[extropy-chat] Re: Jamais Cascio's Critique [Was RE: Recipe for Destruction - Joy/Kurzweil NYTimes Op-Ed]

[David Lubkin]

entropy at farviolet.com wrote:

>Few people alive today where alive in 1918. Nor was the flu far 
>reaching enough to wipe out everyone who was genetically susceptable 
>to it. Plenty of susceptable people lived to pass on there genes by 
>avoiding exposure. Any protection of this sort is minimal at best.

I heard a woman on C-SPAN a year or two ago. I forget who she's with. 
CDC, I think; maybe Ft. Detrick. She's spent her career researching 
the 1918 pandemic. In looking at people who were alive in 1918, she 
found that *everyone* she tested, including residents of the most 
remote parts of the planet, had antibodies for the 1918 flu. As far 
as she could tell, nowhere was safe.

(I haven't been able to locate her work yet. She's not mentioned on 
c-span.org, although she appeared in-studio, and google hasn't 
helped. I'm going to keep looking, since the question's pretty important.)


-- David Lubkin.