As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/scientific-research/de...

This class of products is room temperatures stable, and typeless, and it increases oxygen carrying capacity basically immediately. You can imagine how useful that would be for something like a Tour De France team. Keep a half dozen units of fake blood in your team bus. No special equipment. No rigorous temp control. You can give any unit to any one of your athletes without worrying about compatibility. You can administer it on race day, eliminating any chance of being caught in the runup to your event.

Obviously Biopure condemned off-label use of their product for blood doping, but behind closed doors they were super proud that it was seen as effective enough to be called out by name by WADA. No publicity is bad publicity and all that.

The fact that they weren't using whole red blood cells meant the product was typeless, room temp stable, and better at perfusing around arterial blockages and into tissue since the molecules were so small.

Unfortunately, the company was kind of a mess. They managed to get licensed for sale in South Africa, and in the US for the veterinary product, but never managed FDA approval. It's a shame. Everyone could see the promise of the product, and it really actually worked, but they just couldn't seem to make the business viable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopure

Edit: When I say they imploded, I really mean it. They got prosecuted for misleading statements to investors about the state of US clinical trials, and the legal proceedings became farcical.

"On March 11, 2009 [Senior VP] Howard Richman pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court and admitted he had instructed his lawyers to tell a judge he was gravely ill with colon cancer. He also admitted to posing as his doctor in a phone call with his lawyer so that she would tell the judge that his cancer had spread and that he was undergoing chemotherapy."

That guys was sentenced to 3 years in prison. Here's hoping this new blood substitute has a happier outcome!

Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned cup cake stores.

But I think it's possible that 'extra' holds are potentially like 'junk' DNA. People fall into the trap of thinking that DNA is useless if it's never transcribed, but we know that's not actually the case. Non-expressed DNA can do things like alter binding affinity for neighboring sequences, affecting how often those neighboring sequences are expressed. I think it's possible that climbers are taking in a lot of information subconsciously as they sprint through this route in order to mike very small adjustments. The position of surrounding holds, even ones they never touch, could very well be a part of that information stream. They're fighting over hundredths of a second, so even a very small effect could be meaningful.

The earth is ~4.5 billion years old. So we can say with certainty that it's possible (not guaranteed) to become a space faring race (although not a galaxy crossing one) in 4.54 billion years. If we tack the amount of time it takes to cross the whole galaxy end to end we get 4.55 billion years. The milky way galaxy is 13.61 billion years old. That means the galaxy had 9.06 billion years worth of chances to churn out a another planet that could have expanded across the galaxy from edge to edge and been here waiting when humans arrived on the scene. Planets with Earth like conditions are certainly rare but my, admittedly limited, understanding is that they're not "1 in 9.06 billion years" rare.

There are obviously other constraints here. I think your second point about wealthy technological races potentially stabilizing at zero population growth is totally reasonable. But I think the fact that space's apparent scale doesn't actually matter is the whole reason the Fermi Paradox was such an "ah-ha!" moment for many people. The reason it's a paradox is that, given all of our assumptions for variable values in the Drake Equation at the time, it really seemed like we should have met some aliens. The point was that if distance wasn't the hurdle we thought it was in the equation as currently defined, then we were either missing some relevant variables, or we had made some bad assumptions for the ones we had.

Spoiler Alert...

Humans discover an alien planet/race and eventually realize they've destroyed and rebuilt civilization many times. They've learned to build 'museums' for future civilizations to discover that house a roadmap to all of their advanced technology, but biological constraints (they have to reproduce or they die, ensuring extreme population pressure) mean that global war is basically inevitable. So they're stuck speed-running this cycle where they start from the stone age, rapidly rebuild an extremely advanced society based on guidance from the 'museums', experience extreme population growth, bomb themselves back into the stone age, rinse and repeat. There's a hope that if they can just push technology a little bit further each cycle, they might be able to reach a point where they can resolve the underlying issue, but it's unclear if that's a pipe dream.

Interesting take on the "pre-tech society discovers keys to future tech" trope. Does advanced technology actually solve all problems, or just it just let us skip ahead along the timeline to the same conclusion?