I love what-if thought experiments. Maybe because I’m a sci-fi fan, maybe because science often is about extreme and/or pure conditions (yes I’m a researcher).

The first example that pops up is the trolley problem (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). Self-driving cars must have some default behaviour which one to kill/protect: the driver or the child on the car’s path. In the current pandemic context, what is the level of the risk the first vaccinated would be subject to? In order to save lives, the risk would be pushed to its limit (if there is one).

Ok, let’s stop killing people and tune up the positive mood. If you are in possession of something which would change everybody’s life for the better, cancer cure, new energy source, etc. this sort of life-changing thing. Yes, of course, that will get some businesses down but on the whole, humanity will do much better with it. After you have the know-how you need to make your new thing reach the people. Where do you go for this: to your president/prime minister, to the UN, to the big business, to the academic community? Wherever you go you will meet people and work with people, and nobody is agenda-free. As a result, you have to pick the people with an agenda most aligned to the implementation of your gift to humanity. Once it becomes public you expect a resistance close to civil unrest, from the threatened businesses, from the people which feel that a big change is coming and they hate change because they spend whole their lives fitting into the status quo. Eh, well, you say, you cannot make EVERYBODY happy. You go on with your plan and decide that a little compromise here and there is what we call real life… Even your opponents seem to be satisfied that you “play the game” and then you have a total blast from them. Let’s take as an example — a cure for cancer. Apparently, the creationists think that you are trying to play god or at least mess with god’s plan, how dare you. Evolutionists are in favour of less suffering, but in the long run, they think that we will deteriorate our genes, genetically because bad mutations (cancer) won’t be killed and evolution will go backward. Both camps on any division line apparently agree on only one thing, you are the devil! You try to keep it together and think about the gratitude of future generations, but you are only human and sooner or later you surrender to the overwhelming public pressure.

So… if you happened to come across a huge innovation (something really life-changing), patient it, find its biggest (and richest) opponent, cash it to be buried and forgotten forever …and that will be YOUR happy ending.

PS You understand the anti-vax context here. Would I follow my own advice, …not sure. If you have something of that sort come to me and we will find out.