5 ms·

The Future is Now

10 points by ph0rque 17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago
It should be noted that the "ring around the rosie" story is an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.asp http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.asp
- wallflower 17y ago
  Anyone remember that classic Star Trek episode with "Ring around the Rosie"? Scary in a Twilight Zone fashion. http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Ring_Around_the_Rosie http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Ring_Around_the_Rosie
wlievens 17y ago
While reading this I thought the author didn't seem informed on the subject at all, and rather more interested in creating panic. Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism Okay. Right.
- jerf 17y ago
  Are you sure he's wrong? If so, how are you sure? For one thing, recall that these are amateur hackers at the beginning of the hacking curve; today playing with E. Coli, five years from now in possession of full-on sequencers, producing and inserting arbitrary DNA, ten years who knows? He may in fact be right. As much as we'd all like to dismiss the possibility, I don't actually see a rational basis to declare that he's absolutely wrong. We don't know. Nobody know. There are some arguments you can make about why he's wrong, but all the arguments are probabilistic, about how evolution probably would have discovered something of that lethality, but it's only probabilistic.
  - smhinsey 17y ago
    He can be right (i.e., there is a risk from bioterror) and still be misleading. His complaint boils down to: dangerous bioagents can be easy to grow. we know this.
    - biohacker42 17y ago
      Dangerous bioagents are being grown at a phenomenal rate all around the world, every day. Swine-flu, HIV, Ebola, MRSA, everything else - comes NATURALLY.
      - smhinsey 17y ago
        i am not sure if you think i was saying something else, but i agree 100%. this is extreme foolishness.
        biohacker42 17y ago
        I might have been replying to someone else.
  - biohacker42 17y ago
    Yes I am sure he's wrong. Read through my recent comments for a slightly more elaborate explanation in an that amateur bio hackers thread. For even more information take some college classes in the life sciences.
  - stavrianos 17y ago
    Even if he is right, this isn't something that can be stopped. Even if you manage to stop all the innocent hobbyists, you'll never stamp out the malicious ones. Seems to me that, assuming bad shit will happen, the best thing to do is get as far up the curve as possible as fast as possible. It's like, in the Sarah Connor chronicles, she's trying to hold back the singularity by firebombing the houses of AI researchers when the only real answer is to set off the singularity yourself so at least you can hope to sculpt it.
splat 17y ago
This article strikes me as far too alarmist. Sure, it would be terrible if some guy in his garage concocts Black Plague 2.0 and accidentally (or intentionally) spills it all over a large city. But the author doesn't seem to assess anywhere the odds of this actually happening. I'm not a biologist, but I'd bet that engineering a disease in your closet potent enough to wipe out a significant fraction of the human race before anyone can come up with a vaccine is nontrivial even if one is deliberately striving toward that goal. These sorts of diseases walk a fine line -- too lethal and they kill their hosts before spreading, too benign and they're ineffective; too many mutations and they quickly mutate into a benign strain, too few mutations and the immune system can build resistance (and a vaccine can be found). Personally, I'm going to put the likelihood of this threat in the same basket as "terrorists developing functional nuclear bomb."
- randallsquared 17y ago
  Actually, it's long been a source of wonder to me that that hasn't happened, given that Ted Taylor described how easy it would be in John McPhee's _The Curve of Binding Energy_ in the early 70s. Apparently people who have the resources and skills to pull off such a thing essentially never want to.
  - splat 17y ago
    It's certainly not impossible for such a thing to happen, but it requires enough coincidences to make it unlikely. For a group of terrorists to make a nuclear weapon, they need the scientific background, materials, and engineering skill to build it. The scientific knowledge isn't too hard to get, but acquiring enough resources to make a sizable bomb without attracting too much attention is difficult. Add to that the fact that while the theory of the bomb is relatively simple, I'd imagine that actually engineering it would be the hardest part. One would need to fit the bomb into a relatively small space (no larger than a car) and testing the thing would be well near impossible (a successful test would give you away completely). So, the only people capable of pulling this off would have to be educated, engineering geniuses, in a convenient position in which they can obtain materials without attracting undue attention, and have an intense desire to blow as many people as possible off the face of the planet. It doesn't surprise me that the intersection of these sets approaches the null set.
