>>49498839

The problem is, strap-on prostethics are generally shit at being usable.

>microbiology
>on MY Veeky Forums?
Thank you for making me feel relevant!
Anyway, are amputations your fetish or are you genuinely asking?
Because if you're genuinely asking: Inserting something into your body, like a hip replacement, has a risk of bacteria forming biofilm in the wound. That's bad. A biofilm is a community of different bacteria, some of which are "sleeper cells" that aren't targeted by regular antibiotics e.g. penicilin only kills cells that are growing.
I don't see why you think that a bacterial infection would be concentrated in your legs/arms. You'd be fucked all over, or in an organ.

But yes, in the future, we will be fucked over so hard by antiresistance. S. aureus developed resistance to vancomycin in IIRC 2 years.
IIRC diabetes type 2 causes necrosis in the feet due to poor circulation --> necrosis --> amputation to prevent the spread of necrosis.
It does not have anything to do with a bacterial infection.

So how boned are we, doc?
I don't suppose we'll develop some sort of anti-anti-resistance soon?

If we stop using antibacterial everything, and just use regular cleaning supplies, it'll help a ton. Our obsession with antibacterials only makes their penises harder, and most bacteria aren't a threat to us, or are actively good for us. Our obsession with cleanliness (which is good) has led us to want to exterminate all microorganisms (which is bad) and we're cutting off our nose to spite our face.

If we cut down on those and cut down on overprescribing antibiotics we might be alright.

Otherwise we might have to genetically-engineer bacteriophages or something. Which is literally bordering on
>comic book doomsday scenario
>PC plans
>what could possibly go wrong

>Anyway, are amputations your fetish or are you genuinely asking?

I just really like cyborgs in my cyberpunk settings. But I have this need to justify things in my settings beyond 'rule of cool'.

I can't imagine people electing to saw off extremities just to replace them with chrome.
I can only imagine cyberlimbs being common in a world where a lot of people are amputees.
War will do it. Mine fields will do it. But I feel like some kind of epidemic will help greatly to create scenarios where a lot of people have to get cybernetics. Give players some room to justify cyberlimbs in their characters without a military or third-world background.
What about a flesh-eating disease that attacks the extremities first?

I would replace all my limbs with mechanical ones, if I could. Hell, I would become a brain in the metal shell, if I could.

What about rogue nanomachines that slowly replace the extremities?

>In the future, antibiotic resistant diseases will force more doctors to perform amputations to remove infected limbs, and will make tissue transplants much riskier.
>Will antibiotic resistance lead to increased demand for inorganic cyber-limbs?

No and no. Antibiotic resistance involves every single bacteria in the world. There is no correlation between the two. Amputating limbs is only needed as some certain diseases and a lot of those are due to stuff like diabetes which is not caused by bacteria. Antibiotic resistance have a billion other much more real life dangers than cyberpunk fantasies.

Also cyber limbs will never be better treatment than organic limbs in the long term. If genetic engineering does develop as quick as we hope there will be a much higher likelihood of us being able to simply replace lost limbs with vat grown limbs of the same quality that matches the body DNA.Cybernetic implants will be largely redundant for treating lost limbs, at most they will serve as a temporary solutions to improve the quality of life for those waiting for their organs to be grown and reattached. Unless some magical super technology is invented that makes cybernetic limbs constantly and continuously maintain and adjust themselves at the rate of natural limbs for years and years, then cybernetic limbs will always be a constant draw on a great money, time and work to keep them functioning. Something organic limbs do not require to function and most people would never want to needlessly bother with.

Different user, but pretty fucking boned. Methicillin was supposed to be the be-all, end-all ultimate antibiotic. Then MRSA happened. Vancomycin was, if I remember, a very fortunate accident that bailed out a lot of people because of how easily MRSA can tear through, say, a school or hospital.

Now we have VRSA and while it's not exactly quarantined, it's uncommon enough to not create a pandemic...yet. meanwhile the rest of the pharma world is focusing their efforts elsewhere - partially because having an anti-VRSA drug ready isn't profitable enough to devote research money to, but more because there's a high chance that an anti-VRSA drug simply isn't physically possible. More than a couple people I've talked to are of the mind that the technology to create one would be about 20-30 years too late - assuming we don't have another dark ages-like slide.
>t. MACL Lab Tech

So we Pandemic IRL now?
Well, it was an honor shitposting with you all.

>google it
>As of October 2010, all VISA and VRSA isolates have been susceptible to several Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs.

Not saying this solves the problem even if it's true since I'm sure something could come along at any point that would be immune to those "several drugs" but does this mean VRSA isn't a threat now and this was just a scare in the past?

I completely believe you on us being boned either way.

I remember reading that brass tap handles were more effective than antibiotics at stopping diseases. How much truth is there to that?

