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Earth could be invaded by aliens, someday, and find ourselves unable to overthrow them. We may find that they are not susceptible to any of our biological optio

by pstack 15y ago

Earth could be invaded by aliens, someday, and find ourselves unable to overthrow them. We may find that they are not susceptible to any of our biological options, either. We may start wishing that we had something like small-pox to unleash on their home-world. Not something we'd want to do lightly, but if they assert themselves as our overlords, we may have no other choice.

fiaz 15y ago
Unlikely, but let's just play with this... For all we know, "they" engineered smallpox and are actually immune to it. It was sent to Earth as an engineered precursor to their arrival.
- deleted 15y ago
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Jach 15y ago
Is this an argument that would actually convince you, were you otherwise undecided? I don't consider the probability of that scenario happening (let alone succeeding) high enough to even blink at, I'm sure accidental / malicious release are far more probable, even if they're also not very likely. "Just in case" can be a valid reason to keep something, but the question is always "Just in case of what?" I think nagrom asks the right questions for this. Edit: if you were being sarcastic, sorry, I'll go get an energy drink!
- pstack 15y ago
  I don't see small pox as being unique. If we get rid of it, we need to get rid of everything else. I think we still keep ebola, for example. Frankly, there is simply no way of knowing the future (though I agree, there's no way of ensuring security of samples into the future, either). We worry about destruction of rainforests, because we have no idea what cures and solutions we might find in the undiscovered life within that could be lost forever. Likewise, we simply don't know what today's "horror of horrors" could find beneficial use, some day. In the event that we are invaded by aliens, I would count the success of unleashing small pox on them as being much greater than Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook. :P When it comes down to it, though, I don't think there's a right answer. We just have to make an educated judgement call. Maybe the kind of judgement call where we respond to things like "but if we torture people, we can find terrorists!" with "but that's not the kind of people we are". Maybe we really do need to be the kind of people who say we're not willing to risk exposing innocent people to this for some future that we are only guessing about. Or maybe it's enough to simply map the genome and keep the data on it archived, while dumping the actual real deal.
  - jerf 15y ago
    "Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook." Ugh. Citing that does not signal you as knowledgeable about computers, it signals you as profoundly ignorant. In the real world, viruses for Windows can and have been served by Unix systems running entirely different architectures via exploited websites. We don't even have to get into the theory of the matter, we can demonstrate cross-OS virus transmission in practice. Bits are, quite profoundly, merely bits. They do not have a Mac or Windows or Alien color: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 While I'm sure beyond a shadow of a doubt this was accidental, the idea that a fundamentally telepathic and possibly hive-mindish species of alien may have advanced computers and no concept of computer security because they have no concept or biological possibility of generating a computer hacker is actually a respectable sci-fi speculative idea. Keeping around one particular instantiation of a DNA sequence because it might be useful against a low-probability event isn't useful, because in the grand space of potential DNA-based solutions to such a problem, the smallpox virus is vanishingly small and effectively no different from just deciding to hook a random number generator up to a DNA sequencer, shoving the results into a virus shell, and hoping for the best.
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    - pstack 15y ago
      Your comment has completely lost me. Are you saying that I'm profoundly ignorant, because I mentioned Goldblum infecting an alien ship with a virus from a macbook? How is that ignorant? Of course a non-susceptible OS can still transmit a virus to a target OS. That's why many major mailserver deployments implement systems to defang mail passing through them. Are you asserting that I'm profoundly ignorant, because I think it's unlikely that "we" loaded a macbook up with a destructive virus for an operating system that we've never seen before and know nothing about from an alien world on an alien mothership?
  - rbanffy 15y ago

by pstack 15y ago

fiaz 15y ago

Unlikely, but let's just play with this... For all we know, "they" engineered smallpox and are actually immune to it. It was sent to Earth as an engineered precursor to their arrival.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

Jach 15y ago

Is this an argument that would actually convince you, were you otherwise undecided? I don't consider the probability of that scenario happening (let alone succeeding) high enough to even blink at, I'm sure accidental / malicious release are far more probable, even if they're also not very likely. "Just in case" can be a valid reason to keep something, but the question is always "Just in case of what?" I think nagrom asks the right questions for this. Edit: if you were being sarcastic, sorry, I'll go get an energy drink!

pstack 15y ago
I don't see small pox as being unique. If we get rid of it, we need to get rid of everything else. I think we still keep ebola, for example. Frankly, there is simply no way of knowing the future (though I agree, there's no way of ensuring security of samples into the future, either). We worry about destruction of rainforests, because we have no idea what cures and solutions we might find in the undiscovered life within that could be lost forever. Likewise, we simply don't know what today's "horror of horrors" could find beneficial use, some day. In the event that we are invaded by aliens, I would count the success of unleashing small pox on them as being much greater than Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook. :P When it comes down to it, though, I don't think there's a right answer. We just have to make an educated judgement call. Maybe the kind of judgement call where we respond to things like "but if we torture people, we can find terrorists!" with "but that's not the kind of people we are". Maybe we really do need to be the kind of people who say we're not willing to risk exposing innocent people to this for some future that we are only guessing about. Or maybe it's enough to simply map the genome and keep the data on it archived, while dumping the actual real deal.
- jerf 15y ago
  "Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook." Ugh. Citing that does not signal you as knowledgeable about computers, it signals you as profoundly ignorant. In the real world, viruses for Windows can and have been served by Unix systems running entirely different architectures via exploited websites. We don't even have to get into the theory of the matter, we can demonstrate cross-OS virus transmission in practice. Bits are, quite profoundly, merely bits. They do not have a Mac or Windows or Alien color: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 While I'm sure beyond a shadow of a doubt this was accidental, the idea that a fundamentally telepathic and possibly hive-mindish species of alien may have advanced computers and no concept of computer security because they have no concept or biological possibility of generating a computer hacker is actually a respectable sci-fi speculative idea. Keeping around one particular instantiation of a DNA sequence because it might be useful against a low-probability event isn't useful, because in the grand space of potential DNA-based solutions to such a problem, the smallpox virus is vanishingly small and effectively no different from just deciding to hook a random number generator up to a DNA sequencer, shoving the results into a virus shell, and hoping for the best.
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  - pstack 15y ago
    Your comment has completely lost me. Are you saying that I'm profoundly ignorant, because I mentioned Goldblum infecting an alien ship with a virus from a macbook? How is that ignorant? Of course a non-susceptible OS can still transmit a virus to a target OS. That's why many major mailserver deployments implement systems to defang mail passing through them. Are you asserting that I'm profoundly ignorant, because I think it's unlikely that "we" loaded a macbook up with a destructive virus for an operating system that we've never seen before and know nothing about from an alien world on an alien mothership?
- rbanffy 15y ago