CodeMage 17y ago
The biologically engineered apocalypse has always been a popular bogeyman. Last year, the big scare was the biological terrorism: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/busting_anthrax_myth http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/busting_anthrax_myth A lot of the same logic applies to Mr. Lind's article too.
J_McQuade 17y ago
This article, and many others like it, seems to be so anti-science that I'm surprised it didn't end with "And that's if the LHC doesn't vaporise us all first!" I just get massively incensed with the tone of pieces like this - their strong implication that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently A Bad Thing and the readiness with which they are prepared to be scared is so pervasive that sometimes I honestly get the impression that, to the average person, I must seem like an absolute lunatic for my intellectual pursuits. For example, I've recently been playing around a lot with the Arduino. An acquaintance of mine, upon seeing my desk strewn with various wires and components, immediately asked "Wow, are you making a bomb or something?" - how crazy is that? Now, this person may not be particularly well versed in science or technology, but the fact that the first thing he thought of when exposed to a bit of it was "BOMB!" could well tell you a little about just how dangerous articles like this one can be once they've become the norm. Maybe it's just human nature to be scared of things we don't understand, but something seems to be eroding the average person's very desire to understand in the first place. I can't help but think that scaremongering such as this is not helping in the slightest. (And I apologise for jumping on this article as an excuse to have a bit of a rant, but it just makes me so very, very angry.)
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Wow, are you making a bomb or something? "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide" isn't going to work, is it?
asciilifeform 17y ago
What the Luddites don't understand is that by attempting to restrict amateur (and increasingly, official) research, they hasten the arrival of the very same synthetic plague to-kill-us-all by further alienating smart, resourceful people. I must say that my feelings on bioengineered plagues are somewhat mixed. One one hand, I'd rather not be killed, esp. in a grotesque and uncommonly painful way. On the other hand, I think perhaps there ought to be a death penalty for civilizations which alienate and oppress their intelligent, creative and free-spirited minority.
biohacker42 17y ago
I am saddened by how many votes this is getting.
- ph0rque 17y ago
  I think at least some people are upvoting it for the same reason I submitted it: to get a good discussion going on Hacker News, with people (like yourself?) who actually are involved with the pursuit in question.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    That was my upvote, yes.
noonespecial 17y ago
There certainly is a killer plague coming. Its memetic, infects the brain, and is spread by articles like this.
jodrellblank 17y ago
She’s got a DNA "thermocycler" bought on eBay for $59 Putting that in quotes signifies that you both don't know what it is, and are afraid of it. For $59 off ebay? I'd guess it's something evil and scary like a "warming plate". Well, my dear, the fact is Yes, why don't you who tell her what she was doing, hmm? You clearly have a good understanding of what it would take to engineer ecoli into the black death 2.0 if you can judge that she was "one mistake" away from doing so. A calm, measured, thoughtful response to biohacking would be to run around madly in one’s underwear screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” It is impossible to overstate this threat. What can we do about it? Probably nothing ...
donaldc 17y ago
This article is looking at things from a static perspective. If biohackers ever get to the point of releasing killer plagues, something along these lines would happen: (1) The earliest killer plague created and released by a biohacker kills thousands, but isn't even close to being fine-tuned enough to be an existential threat to civilization. (2) The powers that be, and society, now that their attention has been focused, react to this threat by restructuring themselves slightly to better handle more virulent threats of this sort in the future. (3) Go to (1), only with a somewhat more virulent outbreak. Then go to (2), only with a somewhat larger restructuring. By the time biohackers have gotten far enough up the learning curve to release truly effective plagues, society will have gotten far enough along the restructuring curve to handle them without being wiped out or even seriously set back.

