Neither the mechanisms of finance nor national governments can stanch the flow of these particles, although that is the only solution that they propose or can propose. It is left to us, we who strive for a new age of science, to embrace the whole of biology and our part in it.
There were, in my opinion, three main seeds to the Reawakening. The first, as I have written before, was the sea-level rise resulting from the fuels of the industrial age. The rise was not as large as some doomsayers had predicted, nor was it as fast, but when it got large enough to be measurable it's effects were far more devastating than any model had suggested. Widespread displacement, destruction of crops and aquaculture, famine, loss of infrastructure -- all were far beyond the ability of Financial Age institutions to handle.
The second seed was given a name in 2041: Ljungdahl Syndrome. Scientific Cassandras had been raising alarms about increasing incidence of immune failures and auto-immune conditions for perhaps as much as 50 years prior, but since they mostly affected poor, urban children they were routinely ignored. Asthma, Lupus, Juvenile Arthritis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome -- all rose for decades unchecked and misunderstood. Only when they hit epidemic rates (and the children of the suburban rich were at risk too) was it recognized that these were disparate outcomes of a common process. Even then it took another dozen years of research to discover the cause, only to find that nothing could be done.
Human populations evolved at fairly low density, and children were exposed mostly to relatives during their development. However, with worldwide population doubling every 50 years or so, there would come a point when those assumptions were no longer true. At some critical threshold a child's immune system has to assimilate too many slight variants of the same human proteins, either from the tens of millions of people that live in the same city, or the hands of the workers making the products that surround them. The system cascades ultimately into a compromised state where it can no longer distinguish the body's own proteins from invaders and begins to attack them.
The reaction of the market was to raise children in bubbles. Closed communities, sterilized products, increased suburban sprawl, even jingoistic and xenophobic "DNA-fingerprinting" -- all of them a blight on generations of kids, and none of them in the least bit effective. The decrease in Ljungdahl Syndrome in those years was due entirely to the introduction of immune-boosting drugs and treatments, which were themselves clouded by the many quack treatments that flourished in the unthinking panic of parents with no other options.
Princeton, quoted above, promised rational, global progress, and the systems that had failed so miserably fell. After many years the Syndrome was finally licked, not by changing our environment, but by changing ourselves. Incidence among the enhanced are somewhere between unheard-of and impossible. Among we few e-zero the rates are hard to measure accurately, but it's still pretty much a toss of the dice. I came up snake eyes.
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