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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)

by 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.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    Engineering it is simple once you have enough high-grade material. That was partly what that book was about. It was simple in the 70s, and it's totally trivial now, because the state of the art in ordinary manufacturing has made it so. No geniuses needed, or even engineering degrees, for the simplest designs. Yet it hasn't happened. It's not clear to me whether this is luck, heroic yet mostly secret effort by various national governments, something systemic to terrorism, or some combination. Well, we know at least that the CIA used to buy fissionables, no questions asked and no consequences meted, but I, at least, don't know how much they actually got that way.
swombat 17y ago
Playing devil's advocate here, I think the danger is accident rather than intention. If there are just a few "evil scientists" tinkering around this worldwide, that's fine... their chances, as you argue, are low... but what if there's a hundred thousand amateurs blundering around in their spare evenings? That surely massively multiplies the likelihood that they come up with something devastating, by accident. And even though the likelihood may still be less than that of a plane crash, it's worth bearing in mind that we're all riding on this plane... I'm not suggesting that these people somehow need to be rounded up or something... I don't think that would work, for a start. But perhaps the subject does deserve some thought. Perhaps biohackers can be provided with free access to secure facilities, expertise and oversight that will enable them to conduct their experiments safely. Sure, that might cost a bit, to build all the infrastructure... but it's less expensive than a Black Plague 2.0, as you call it.
- splat 17y ago
  One of the problems with present-day technology is that the capability of wiping out the human species is a possibility, even if vanishingly small. It's hard to refute the argument that "The value associated with the destruction of the human race is minus infinity, so the expected value of doing anything that has a nonzero probability of destroying the human race is also minus infinity." But we seem to be comfortable with this existential threat on some level given that we switched on the LHC and we have thousands of nukes ready to destroy every major city on the face of the earth within hours. It all comes down to costs and benefits. If we try to minimize this existential threat by building some sort of infrastructure so that biohackers can conduct their experiments with oversight we're going to lose something. In this case, we'd be losing research that qualified scientists could be doing instead of babysitting people who, on average, probably have no idea what they're doing. Plus, institutionalizing the process seems to me to defeat the purpose of biohacking--using unconventional techniques to solve problems. In the facilities you describe, I'm not sure the biohackers would have the freedom to perform the experiments they want. True, it would significantly reduce the odds of a catastrophic virus leaking to the general population, but it would also reduce the odds that someone discovers some "miracle cure." (Of course, the odds of this happening either way are pretty small, but I'd reckon that the odds of something good coming out of these garage experiments is at least an order of magnitude greater than the odds of anything bad happening.)

by splat 17y ago

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.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  Engineering it is simple once you have enough high-grade material. That was partly what that book was about. It was simple in the 70s, and it's totally trivial now, because the state of the art in ordinary manufacturing has made it so. No geniuses needed, or even engineering degrees, for the simplest designs. Yet it hasn't happened. It's not clear to me whether this is luck, heroic yet mostly secret effort by various national governments, something systemic to terrorism, or some combination. Well, we know at least that the CIA used to buy fissionables, no questions asked and no consequences meted, but I, at least, don't know how much they actually got that way.

swombat 17y ago

Playing devil's advocate here, I think the danger is accident rather than intention. If there are just a few "evil scientists" tinkering around this worldwide, that's fine... their chances, as you argue, are low... but what if there's a hundred thousand amateurs blundering around in their spare evenings? That surely massively multiplies the likelihood that they come up with something devastating, by accident. And even though the likelihood may still be less than that of a plane crash, it's worth bearing in mind that we're all riding on this plane... I'm not suggesting that these people somehow need to be rounded up or something... I don't think that would work, for a start. But perhaps the subject does deserve some thought. Perhaps biohackers can be provided with free access to secure facilities, expertise and oversight that will enable them to conduct their experiments safely. Sure, that might cost a bit, to build all the infrastructure... but it's less expensive than a Black Plague 2.0, as you call it.

splat 17y ago
One of the problems with present-day technology is that the capability of wiping out the human species is a possibility, even if vanishingly small. It's hard to refute the argument that "The value associated with the destruction of the human race is minus infinity, so the expected value of doing anything that has a nonzero probability of destroying the human race is also minus infinity." But we seem to be comfortable with this existential threat on some level given that we switched on the LHC and we have thousands of nukes ready to destroy every major city on the face of the earth within hours. It all comes down to costs and benefits. If we try to minimize this existential threat by building some sort of infrastructure so that biohackers can conduct their experiments with oversight we're going to lose something. In this case, we'd be losing research that qualified scientists could be doing instead of babysitting people who, on average, probably have no idea what they're doing. Plus, institutionalizing the process seems to me to defeat the purpose of biohacking--using unconventional techniques to solve problems. In the facilities you describe, I'm not sure the biohackers would have the freedom to perform the experiments they want. True, it would significantly reduce the odds of a catastrophic virus leaking to the general population, but it would also reduce the odds that someone discovers some "miracle cure." (Of course, the odds of this happening either way are pretty small, but I'd reckon that the odds of something good coming out of these garage experiments is at least an order of magnitude greater than the odds of anything bad happening.)