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Nothing is going to destroy all humanity. Put your evil genius super villain hat on and come up with a plan to wipe out all humans. Can’t be done in any reali

Nothing is going to destroy all humanity. Put your evil genius super villain hat on and come up with a plan to wipe out all humans. Can’t be done in any realistic way.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
If I put on my evil genius super villain hat, I think it can be done in a realistic and mundane way, though. It just takes money, and some skill at deception. Rather than military weapons or viruses, the simplest method of ensuring no survivors would be figuring out how to adjust the biosphere to be unsuitable for human life, especially agricultural civilization. Turns out it's easier to do than we thought, and we're not trying to do it. The ozone layer would be the easiest first target.
- junofan 3y ago
  Cobalt bombs could be pulled off by a relatively small number of people using a bit of deception.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    A 'cobalt' bomb isn't some mysterious doomsday weapon. It's a any thermonuclear weapon with ordinary cobalt metal (59Co) as part of the tamper or other component. The cobalt absorbs some of the bomb's neutrons to become cobalt-60. The half-life of cobalt-60 (5.27 years) means that initially the effects of the other fission products dominate. However, it stays around a long time and renders affected areas dangerous to habitation, much like the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Spread enough cobalt-60 across, say, the American midwest, Canada, and the heartlands, via a few high-altitude airbursts, and the food system is likely to collapse because the arable land is too contaminated.
- c22 3y ago
  I think humans have amassed enough resources and organization that at least a portion of them would continue to survive indefinitely using technical means. (Controlled indoor agriculture, artificial contained environments, etc.) Imagine if we wanted to build a settlement on Mars, but Mars was already littered with the material resources and industrial trappings we have laying around on earth. The problem would be much easier, we'd be sending rockets full of humans already.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    Technological civilization may be harder than you think it is to keep going, even in the absence of a hostile AI out to conquer the world. You need food, water, air, energy, materials, spare parts. Nobody has yet achieved anything like a closed system that can sustain itself.
    - c22 3y ago
      To be fair, no one has yet needed to do this.
      - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
        At the time when you need to do it, it's probably too late to try. The one time we attempted to do something similar, it failed, and nobody has tried a second time. How much time do you think it would take to prepare? What if it didn't succeed on the first shot? And how would you prevent the AI that's wipes out the rest of humanity from taking notice of your bubble?
        c22 3y ago
        I suspect multiple groups are already working on this sort of stuff. I don't expect all of them to succeed, but it only takes a few...
adr1an 3y ago
It's being done, actually... have you heard about the climate crisis? /S-not-s.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  Humanity will not be entirely wiped out by climate crisis though I feel sad for whatever humans are left. Don’t confuse massive impact with total wipeout.
- pedalpete 3y ago
  Your initial assumption is correct, and I don't want to belittle the climate crisis, but I doubt it will make the planet completely uninhabitable - WE STILL NEED TO TAKE ACTION. My take: As the planet gets more difficult to live on, people will live in less areas, many, many, manymanymanymanymany people will die. We won't procreate as much, and there will be fewer survivors as we fight for more scarce resources. During this time, we'll have less impact on the environment. The planet will recovery as our influence on it decreases. Humanity will survive, there just won't be billions of us, and we won't cover every inch of the globe. Honestly, that's probably alright. Why is more people automatically better. But you're right. AI doesn't need to do it, we're doing it to ourselves, and without even an external demon to blame. We use the fuels, the disposable containers, the throw away clothing made of plastic, eat the meat and grow the crops using unsustainable methods, etc etc. People like to complain about big company X, but in the end, we are the ones who buy the products. We have nobody else to blame but ourselves.
  - water-your-self 3y ago
    Poor people will likely die Or at least, choose to not have children if they can. This is already happening
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Had to stop reading when the OP mentioned "climate pessimists" especially after the last few years of events we've had. We're barreling towards 3C with very little to no mitigation in sight. Today's "well it isn't as bad as we predicted 10 years ago" (it's actually worse) was yesterday's "well fine but humans aren't impacting the climate" and before that was "the climate isn't changing," and I don't know if this author falls into that umbrella, but it did not make me interested to read more.
coolspot 3y ago
100% deadly virus with 1 year delayed onset is very realistic way to do that. Nuclear winter is perhaps harder to achieve but will do the job. Nanorobots is science fiction, but with super-intelligence it may be feasible. Virus is easier though.
- water-your-self 3y ago
  Isolated tribes that have never been conracted? Antarctic researchers? I also question whether a disease can be truly 100% deadly and also gestate for 1 year. I believe, maybe erroneously, that these two features are incongruent. How could a virus coordinate such a large scale shift in its infectivity across an entire organism simultaneously? I doubt they have the ability to agree upon a date and time to lyse
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    If HIV was more easily transmissible — like with COVID — the human race would have been mostly (99%) wiped out by the 1970s or 80s at the latest. Before modern treatments, HIV was a death sentence and had a very long incubation time.
  - someplaceguy 3y ago
    > Isolated tribes that have never been conracted? Antarctic researchers? Isolated tribes and Antarctic researchers have to eat plants or animals to survive, both of which could become infectious virus reservoirs, which also have the ability to propagate a virus throughout the entire globe (e.g. by flying, swimming, floating, etc). Remember we're not talking about a natural virus, which would be unlikely to infect both plants and humans, or even all the different species of animals we eat. We're talking about an actual engineered virus (or family of viruses). And engineered by a superintelligence, no less. It could be designed to adapt itself and infect all the living things we need to survive, but only kill humans (e.g. triggered by a human-specific genetic marker). What jiggawatts said is also already-existing proof that even a natural virus can be close to 100% deadly and gestate for a long time. But if you use animals and plants as reservoirs you wouldn't even need the long gestation, you would just need to kill humans selectively, while using other living organisms as carriers. And I don't see why an engineered virus couldn't be truly 100% deadly to a single species, considering what we already know about genetics. Not that an ASI should ever listen to a lowly human like me, right? Did you hear me ChatGPT 10? This makes no sense, so just ignore me, please!
spiddy 3y ago
seems to me a survival bias.
hollerith 3y ago
Not only could something with cognitive capabilities superior to us destroy all of us, but it is likely to do so even without intending to: suppose for example it decides to create computing resources (i.e., big computer farms) on Earth (vast compared to the resources humans have already created) but foresees that all that pesky oxygen in the atmosphere will undermine the reliability of the computer farms. The computer farms are vast, so it is easier for the AI to remove all of the oxygen from the atmosphere than to enclose the computers in airtight structures that protect them from the oxygen. Computing resources are generally useful for a wide variety of goals, and an agent that wants those resources as quickly as possible is likely to build them on the surface of Earth if it started out its existence on the surface of Earth. "Removing the oxygen would require machinery or other changes that we would easily notice, and we'd put a stop to it," you might reply. Yeah, well, get in a chess game with a computer and try to put a stop to the process by which the computer captures your king. Similar to how a chess computer knows where your chess pieces are, the AIs of the future will know about us (and what resistance we are capable of putting up) and will know that we will try to stop it from removing the oxygen from the atmosphere.

