That's a great way to get cooked inside your rocket by blueshifted cosmic rays. You'll arrive at your destination ready to eat, a kind of cosmic jerky sent by the gods.
Space is filled with cosmic rays, mostly protons, going in all directions. Most of them have energies under 10 GeV (99.6% c). But if you start racing through that flux at a very high speed yourself, their velocity relative to you will be boosted in the direction you're traveling, and you'll briefly see a high-energy particle beam coming through the windshield before your eyes are cooked.
If you get going really, really, really fast, a similar thing happens with the blue-shifted cosmic microwave background.
How to write science: many years ago, this piece has transformed my scientific writing. It's one of those vital skills that are mysteriously never taught in college. In a gist, by understanding the reader's expectations, you can write text that the reader will immediately get.
I am not excited about having a vote on how to spend anybody's money, particularly if they spend it researching vaccines for malaria, like Gates did. Our system of government strictly limits which decisions are subject to democractic choices, for good reasons
Just because you've successfully created a wildly successful business, does that imply that you should now also be the person to decide how all that money is spent? Why would society agree to this? We can acknowledge that you might be a brilliant business person without simultaneously and implicitly agreeing that you're just the smartest person around and should clearly get to control where all that revenue flows to.
Hence, the 1950s & 1960s idea of taxation: you can earn boatloads of cash, but we'll tax a lot of it away from you. You'll still have enough to be crazy rich and lead a life everybody else can only dream of, but you're not going to control the disposition of (say) US$20B.
If I literally stole 1 trillion dollars from the richest Americans and gave it to the poorest 20 million Americans, I'd have substantial impact on the standard of living (both for them, and for the country on average).
Ignoring the fact that there isn't just $1 trillion cash sitting in a vault somewhere, after your 20 million American's burned through their $50k, they'd be back to square one.
Think this through; is Somalia poor because their government doesn't give poor people enough money to consume?
No. Somalia is poor because they produce very little right now (for a variety of reasons). If you look at countries that have recently increased their standard of living on a massive scale, such as China, they have done so not because they consumed their way there. A huge amount of investment into productivity was undertaken.
> Ignoring the fact that there isn't just $1 trillion cash sitting in a vault somewhere,
When my team of 100 crack assassins/financial shenanigan wizards target the richest 100 Americans individually in their own homes, I don't think this will matter too much. We'll get the money.
>after your 20 million American's burned through their $50k, they'd be back to square one.
Sure, but their standard of living would meanwhile have increased.
Obviously, it's a reductio ad absurdum, but I'm using it to prove a point.
Your use of Somalia merely proves that a certain level of productivity (shall we call it GDP?) is required for this thought experiment to even make sense. Yes, a certain level of society-wide wealth is necessary for redistribution to even be possible. And indeed, one could try to improve productivity instead of or in addition to redistribution.
But none of that means that in a society with as much productivity (a high GDP, if you like) as the USA, redistribution could not also be used to increase the standard of living.
The definitionally-poor in the US generally pay minimal if any net income taxes (the earned income tax credit will be greater than any due taxes), so there's not a lot of room for improvement here.
That's not the issue with HIV. The issue with HIV is that it's a retrovirus. It uses both reverse transcription and inscription enzymes to change your DNA.
A vaccine works to stimulate your immune system's "memory" that's evolved for treating infections. (That can be anti-bodies, but it's more complex .. also involves memory T-cells, the complement system, etc.)
When the same virus comes it, it will infect cells, but your body is much more prepared to handle it. The trouble with HIV is that it's the initial infection that can slowly inactivate an immune system over 2~5 years (not everyone though. Some people have HIV and never develop AIDS; known as Long Term Non-Progressives).
A vaccine wouldn't help at all with HIV. Keep in mind, the HIV rapid test checks for the presence of antibodies.
It sounds like some of the technologies made it into prototypes, and could be feasible in some applications. e.g. ship detection is more feasible than aircraft detection
