Hard to do in a reliable, controlled manner, yes. It's surprisingly easy however to do it messily. To push the analogy further, think about the early atomic pi

Hard to do in a reliable, controlled manner, yes. It's surprisingly easy however to do it messily. To push the analogy further, think about the early atomic piles. Also note that nuclear requires a certain amount of collection of radioactive material, kind of like gold but much more expensive. Viruses can just be drawn from anyone's blood stream / mucus. People don't quite realize the catastrophic risk our over educated society can be as we learn more and more about the building blocks of our universe, intelligence, organic makeup or otherwise. Vernor Vinge discusses it a bit in his latest novels. What is the scientific requirement that the universe can not be easily meddled with by highly intelligent / knowledgeable agents? The human being did not evolve under circumstances where we had such capability. Likely our best bet is to spread out to different planets where there would at least be some buffer.