10 points by ph0rque 17y ago

It should be noted that the "ring around the rosie" story is an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.asp http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.asp

wallflower 17y ago
Anyone remember that classic Star Trek episode with "Ring around the Rosie"? Scary in a Twilight Zone fashion. http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Ring_Around_the_Rosie http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Ring_Around_the_Rosie

wlievens 17y ago

While reading this I thought the author didn't seem informed on the subject at all, and rather more interested in creating panic. Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism Okay. Right.

jerf 17y ago
Are you sure he's wrong? If so, how are you sure? For one thing, recall that these are amateur hackers at the beginning of the hacking curve; today playing with E. Coli, five years from now in possession of full-on sequencers, producing and inserting arbitrary DNA, ten years who knows? He may in fact be right. As much as we'd all like to dismiss the possibility, I don't actually see a rational basis to declare that he's absolutely wrong. We don't know. Nobody know. There are some arguments you can make about why he's wrong, but all the arguments are probabilistic, about how evolution probably would have discovered something of that lethality, but it's only probabilistic.
- smhinsey 17y ago
  He can be right (i.e., there is a risk from bioterror) and still be misleading. His complaint boils down to: dangerous bioagents can be easy to grow. we know this.
  - biohacker42 17y ago
    Dangerous bioagents are being grown at a phenomenal rate all around the world, every day. Swine-flu, HIV, Ebola, MRSA, everything else - comes NATURALLY.
    - smhinsey 17y ago
      i am not sure if you think i was saying something else, but i agree 100%. this is extreme foolishness.
      - biohacker42 17y ago
        I might have been replying to someone else.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  Yes I am sure he's wrong. Read through my recent comments for a slightly more elaborate explanation in an that amateur bio hackers thread. For even more information take some college classes in the life sciences.
- stavrianos 17y ago
  Even if he is right, this isn't something that can be stopped. Even if you manage to stop all the innocent hobbyists, you'll never stamp out the malicious ones. Seems to me that, assuming bad shit will happen, the best thing to do is get as far up the curve as possible as fast as possible. It's like, in the Sarah Connor chronicles, she's trying to hold back the singularity by firebombing the houses of AI researchers when the only real answer is to set off the singularity yourself so at least you can hope to sculpt it.

splat 17y ago

This article strikes me as far too alarmist. Sure, it would be terrible if some guy in his garage concocts Black Plague 2.0 and accidentally (or intentionally) spills it all over a large city. But the author doesn't seem to assess anywhere the odds of this actually happening. I'm not a biologist, but I'd bet that engineering a disease in your closet potent enough to wipe out a significant fraction of the human race before anyone can come up with a vaccine is nontrivial even if one is deliberately striving toward that goal. These sorts of diseases walk a fine line -- too lethal and they kill their hosts before spreading, too benign and they're ineffective; too many mutations and they quickly mutate into a benign strain, too few mutations and the immune system can build resistance (and a vaccine can be found). Personally, I'm going to put the likelihood of this threat in the same basket as "terrorists developing functional nuclear bomb."

randallsquared 17y ago
Actually, it's long been a source of wonder to me that that hasn't happened, given that Ted Taylor described how easy it would be in John McPhee's _The Curve of Binding Energy_ in the early 70s. Apparently people who have the resources and skills to pull off such a thing essentially never want to.
- splat 17y ago
  It's certainly not impossible for such a thing to happen, but it requires enough coincidences to make it unlikely. For a group of terrorists to make a nuclear weapon, they need the scientific background, materials, and engineering skill to build it. The scientific knowledge isn't too hard to get, but acquiring enough resources to make a sizable bomb without attracting too much attention is difficult. Add to that the fact that while the theory of the bomb is relatively simple, I'd imagine that actually engineering it would be the hardest part. One would need to fit the bomb into a relatively small space (no larger than a car) and testing the thing would be well near impossible (a successful test would give you away completely). So, the only people capable of pulling this off would have to be educated, engineering geniuses, in a convenient position in which they can obtain materials without attracting undue attention, and have an intense desire to blow as many people as possible off the face of the planet. It doesn't surprise me that the intersection of these sets approaches the null set.

