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The original “rapture of the nerds”:
[Fedorov’s] thought was powerfully shaped by both Orthodox Christianity and Hegelian philosophy. […] Rather than passively waiting for God to bring on the Millennium, being a good Christian meant participating in the building of heaven on Earth. It was the way in which he expected this to come about that really separated Fedorov from the others. In his thinking there is only one evil in the world that really counts, death. Moreover, rather than being accepted as a part of “the human condition,” part of the human mission is the technological conquest of death. This means not only achieving immortality, but restoring all the people who have ever walked the Earth to life so that they may share the gift as well, making the heaven of the afterlife a physical reality. […] To help bring the dead back to life, Fedorov believed that humanity would eventually launch expeditions across the cosmos to recover particles that once belonged to their ancestors in order to reconstitute their bodies. Additionally, since Earth would not be big enough to accommodate all of the people who had ever lived at once, room would be found for them on other planets.
(via Charlie Stross)(tags: via:cstross rapture nerds singularity futurism posthumanism space biotechnology death immortality life-extension future nikolai-fedorov philosophy religion)
Long Covid risk reduced by double vaccination
_Self-reported long COVID after two doses of a coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine in the UK_ – report from the UK Office for National Statistics. Tl;dr: ‘reduced odds of Long Covid if SARS-CoV-2 infection occurs after double vaccination in adults. Almost half less likely (OR 41%) compared to unvaccinated when infected.’ See also this preprint https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2
(tags: long-covid covid-19 ons uk vaccines vaccination)
rMA 15 – 15 passages resulted in a very pathogenic variant of SARS-CoV
“A Mouse-Adapted SARS-Coronavirus Causes Disease and Mortality in BALB/c Mice”: “We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation.” This is the scary paper which Anthony J Leonardi refers to regularly — 15 passages through mice resulted in SARS-CoV (the first one) becoming much more pathogenic.