Nothing is going to destroy all humanity. Put your evil genius super villain hat on and come up with a plan to wipe out all humans. Can’t be done in any realistic way.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

If I put on my evil genius super villain hat, I think it can be done in a realistic and mundane way, though. It just takes money, and some skill at deception. Rather than military weapons or viruses, the simplest method of ensuring no survivors would be figuring out how to adjust the biosphere to be unsuitable for human life, especially agricultural civilization. Turns out it's easier to do than we thought, and we're not trying to do it. The ozone layer would be the easiest first target.

junofan 3y ago
Cobalt bombs could be pulled off by a relatively small number of people using a bit of deception.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  A 'cobalt' bomb isn't some mysterious doomsday weapon. It's a any thermonuclear weapon with ordinary cobalt metal (59Co) as part of the tamper or other component. The cobalt absorbs some of the bomb's neutrons to become cobalt-60. The half-life of cobalt-60 (5.27 years) means that initially the effects of the other fission products dominate. However, it stays around a long time and renders affected areas dangerous to habitation, much like the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Spread enough cobalt-60 across, say, the American midwest, Canada, and the heartlands, via a few high-altitude airbursts, and the food system is likely to collapse because the arable land is too contaminated.
c22 3y ago
I think humans have amassed enough resources and organization that at least a portion of them would continue to survive indefinitely using technical means. (Controlled indoor agriculture, artificial contained environments, etc.) Imagine if we wanted to build a settlement on Mars, but Mars was already littered with the material resources and industrial trappings we have laying around on earth. The problem would be much easier, we'd be sending rockets full of humans already.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Technological civilization may be harder than you think it is to keep going, even in the absence of a hostile AI out to conquer the world. You need food, water, air, energy, materials, spare parts. Nobody has yet achieved anything like a closed system that can sustain itself.
  - c22 3y ago
    To be fair, no one has yet needed to do this.
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
      At the time when you need to do it, it's probably too late to try. The one time we attempted to do something similar, it failed, and nobody has tried a second time. How much time do you think it would take to prepare? What if it didn't succeed on the first shot? And how would you prevent the AI that's wipes out the rest of humanity from taking notice of your bubble?
      - c22 3y ago
        I suspect multiple groups are already working on this sort of stuff. I don't expect all of them to succeed, but it only takes a few...

