy ones alone.

When discussing the genre of science fiction with students, I always said that good science fiction, no matter how far out its premise might seem to be, should contain a seed of something that makes us think, “Could something like this really happen? Do we see anything around us in our current time that makes us think about this story?”

As an example, one of the stories we read was Isaac Asimov’s “The Feeling of Power.” It is set in a future of space wars. Battles were being waged by spaceships run only by computers on board.

Then the government finds a man who can do math in his head — by then that ability has been long lost because computers do all the math. Those in power direct him to teach others how to do math in their heads — because it will be much cheaper to put a person on those warring spaceships instead of a computer.

That Asimov story has been around for a long time. But here we are in a time when most of us use calculators for our math and computers are doing the big math. And kids go to school clutching calculators.

Of course, as you know, science fiction is not written to be literal. The good science fiction makes us think, “What if?”

(It sounds like the “What if.” leap from the science fiction you talk about to the reality of the hope for targeted cancer treatment is a good one to think about. I am thankful we have brilliant scientists like Kathryn Whitehead.)
Boomer

The big social media technology CEO’s called before congress, had to answer questions and I think we know why?

Way above my pay grade...
:ohdear::ohdear:

Thanks. You said just what I was thinking. Here's a quote I think that applies to most of the regulars on TOTV:

"I've lost my mind and I'm worried that it's such a small thing to be wandering around on its own"!

Hopefully people will watch TED Talks and not rely on what they can find on the internet to feed their beliefs. If so, and witht he fact that 95% of C-19 hospitalizations and 99% of C-19 deaths, are to the unvaccinated. mRNA vaccines are for real, although not fully approved by FDA, they have 100s of million tests in the USA and more in the world to provide the necessary effectiveness. Please get vaccinated.

She said all I need to know...She called it a Therapeutic.....Not a vaccine....a bandaid, just like tylenol. :eek: Someone has been had......:ohdear:

I found it on Google. Why would they ban it?

I think good, solid sci fi is written by people who read what's going on behind the scene and they expand on what it might be like in the future. Dick Tracey comes to mind. And although not science fiction, he did have a watch he could use to communicate on. An Apple Watch. ;-)

The scary part is when the writer doesn't see any positive ending. In Travelers the last episode left me depressed. Although a writer can take an experimental product and make it positive, they still don't know how man will use it.

Yes, I knew it was sci-fi too, before I started watching it. It's why I watched it, so I don't understand your comment. It was the nanites, that their medical team used, to heal someone, that I thought was fantasy.

This is real. Treating cancer with nanorobots - Advanced Science News

I was being facetious, in case that helps you "understand."

I also enjoy Sci-Fi. Not all of it is positive and not all of it tells the future, I hope. I have watched several movies that had a similar theme. One that I remember somewhat was about a deadly disease that hit the world and a cure was hastily initiated. Unfortunately, the cure was mandated to all before it was discovered that children were practically sterilized by the serum and all pregnancies ended up aborting. They discovered that only one person was able to conceive in the whole world. Fantasy of course, but just as a possible preview to the future as "nanobots."

But, that was just fiction, of course.

Since the beginning of time there have always been the negative and the positive. If you remember Travelers had the other "faction," and you know how it ended.

For those interested in how nanos work, this video is easy to understand.

Nanoparticle-based drug delivery in the fight against cancer - YouTube