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I agree that shutting GoF down would be good, and also that COVID was very far from the upper end of the badness scale.
But I have to be contrary here.
All of the algae in the world, combined, pull down a total of about 2e14 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. The atmosphere as a whole has 2e15 kg of CO2. All living things on Earth, combined, contain about 5e14 kg of carbon. So you're positing that there is a new species which rapidly becomes the largest source of biomass on Earth over the course of a decade or more (probably much more, carbon capture gets harder as co2 concentration decreases), and during that time, nothing natural or engineered figures out how to eat it.
I don't buy it. I think using a biological agent to permanently wipe out the biosphere is a much harder problem than either "kill all humans" or "wipe out the biosphere by any means possible, including but not limited to Very Large Rock Dropped From Very High Up™".
No, I'm positing that it does so faster than that. Algal blooms are fast; they're just limited by nutrients to small areas. Here, the entire ocean can support a max-density algal bloom.
And no, this wouldn't permanently wipe out the biosphere. Life would survive and eventually recover, because even without something evolving to eat it (and it would, although it'd likely take a while), it probably wipes itself out from lack of carbon and/or the oceans freezing over and eventually the dead algae on the seafloor get subducted, incinerated, and re-released as CO2 via volcanoes (and there are quite a lot of reservoirs of life that are shielded from "oh noes the CO2 is gone" on quite-long timescales). As noted, this probably wouldn't even be enough to wipe out humanity by itself (because we could build closed biospheres not subject to being leeched, and top up whatever leaks did occur with coal-burning power stations) - we'd lose most of humanity because we wouldn't remotely be able to build enough fast enough to support the current population, but we wouldn't quite be wiped out absent further disruption (e.g. chaos from all the starving mobs preventing/destroying the closed biospheres, industrial collapse leading to being unable to do maintenance, or killer robots showing up).
Ah, I missed the bit where the goal of this wasn't to wipe out the entire biosphere. In that case though, I don't particularly see how this is all that much scarier than vaccine resistant smallpox / airborne HIV / whatever your default human nightmare pathogen is (except if you're not a human, if you're not a human this is indeed much worse).
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