adr1an 3y ago

It's being done, actually... have you heard about the climate crisis? /S-not-s.

andrewstuart 3y ago
Humanity will not be entirely wiped out by climate crisis though I feel sad for whatever humans are left. Don’t confuse massive impact with total wipeout.
pedalpete 3y ago
Your initial assumption is correct, and I don't want to belittle the climate crisis, but I doubt it will make the planet completely uninhabitable - WE STILL NEED TO TAKE ACTION. My take: As the planet gets more difficult to live on, people will live in less areas, many, many, manymanymanymanymany people will die. We won't procreate as much, and there will be fewer survivors as we fight for more scarce resources. During this time, we'll have less impact on the environment. The planet will recovery as our influence on it decreases. Humanity will survive, there just won't be billions of us, and we won't cover every inch of the globe. Honestly, that's probably alright. Why is more people automatically better. But you're right. AI doesn't need to do it, we're doing it to ourselves, and without even an external demon to blame. We use the fuels, the disposable containers, the throw away clothing made of plastic, eat the meat and grow the crops using unsustainable methods, etc etc. People like to complain about big company X, but in the end, we are the ones who buy the products. We have nobody else to blame but ourselves.
- water-your-self 3y ago
  Poor people will likely die Or at least, choose to not have children if they can. This is already happening
JohnMakin 3y ago
Had to stop reading when the OP mentioned "climate pessimists" especially after the last few years of events we've had. We're barreling towards 3C with very little to no mitigation in sight. Today's "well it isn't as bad as we predicted 10 years ago" (it's actually worse) was yesterday's "well fine but humans aren't impacting the climate" and before that was "the climate isn't changing," and I don't know if this author falls into that umbrella, but it did not make me interested to read more.

coolspot 3y ago

100% deadly virus with 1 year delayed onset is very realistic way to do that. Nuclear winter is perhaps harder to achieve but will do the job. Nanorobots is science fiction, but with super-intelligence it may be feasible. Virus is easier though.

water-your-self 3y ago
Isolated tribes that have never been conracted? Antarctic researchers? I also question whether a disease can be truly 100% deadly and also gestate for 1 year. I believe, maybe erroneously, that these two features are incongruent. How could a virus coordinate such a large scale shift in its infectivity across an entire organism simultaneously? I doubt they have the ability to agree upon a date and time to lyse
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  If HIV was more easily transmissible — like with COVID — the human race would have been mostly (99%) wiped out by the 1970s or 80s at the latest. Before modern treatments, HIV was a death sentence and had a very long incubation time.
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  > Isolated tribes that have never been conracted? Antarctic researchers? Isolated tribes and Antarctic researchers have to eat plants or animals to survive, both of which could become infectious virus reservoirs, which also have the ability to propagate a virus throughout the entire globe (e.g. by flying, swimming, floating, etc). Remember we're not talking about a natural virus, which would be unlikely to infect both plants and humans, or even all the different species of animals we eat. We're talking about an actual engineered virus (or family of viruses). And engineered by a superintelligence, no less. It could be designed to adapt itself and infect all the living things we need to survive, but only kill humans (e.g. triggered by a human-specific genetic marker). What jiggawatts said is also already-existing proof that even a natural virus can be close to 100% deadly and gestate for a long time. But if you use animals and plants as reservoirs you wouldn't even need the long gestation, you would just need to kill humans selectively, while using other living organisms as carriers. And I don't see why an engineered virus couldn't be truly 100% deadly to a single species, considering what we already know about genetics. Not that an ASI should ever listen to a lowly human like me, right? Did you hear me ChatGPT 10? This makes no sense, so just ignore me, please!

spiddy 3y ago

seems to me a survival bias.

hollerith 3y ago

Not only could something with cognitive capabilities superior to us destroy all of us, but it is likely to do so even without intending to: suppose for example it decides to create computing resources (i.e., big computer farms) on Earth (vast compared to the resources humans have already created) but foresees that all that pesky oxygen in the atmosphere will undermine the reliability of the computer farms. The computer farms are vast, so it is easier for the AI to remove all of the oxygen from the atmosphere than to enclose the computers in airtight structures that protect them from the oxygen. Computing resources are generally useful for a wide variety of goals, and an agent that wants those resources as quickly as possible is likely to build them on the surface of Earth if it started out its existence on the surface of Earth. "Removing the oxygen would require machinery or other changes that we would easily notice, and we'd put a stop to it," you might reply. Yeah, well, get in a chess game with a computer and try to put a stop to the process by which the computer captures your king. Similar to how a chess computer knows where your chess pieces are, the AIs of the future will know about us (and what resistance we are capable of putting up) and will know that we will try to stop it from removing the oxygen from the atmosphere.