Oh, 2022

> will be going into the cocktail of childhood vaccinations that Christianist preachers like to rail against, along with HPV.

I think he's being too generous.

I'm with you 100%. I think Stross is just going for laughs. 2031 is way too soon for much of this, when you consider where we were in 2011 compared to today. Musk may shoot his load to the Moon or Mars for twitter likes, but in terms of funding and feasibility, I don't think he'll have the same billions to play with in 10 years, and NASA needs a decade headstart. China and India seem unlikely to shoot for Mars since they are focused on the global production (China) or their own capital boom (India).

The "Great Lakes megalopolis" is hundreds of feet above sea level and getting wetter with the warming. Lots of people will still be worried about cars for a long time.

> If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything really change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as opposed to symbolically - did the ISS change?)

There are a lot of benefits from the ISS:

There's the joint effort between otherwise adversarial countries. Even if it's just "symbolic" the most optimistic view of this would be it's been a contributor to preventing an outright war.

There's also the inspirational aspect that gets people interested in STEM with a very concrete and exciting application (even little kids find rocket launches exciting). More people interested in and entering STEM fields means more technology advancements. I'd argue this is not just a "symbolic" benefit, even in the case of inspiring kids where it can take a decade or more for them to graduate and actually start contributing.

There are also lots of real,b practical improvements to life on Earth. Sometimes it's just another use of technology developed for space, which otherwise wouldn't be pursued or funded, such as improved ways to grow plants, water purification, and remote medical and surgical procedures. It's not that these aren't possible to fund purely for Earth-based applications, but the trouble is the people with the money and skill don't have the need, and vice-versa.

There's also been unpredictable discoveries, such as bone density loss in astronauts leading to better understanding bones at a cellular level and treatments for things like osteoporosis. There's also a bunch of discoveries from experiments in zero-gravity: growing microbes, crystal structures and in fluid dynamics.

It's a good assumption that being on the Moon will have similar technology advances and (currently unknowable) discoveries.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_...

The purpose of all vaccines (including those built with mRNA technology, many current day vaccines using a "killed" virus and even those using a different but related virus whole like the original "vaccination" with cow pox) is to teach your body's immune system about something so that it might react appropriately immediately when it sees that thing, or something very similar in the future.

The effect of teaching the immune system to attack something is difficult to predict because it is a natural system and we don't entirely understand how it works, only enough to get better at teaching it new things. In some cases it's so good at destroying related things that it produces "sterilising immunity" - a vaccinated person can't get the disease at all, even if directly exposed to it, in other cases, as seems to have been the case for COVID-19, you get something useful but much less effective.

AIUI There's no reason we know of why the platform (the mechanism by which we tell people's immune system about a new thing to be attacked) would influence how effective the defence put up subsequently is. The vaccine is not in your body when you're attacked weeks or months later by a virus, what's left is a "memory" of what should be identified as foreign and destroyed. So, it would be expected to depend on how AIDS works, and perhaps on exactly what the vaccine is teaching the immune system to attack, not on how the vaccine is manufactured.

Think about the difference between identifying wanted bank robbers with a hand-drawn picture of their faces, versus a still from a CCTV camera. It might be harder or easier to recognise the CCTV still, but we wouldn't expect them to do more or less jail time when identified by one method versus the other.