The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish (Kishony Lab)

It is absolutely nowhere near evolutionary adaptive capacity. Life will not end and the world will still be there. Life's evolutionary adaptive capacity is stagerring! Just take a look at the experiment where it barely stretches muscles: [this video] What I understand they mean is "Life as we know it" defined as large animals and familiar plants roughly in places where we are used to seeing them. We are looking at life with our antropocentric point of view and we basically want familiar stuff to stay the same and we don't want unfamiliar stuff to show up. We don't want things to change and that's why potential large shift in how life presents itself may be caulled as "end of the world" event, but it is not. Life doesn't care whether oceans are clean or polluted, hot or cold. It WILL adapt some way or another even if all crustaceans and fish will die because they can't adapt quickly enough to lowering pH. We should care not because life is at danger but because we are at danger. Life as we know it is a machine that supports us, let's us grow food and provides air and water and soil and climate that we need. Humans will survive for sure in one way or another even if the temperature rises by 20 degrees but what kind of life will it be and how much suffering for those that can't deal with it?

Honest question here, do vaccines actually reduce the chance for covid to mutate? Spitballing, I would expect a vaccine to decrease the number of total mutations that can occur but also simultaneously increase the selective pressure on the virus, increasing the chance that any mutations that improve the virus’ ability to resist the vaccine become dominant. To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: [this video] Agree with the rest of your post though.

Aging is one side effect of a major internal system that counteracts cancers. Most of our cells are preprogrammed to die after a certain number of replications. This is one of many systems that counteract normal genetic mutations - which can cause cancers and other side effects. By definition a cancer has to reproduce and one way of defeating cancers is for cells to die (or be killed) once they reach a number of cell reproductions. Think of a binary tree where the tree depth is the number of cell reproductions, and telomere length controls tree depth. Each time a cell reproduces it risks mutations. Stem cells are the progenitor branches, and stem cells maintain “cleaner” copies of DNA, which then become normal cells. Normal cells then reproduce a number of times before they kill themselves. We have evolved this system because it balances the shorter term harms of cancer (high cost preventing reproduction), and senescence (lower cost after reproduction). There can be no “cure” for cancer, or aging. The cure would for cancer would require some way to either cause perfect cell reproduction, or to remove (or correct) all cells with imperfect reproductions. The “cure” for aging would require a cure for cancer. If I were to invest in something myself, it would be brain transplant, since brain cancers are rare, and dealing with organ rejection seems doable, and the issue of nerve reconnection seems solvable. The main problem is finding spare bodies, which can be unethically solved f