Originally Posted by Evil_inKarlate

Not unlike people who spout similar fanciful notions like:We will never eliminate disease. The elimination of smallpox has allowed for the rise of cancer. The quest for a germ-free environment has given rise to near-unstoppable 'super germs'. People are designed to self-destruct and make room for the next generations, and viruses and bacteria are designed to overcome whatever defenses we may come up with.

We will probably never eliminate hunger. While your premise of getting all governments to work together negates the fact that all vaguely recent famines have had a major political component, less hunger will generally lead to more people, which will lead to more food demands, which will be met if ending hunger is our primary goal, and thus we will have even More mouths to feed, and so on, until at some point we truly meet the saturation point of earth's food production (or exhaust its supplies), and we'll find ourselves with a Lot more people and a lot more... hunger. I did throw in 'probably' because if some sort of draconion population control measures are adopted in parallel, it Might be achievable.

We will never end poverty. Poverty is comparative. If you could wave your magic wand and give everyone on the planet a house with running water and a full pantry, a medical savings account, and a college education (and a couple other things you consider the opposite of 'poverty'), you would simply have college grads asking if you wanted fries, dopeheads letting their houses fall into disrepair, and people whose houses only had 1 or 2 bedrooms. While much better off, they would still be the new 'poor'.

We will never eliminate "etc". It is too much fun to use, plus can sneak in by way of its many aliases, "et cetera", "...", in some cases "blah blah blah", and so on. There are probably even versions I'm not thinking of. (Like the one I already slipped into this paragraph after I had made my 'comprehensive' list!) Just like disease and poverty, "etc" is a scourge that we'll be stuck with for a very long time.


Besides which, a lot of advancements have been dependent on, or at the very least facilitated by, war and conflict. Among other things, Sputnik went into space on what was essentially an ICBM, built over-powered to carry not-yet-designed H-bomb warheads. We're discussing this on an internet originally designed to maintain military and governmental communication even when many hubs were destroyed by such nuclear weapons. Modern electronics are based on metallurgy and materials sciences that trace their roots to the quest to build better cannons. (Or at the very least made some appreciable progress in the course of that quest.) The US space program itself, plus whatever technological spin-offs it may have engendered, were a result of the one-upsmanship of cold war non-cooperation. So while I won't go so far as to say war and conflict are overall Good things, they do have some appreciable upsides that a lot of people ignore.