4 ms·
Eventually we'll be able (as in it will be possible) to pinpoint some "contrarian" gene, then make something that only kills these individuals, and put it into
by chaosbolt 2y ago
Eventually we'll be able (as in it will be possible) to pinpoint some "contrarian" gene, then make something that only kills these individuals, and put it into mosquitoes.
Now if it's possible to do then obviously some government somewhere will do it (eventually), and no one will notice anything, say it's something that gives you a heart attack, and say we see a spike in heart attacks in 2050, it won't even be that significant since contrarian individuals are few, and just like that after a year the population will be a lot more docile.
It's still a sci-fi scenario now but it's scary to think about what the future will hold.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoWe can do basically this today. I could probably do it, if I decided to throw my entire life away (which, if I'm considering killing, is the minimum bar anyway) – though, not reliably and not without side effects. For an organisation of significant size, it's a question of how sophisticated they'd want to be. The main obstacle to your sci-fi scenario is that, to date, no such "contrarian gene" has been identified. In fact, most traits you'd want to genocide away seem tenuously related to particular alleles, at best. Unless we start seeing fanatical HERC2 purists, or the people making bioweapons decide they don't care about collateral in the War Against Redheads, we're probably safe from genetically-selective mosquito-induced heart attacks.
- kelipso 2y agoI think contrarian just means high IQ lol. Also hard to test genetically. No offense!
- artistic_regard 2y ago[flagged]
- kelipso 2y agoVery intelligent response, good job!
- artistic_regard 2y agoU are damn right!