… if you want to have a worry-free Hanukkah/Christmas/Mithramass/Winter Solstice/Feast Of Sol Invictus/Saturnalia .
Federal Panel Asks Journals Not To Publish Details On Deadly Virus
Short form: the Feds (National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity) have asked Science and Nature to not provide details that were included in papers presented to them. The details: how to reproduce a genetically modified version of the H5N1 virus… modified to be more easily transmitted.
To my mind, this is a matter of simply delaying the inevitable. For decades we have worried about nuclear terrorism, and for good reason… a single nuke could wreck a society. But here’s the thing: even if Wikileaks publishes complete blueprints and manufacturing specs for a whole range of nuclear weapons, your average well-provisioned James Bondian supervillain stands little chance of making his own nuke. And for a simple reason: weapons grade uranium and plutonium are vanishingly rare substances. You can’t make the stuff without a hell of a mining and industrial base.
But plagues? Down to the basics, all you need are oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, tace amounts of a few common elements… and knowledge. It will not be long – less than a generation, I’d expect – before your more motivated terrorist can wipe out millions using nothing more than a laptop, an internet connection, and a portable hard-drive-sized device that plugs into the laptop and cranks out virii to engineered specifications. Right now it takes a well-provisioned biology lab…. but even that is a vastly smaller and cheaper thing than even a low-end nuclear program.
Smallpox *will* come back. “Improved” versions of polio, the bird flu, you name it. And your more adventurous bio-terrorist will take a stab at cleverer diseases… those that attack specific racial features, or go after people based on age, gender, height, weight, IQ, sexual orientation, eye color, you name it. Expect to see a disease that attacks certain “unclean” animals… and expect to see the anti-pig disease mutate into an anti-cow disease, and then an anti-dog disease, then an anti-human disease.
There are of course law enforcement agencies working to combat this. But the problem is that the technology that will permit this is only going to get smaller, cheaper, easier to obtain and to use.
I can think of few reasons more important to get humanity the hell *off* this rock. As things currently are, one disease could extinctify humanity in a matter of months. But with a cloud of space colonies, separated from each other by weeks or months of travel time but within minutes of communications, such an extinction event becomes virtually impossible.