While it is true that copper and it's alloys are antibacterial/microbial, they sort of work in a passive way, and take time to kill stuff. They definitely help, but they wont save you if you if there's a real outbreak.

Science is working on nano-bots which could be programmed to kill bacteria and malign cells. So even if it happens as you suggest, it will be a very short stage before nanotechnology takes over.

This is truth, copper and its alloys have antibiotical effects. However the only thing they do is that microbes survive for far less time on a copper surface when compared to plastic or other metals say iron, aluminim. They cannot be turned into medicine because (like most metals), while in micro doses they are essential for life, in large raw does they are poisonous to life in general.

Another interesting antibacterial metal is silver, silver and its compounds have a long history of being used in medicine and are still used today. Even going back to ancient times where seamen dropped a silver coin into the fresh water barrel they carried with themselves during sailingto keep the water from going bad. They did not know how it works but it did. Another tradition was that when a child is born the parents were gifted with a small spoon made of silver, that was intended to be used to feed the baby when he/she started to eat normal food.

>So how boned are we, doc?
In 2020 it is estimated antibiotic resistant bacteria will kill more people than cancer.
We are pretty fucking fucked. Like, imagine getting fucked. Now double that a fuck-load amount of times.
>how do we get unfucked?
Take S. aureus. It's the bacteria in MRSA and VRSA. If you're in the hospital for an infection, chances are you'll get infected with S. aureus when you get treated with antibiotics, because it doesn't die and you just killed all its competition.
If you didn't get treated with antibiotics, it would not have won the battle of colonising in your body.
Basically, stop using antibiotics, especially the breadspectum drugs (penicillin, for one). When you do, it becomes more viable to carry the resistance gene.
Also you don't make money from making antibiotics. S. aureus will be immune in like two years.
This desu. There are literally more than billions of bacteria living inside you, just chilling or helping you out in some way (I know there's an E.coli strain in the gut that makes vitamin K, and you have lactobaccilus chilling in the vagina that protect it from yeast infections. That's pretty based, user.)
>bacteriophages
Russia is working on that last I heard.

tl;dr REEEEE STOP USING SO MANY ANTIBIOTICS
As cliché as it is, what about zombies? The infection spreads via bite, but it's slow. Getting bit in the arm or leg will take a day before it spreads to the heart, so you can chop off the body part?
>flesh-eating disease attacks the extremities first
But why?

Nope unfortunately we are pretty fucking boned. Antibacteria was an nothing less than a revolutionary discovery in the field of medicine. It was so fucking super effective it was nothing short of a miracle drug when it was first discovered. The problem is that we quickly started to rely on antibiotics for almost everything in life from medicine, poultry and so on. However, evolution does not stop and in time (an extremely short time too) bacteria adapted to our miracle drugs and (barring the discovery of some kind of similar miracle drug) soon we will be in big fucking trouble.

Mind you it won't be a complete everybody dies doomsday scenario but some diseases will be a whole magnitude more deadly than before and we will almost helpless to stop it. Humanity will not go extinct but potentially people could die in masses that were unheard of since the world wars.

Can you adopt me and tell me bedtime stories about bacteria and fermentation and agar plates?

So, like, Middle Ages-tier plagues? Or even worse?

I think we're going to have a lot more important things to worry about than owwies on your arms becoming infected if those communist fucksticks in China keep mass-inoculating pigs with the most potent antibiotics that exist.

Disease Control groups have now more or less confirmed that given the ease of long-distance travel and the porous nature of modern borders, geography is no longer a barrier to contamination if an epidemic goes unnoticed for more than a week. Soon, it might be as little as 24 hours.

Viruses are rough, but we haven't had a high-level untreatable bacteria strain in a minute and a half. It could happen any day now, stewing in some shithole in Xian or Guangzhou, just waiting to sweep across the Earth.

Not an epidemiologist so I my word is not backed by hard science. The most honest answer is "we just don't know" what will happen. What is different that the Middle Ages had much worse living conditions, hygene sand healthcare system, so people in general died much more easily after they caught the disease. However diseases generally spread slower because of the distances between settlements meaning people that carried the disease usually couldn't spread it very far.

The real danger today as said that a single person can travel vast to distances with extreme ease, even with all sorts of security we have in place diseases can spread like lighting compared to the middle ages. What we do have as an advantage is the much more well prepared healthcare system to try and prevent/contain the epidemic and a population that has better hygene in general.

tl;dr In short we have no clue how it will turn out we can only prepare for such events. I don't want to cry wolf but not gonna lie, looking from today the odds look pretty fucking horrible compared to what we got used to in the last generations.

>Cyber limbs and railing against faceless digital corporate shills.
The cyberpunk future is now.

I think you have it kinda backwards. "cyber-limbs" require us to have working antibiotics to prevent the infections associated with implantation. Antibiotic resistance is the crib death of the cyborg future not it's conception.

