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This is the most blackpilling thing about the whole COVID incident.
Modern apocalyptic and post apocalyptic science fiction was wrong. Armageddon will not come because of power hunger of big governments or greed of mega corporations.
Old time pulp fiction was wrong too. Armageddon will not come becaue of brilliant and audacious plans of genius mad scientist, and definitely will not be averted at last minute by slack jawed Action Hero.
Apocalypse will come due to few hundred, thousand at most, rather mediocre people, people with names, faces and adresses out there who are not protected and hiding at all, playing russian roulette with all mankind, openly and brazenly.
For ultimate power? For unlimited wealth? To create paradise on earth? To have revenge on the whole world?
Nope. They do it to publish few articles no one will ever read in prestigious journals to burnish their citation metrics. Nothing personal, just scientific bureaucratic process working as intended.
And mankind as a whole is fine with it.
No big deal.
Nothing to see here.
No hard feelings.
Everything keeps going, everyone is waiting for the next oops.
Only reaction, after three years so far, is ... one country's proposal to stop public funding of this pastime. Better than nothing, but not by very much.
Conclusion: Just stop worrying. Humanity is NGMI, and fully deservedly so.
Disease won’t wipe us out. Even the Black Death only killed, what, 30% of the population? And we have much better medical technology.
When the next oops comes, at least half of the population will refuse to follow the expert's orders and use the newly advanced technology (which half will depend whether the new treaments are coded blue or red this time).
This effect will be canceled by the experts' orders being anywhere from useless to counterproductive. (As it was with COVID and the Black Death)
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You grossly underestimate the risk of intentional or accidental development of bio-weapons, of which I consider GOF research to be the latter.
We have diseases with properties, which, if combined, would likely be beyond our ability to handle even with concomitant advances in biotech.
Offense outpaces defense very hard here, and the main reason we're not dead is because nobody is trying particularly hard for it to be so. You can GOF an extremely virulent organism to be much more lethal, a lethal organism to be much more virulent, potentially with the ability to lie dormant like HIV for ages till it erupts a few months later after infecting a majority of humanity. Even if it doesn't kill literally everyone, it has the potential to throw a very real wrench in the works, look at what Baby's First Pandemic, Covid, with a CFR of 0.1% before vaccines, managed to cause.
We didn’t have to notice Covid happened, let alone react the way we did, it was a media panic. The Black Death is probably an upper limit as far as plague; myxomatosis in rabbits maxed out at around that threshold IIRC.
Covid certainly was an over-reaction, but trust me doctors would have noticed an OOM or two surge in hospitalizations for respiratory issues regardless of public awareness. A more deadly by an OOM or two disease would cause far more economic damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis
You're relying on the observed lethality of natural epidemics to decide on the risks of engineered ones, which is a very bad idea for something that is presumably being aggressively optimized to kill you. Look at the number of eggs laid by a wild junglefowl versus a breed optimized to churn them out for an illustration of what selective pressures can achieve.
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Not just GoF research. After three years of misery caused by people playing God just to publish marginally more interesting papers than their peers, we now have a bunch of people racing to create a digital God, with who-knows-what outcome.
This is not the same thing. Artificial intelligence promises audacious scientific breakthroughs to Mad Scientist, ultimate surveillance and control to Evil Overlord, unprecedented giga-profits to Corrupt Corporate Executive. Everyone who is someone needs and wants it.
Science fiction authors of golden, silver, bronze and trash ages would understand and approve.
But GoF research, that is really about nothing than few more scientific papers for never-to-be-read pile? Any science fiction author of note would laugh at this plot, any magazine editor would reject this premise even as satire.
Well, anyone except Philip.K.Dick.
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