CodeMage 17y ago

The biologically engineered apocalypse has always been a popular bogeyman. Last year, the big scare was the biological terrorism: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/busting_anthrax_myth http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/busting_anthrax_myth A lot of the same logic applies to Mr. Lind's article too.

J_McQuade 17y ago

This article, and many others like it, seems to be so anti-science that I'm surprised it didn't end with "And that's if the LHC doesn't vaporise us all first!" I just get massively incensed with the tone of pieces like this - their strong implication that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently A Bad Thing and the readiness with which they are prepared to be scared is so pervasive that sometimes I honestly get the impression that, to the average person, I must seem like an absolute lunatic for my intellectual pursuits. For example, I've recently been playing around a lot with the Arduino. An acquaintance of mine, upon seeing my desk strewn with various wires and components, immediately asked "Wow, are you making a bomb or something?" - how crazy is that? Now, this person may not be particularly well versed in science or technology, but the fact that the first thing he thought of when exposed to a bit of it was "BOMB!" could well tell you a little about just how dangerous articles like this one can be once they've become the norm. Maybe it's just human nature to be scared of things we don't understand, but something seems to be eroding the average person's very desire to understand in the first place. I can't help but think that scaremongering such as this is not helping in the slightest. (And I apologise for jumping on this article as an excuse to have a bit of a rant, but it just makes me so very, very angry.)

jodrellblank 17y ago
Wow, are you making a bomb or something? "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide" isn't going to work, is it?

asciilifeform 17y ago

What the Luddites don't understand is that by attempting to restrict amateur (and increasingly, official) research, they hasten the arrival of the very same synthetic plague to-kill-us-all by further alienating smart, resourceful people. I must say that my feelings on bioengineered plagues are somewhat mixed. One one hand, I'd rather not be killed, esp. in a grotesque and uncommonly painful way. On the other hand, I think perhaps there ought to be a death penalty for civilizations which alienate and oppress their intelligent, creative and free-spirited minority.

biohacker42 17y ago

I am saddened by how many votes this is getting.

ph0rque 17y ago
I think at least some people are upvoting it for the same reason I submitted it: to get a good discussion going on Hacker News, with people (like yourself?) who actually are involved with the pursuit in question.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  That was my upvote, yes.

noonespecial 17y ago

There certainly is a killer plague coming. Its memetic, infects the brain, and is spread by articles like this.

jodrellblank 17y ago

She’s got a DNA "thermocycler" bought on eBay for $59 Putting that in quotes signifies that you both don't know what it is, and are afraid of it. For $59 off ebay? I'd guess it's something evil and scary like a "warming plate". Well, my dear, the fact is Yes, why don't you who tell her what she was doing, hmm? You clearly have a good understanding of what it would take to engineer ecoli into the black death 2.0 if you can judge that she was "one mistake" away from doing so. A calm, measured, thoughtful response to biohacking would be to run around madly in one’s underwear screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” It is impossible to overstate this threat. What can we do about it? Probably nothing ...

donaldc 17y ago

This article is looking at things from a static perspective. If biohackers ever get to the point of releasing killer plagues, something along these lines would happen: (1) The earliest killer plague created and released by a biohacker kills thousands, but isn't even close to being fine-tuned enough to be an existential threat to civilization. (2) The powers that be, and society, now that their attention has been focused, react to this threat by restructuring themselves slightly to better handle more virulent threats of this sort in the future. (3) Go to (1), only with a somewhat more virulent outbreak. Then go to (2), only with a somewhat larger restructuring. By the time biohackers have gotten far enough up the learning curve to release truly effective plagues, society will have gotten far enough along the restructuring curve to handle them without being wiped out or even seriously set back.