Unless you are talking about purely non-invasive prosthetics that are never going to be much good in terms of controllability.

>implying we won't all be perfect immortal machines thanks before antibiotic resistance does any real damage
Singularity soon, fellow meatbags!

>The geek Rapture
>TFW I hatr everything about how people treat it, yet it increasingly seems the only way humanity can escape disaster and mass die-off
Honestly, it's looking more and more like we're either getting a Rapture or a Flood in the near future, and there won't be life vests for the latter.

Didn't expect to see fear-mongering from national geographic

Is this a serious post

where do you think you are

Not on /x/

Yellowstone, superbugs, climate change, nuclear armageddon. Pick your poison.
The Singularity is asinine cultist bullshit peddled by low-testosterone numales terrified of reality.

I wish really but unfortunately life isn't that simple.

>Will antibiotic resistance lead to increased demand for inorganic cyber-limbs?
The way I see it, cyber limbs will be very middle class thing.
The poor will not be able to afford them.
The rich will get gene-mod treatment or >nanomachines, son

And then hackers infect nano-machines with viral infections that turn them into infectious diseases.

To counter them we make anti-nano medicine, but then the nanomachines mutate a resistance to that, and before you know it, we're back where we started.

>infect nano-machines with viral infections
>not ransomware

>not custom printed body part replacements

sort of, but it's not quite that bad.

they were susceptible then. Those drugs most of them we can't use because they'd become immune to them within weeks. Some of them are already useless.

other anons have answered this a lot better than I could.

No. You wouldn't like my stories anyway.

So what might a cyberpunk setting plagued by antibiotic-resistant microbes look like?

Mandatory genetic engineering?
Special quarantine police death-squads?
Mass exodus from major cities?
Face masks for everyone?

>Will antibiotic resistance lead to increased demand for inorganic cyber-limbs?

I don't think so, but I do have a couple of predictions for the not-so-distant-future.

-Gene Therapy will see an end to genetic diseases in our life time provided people don't have too much of a stupid "morality, what is a man, mah purity" chip on their shoulder. I'm confident some of us will live to see a day where even our own genetic ailments are miraculously phased out or alleviated without medication.

-We will reach a point where Gene Therapy has a similar culture of vaccines: Readily available to the public with children receiving it before and after birth, etc. It will, however, have a much more annoying and asshole counter-culture as not only will people find it "unnatural", "unsafe", but will also simultaneously feel their non-gene-therapy-"natural"-babies are being discriminated against.
The only divide between gene-therapy children and natural ones would be anti-therapy parents saying it causes autism or flipper babies. There will be no predicted class divide.

-Viruses as well will become phased out and or made significantly more survivable as they're curtailed (ironically) by genetically engineered viruses. Everything from HIV to Herpes may be dying out or even extinct 40 or 30 years from now. I don't think we'll see an end to Cancer though.

-In terms of robotification, cyborgs, androids, mechanization and automation; we're only 13-15 years off from robots completely consuming every entry level job and the eventual trickle-down extinction of the lower and middle class because of it. We're already seeing this happen today in very small steps with automated cashiers and other self-serve stations within grocery stores and fast food establishments. Places in America and Canada with a 15$ or higher minimum wage will be the first to be automatized- companies opting in for robots than pay that much.

Nah.
Just lepers sitting around in the worst parts of town while the rich turn their noses up and insure a minimum of contact with them.

Well, every generation is a reaction to the preceding generation, and the current generation is experiencing a problem with anti-vaccers turning their offspring into screaming typhoid-maries because they are so afraid of their precious little ones catching the autism.
If those fuckers cause an epidemic, we could hope for a social backlash against them. This may lead us into more pro-vaccination attitudes and maybe even pro-gene-therapy if people are still afraid of the autism bogey-man. One can only hope.

I'm kind of hoping for a future where people are offered guaranteed income in exchange for undergoing sterilization. It's gonna be a hard fight to get to that point though. Maybe start by offering sterilization +compensation to anyone that tests positive for genetic diseases but can't or won't get gene therapy.

>I'm kind of hoping for a future where people are offered guaranteed income in exchange for undergoing sterilization. It's gonna be a hard fight to get to that point though.

I'm holding my breath for garaunteed income just in general since if it doesn't happen before or during automation taking over: there's going to be millions of people socially expected to get jobs that simply aren't there... And I can't imagine how a consumerist economy would work when noone has any fucking jobbies.

Though on the sterilization note: they'd made breakthroughs in FABRICATING sperm, eggs, etc, so attempts at manuel/old fashioned procreation may become a thing of the past with artificial insemination becoming so advanced.
We may enter into a future where you can't legally or physically have or adopt a child unless you're capable of supporting it for the require +19/20 years.

