Have you kicked yourselves for not investing in or working on virus related technologies the past few years? You’d be in the spotlight right now. Of course chances are your funding would’ve dried up by now unless you timed things perfectly. That rarely happens in life.
Imagine this. You saw Bill Gates TED talk in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI
After that you decided to start a pandemic focus fund or company. I think there are ways you could’ve prepped for this outbreak while not running out of cash.
For example, design and line up manufacturers for a simple ventilator. Don’t manufacture it until needed. Do the same with dialysis machines. Work on a platform that can quickly spin up new vaccines like Moderna. They’re in the driver seat for a new vaccine. This platform could be used for other vaccines to make money waiting for the Big virus outbreak. For medical supplies, you could stockpile but that’s costly. You could also have production lined up but not sure if that’s possible. Then for testing you could have a platform that doesn’t need swabs. Breath comes to mind. That’s super biased though since we’re working on a breath platform, www.godeepbreath.com.
So what big catastrophe is next? Climate Change. Yes. The electrical grid. Yes. Let’s talk about that one. Maybe the chances of the grid going down in parts of the USA for two weeks are almost zero, but if it does, it’s Catastrophic. No water. No electricity or heat. No transportation. No Internet. No communication.
I don’t think we can comprehend how much our lives would be affected. A terrorist attack is probably the most likely to bring down the grid for a long period of time.
Other countries have regular power outages. They’re used to it. They’re less fragile. The USA is super fragile.
Should someone start a fund or startup to prevent a complete grid shutdown? I don’t know. It sounds kind of fun but you need to sell a Hollywood story to potential investors. But many of the processes and tech that would make our grid and generation more resilient, like grid batteries and alternative energy, are helpful for climate change too. That could work.