There is a simple explanation to this: It turns out that being a good rationalist with access to an option trading account is actually an edge.
I also realized that the market was wrong and told friends to pull out of equities in mid-February. They didn’t listen.
which animals?
alarmist. Good Judgement’s Dashboard has less than a 20% chance of over 350k deaths -
It’s changed substantially since you wrote this BTW. It’s now 54%
There are definitely some materials that will resist it. There would be a one-off cost to replace materials, then mostly not much change.
It would be very valuable to take a particular “Alarm” and see how many true positives, false positives, true negatives and false negatives it would have produced over the past 20 years.
sunburns
I don’t think this would be a problem with sunburn unless your skin started peeling.
I generally only put a dressing on damaged skin if it’s actually bleeding.
One should probably put a dressing on that in public places for general hygiene reasons anyway—both for your benefit and for the benefit of other people!
The total time x surface area of these events is probably not very large anyway, and in addition your cells are less affected due to their size, might be hidden under clothes, in shadow, etc etc etc. One would have to run the numbers on this and compare it to existing skin cancers from UVB—it could very plausibly be 3 orders of magnitude less.
abrasion from overuse
What’s the time x surface area for people rubbing their own skin off? Probably not much!
You should definitely try harder to connect with academic historians. They justify their existence by telling us they can help us learn from the past - this is a golden opportunity for it!
No, this Far-UVC stuff is very nasty. It is only ok for us on the outside because our skin stops it.
Exposing your blood to large amounts of Far-UVC is almost certainly going to lead to cancer IMO.
450nm blue light will not kill viruses in any reasonable time & power level.
Also, worry much less about fomites and much more about breathing the virus in.
On Air vs Fomites: for this virus, a picture is emerging that fomites are basically irrelevant and air transmission via droplets or aerosols is what matters. But in general, there may be other pathogens where fomites are most important, e.g. norovirus and the like that spread via the fecal-oral route.
UV light can help with fomites but a full solution to fomite problems requires other changes, such as copper surfaces, better ways of making large amounts of very hygienic food, etc.
On ventilation: ventilation won’t eliminate droplets from sick people, it will dilute them somewhat over time. Airplanes already have ventilation via a compressor.
Far-UVC can zap droplets that are in the air before they get from person A to person B, which I think is the big win here.
Great article, @Kirby Sikes, thanks for taking the time to research this!
Public funding into this kind of research should be expanded in general, so that by the time the next pandemic hits we can know better what technologies are safe and effective.
I strongly agree with this conclusion.
In terms of disagreement, I mainly disagree on the “Community level concerns” section rather than the “Safety concerns for individuals” section which is an excellent piece of scholarship IMO.
You should consider publishing this as a preprint on BioArXiv.
Aberrancy vs normalcy maybe?
Yes, but global virus pandemics cost an amount of money that’s almost unfathomably large, so hardening the indoor environment in certain places would likely be a trivial cost.
Can you give an example of what could cause that?
We usually cover damaged skin with a dressing because it can be harmed by other threats, so I’m struggling to think of something.
dose of 2.8 kJ /cm^2.
A dose of 2.8 kJ /cm^2 is 28 MJ /m^2, so a 100W-luminous-power blue LED would decontaminate 10 square meters (a small room) in 280,000,000⁄100 = 2.8 million seconds = 30 days.
For decontamination to be useful I think it needs to happen inside of 15 minutes. Certainly not multiples of a month.
I think we can reject blue light because the required power for rapid decontamination is far in excess of what we can provide.
The shadowed spaces probably don’t matter.
The volume of air you are trying to sterilize is the region around people’s heads, and to a lesser extent the surfaces that people touch a lot.
It would be interesting to find some more discontinuities that are unrelated to Western Civilization.
For example, what about Zheng He’s treasure voyages or the Great Wall of China? Or Mesoamerican civilizations?
Could you systematically contact relevant historians to farm this work out?
Apparently those slides contradict the studies cited in my article.
I don’t know which to believe. The rational action is to urgently run more experiments to assess the risk from 200nm-220nm band.
It would be really great if those slides had a references section.
It’s probably only worth using ecosia if you think your time is virtually worthless. Tree planting is mostly a useless activity in the grand scheme of things, though one gets into a somewhat complicated calculation to show this.
Google claims there are 3*10^12 trees in the world, ecosia claims to have planted about 10^8. Trees are in an equilibrium with a bunch of stuff like atmospheric CO2 as well. Your personal contribution to the number of trees via ecosia is likely ~ a few trees (not clear whether they reach maturity though).
Do anything else useful with your time before this.