Isn't our inability to cure all cancers a limitation of our knowledge more than a hard physical limit?
I've read several articles saying that different cancers are not exactly the same disease, but more like different diseases with the same symptom (uncontrolled tumor growth) and different etiology, even sometimes different from person to person, not just from tissue to tissue. This was said to be a reason that a general cancer cure is so elusive. But is it really thought of as impossible, not just elusive?
Maybe our inability to extinguish the sun is also a limitation of knowledge more than a hard physical limit!
Even if I'm right about this, your description of the situation would still be accurate in that there would be no way to simply throw more money at the problems and guarantee a solution; there would need to be qualitative breakthroughs which aren't guaranteed to happen at any particular level of expenditure. If people had spent multiples of the entire world GDP on a space program in the 1500s, they would still not have been able to get people to the moon, though not because it's physically impossible to do so in an absolute sense.
I've read several articles saying that different cancers are not exactly the same disease, but more like different diseases with the same symptom (uncontrolled tumor growth) and different etiology, even sometimes different from person to person, not just from tissue to tissue. This was said to be a reason that a general cancer cure is so elusive. But is it really thought of as impossible, not just elusive?
Maybe our inability to extinguish the sun is also a limitation of knowledge more than a hard physical limit!
Even if I'm right about this, your description of the situation would still be accurate in that there would be no way to simply throw more money at the problems and guarantee a solution; there would need to be qualitative breakthroughs which aren't guaranteed to happen at any particular level of expenditure. If people had spent multiples of the entire world GDP on a space program in the 1500s, they would still not have been able to get people to the moon, though not because it's physically impossible to do so in an absolute sense.