The US and Europe have even begun to make preparations for Three-Parent insemination, Id Est; where THREE parents are capable of contributing to the birth of the child (which would allow homosexuals to have children genetically related to them).

I'm hoping on guaranteed income as well, but I think if we get it (in America) it will be one piece at a time and subdued by congressional compromises and half-measures.

But, assuming we do get a future where the jobs are all automated but everyone has guaranteed income, and everyone is sterilized but everyone still has the option to have children if they go through a fertility clinic...

...What if we end up with a situation similar to Japan/Korea where the birthrate declines steeply into the negative numbers because nobody wants to have kids? And how might I use that to put together an interesting cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic setting?

I need my Cat, user. He is my life.

>I need my Cat, user

Is Cat his name? Is that why it is capitalized, like a proper noun?
Not trying to be a grammar nazi. I'm just tickled by the idea of a cat named Cat.

My cat is called Mao, which is just Cat in Chinese. Rest of the family insist on calling him by a more formal name, so now he responds to both names.

>What if we end up with a situation similar to Japan/Korea where the birthrate declines steeply into the negative numbers because nobody wants to have kids?

Declining birthrates in those countries are largely due to socio-economic pressures caused by a toxic corporate culture that strongly disincentivizes taking on the additional responsibilities of children, forces women into choosing between career and family, and limits opportunities for courtship (and really any cross-gender interaction).

A guaranteed livable income would dismantle that culture.

>Mao
I just called my cat "Katze" which is the german word for it.

Is this a common thing?

My dog has a formal name, but I almost never call him by that. I just call my dog 'Dog'.
Sometimes I might mix it up by calling him 'Doge', 'Doog', or 'Dodongo'.

True, true.

You people sound like you want this shit, but it sounds like something out of a dystopia, especially the forced sterilization. Is this a fetish thing or do you just want the real world to turn into a cyberpunk fantasy?

You know guaranteed incomes more or less prevent the cyberpunk future from arriving, right?
The masses of unfortunate and discontents stems from the idea that automation will replace every job that isn't high-skill, and humanity has shown time and time again that the optimistic idea that humanity freed of work simply turns to hedonism rather than self-improvement and learning. I.e., automation does not lead to the working class elevating themselves and learning the skills required for the remaining jobs. They just sit and stew in their own filth, except now they aren't getting paid and can't afford food.

Guaranteed income does nothing to make them learn the skills or elevate themselves either, but it at least makes them complacent zoo animals instead of malcontents that then become shadowrunners and thugs because they need a way to get cash.

There's a big difference between "wanting this shit" and theorizing about how to prevent the future from being shit.

>You people sound like you want this shit, but it sounds like something out of a dystopia, especially the forced sterilization.

I'd rather have compulsory non-permanent sterilization than people terminating unexpected pregnancies or giving up their children to adoption because they can't raise them.

No, we definitely do not want this shit, just some trolls make a bait post here and there. But these things "could" happen in the future sicne we cannot know teh future.

Guaranteed income is a myth user. Even today the majority of western civilization is barely able to give pension to the still rapidly growing retired elderly population. There is absolutely no realistically possible scenario where automation replaces masses of unskilled labor and all the masses of replaced people will just live fine on welfare. There is no country in the world that can afford that barring some radical change in the economy.

There is no country in the world that can afford that barring some radical change in the economy.

You're talking about massive automation and guaranteed income. That doesn't constitute a radical change in the economy?

>I'd rather have compulsory non-permanent sterilization than people terminating unexpected pregnancies or giving up their children to adoption because they can't raise them.

I'd rather have any of those than trailer trash and ghetto chimps pumping out more and more kids that my taxes have to pay for.

>You're talking about massive automation and guaranteed income. That doesn't constitute a radical change in the economy?
I stand corrected user, I worded it pretty bad because I was in a hurry to type it down.

I meant that unless the current day economy somehow magically transforms by drastically lowering living costs and at the same time increasing welfare plus eliminating most of the labor based taxes and other state income which is a large part of the income for most governments. I am not even going to start getting into the discussion of the masses of families that still live on loaned money. Doing all of these is completely unfeasible as of today and in the foreseeable future.

Meaning the imaginary future world where robots replace the majority of unskilled manual labor rendering a considerable part of the population unable to work and earn a living and rely on guaranteed income to ensure their survival and still living under reasonable living conditions is completely unrealistic. Sooner or later there will be another large clash between corporations that opt to use cheaper automation instead of high cost human labor and the labor force that is no longer needed and thus loose their source of income. The big question is how will reality handle this situation? In fiction this is generally portrayed in a dramatic and dark way but we just do not know how reality will handle it.

Wouldn't, uh, artificial limb attachment then become incredibly dangerous without being able to rely on antibiotics to prevent infection?