[ExI] (no subject)

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat

John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> I didn't write that Spike did.

Sorry for the misattribution.

Spike mixed up me and Robert Kennedy recently.

Keith
_______________________________________________



Owww, dang, Keith my apologies sir.

If I am conflated with another, I don't mind a bit if the person with whom I
am conflated is either you or Robert Kennedy.  Or Rafal, or Adrian, or a
number of our other gentlemanly hipsters.

Someone, I thought it was Robert, wrote a comment which worries me.  It was
about creating a virus in the lab.  That person (Robert or you, I think it
was Robert) commented that this technology was beyond the current state of
the art but is conceivable in 5 to 10 years.

This is scarcely comforting, for my notion is that any technology which is 5
to 10 years away might happen unexpectedly.  Technology does stuff like
that.  My formative years were misspent in proximity to the space program,
where that whole stunt of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely
was a technology that feels like it was ripped from the 1990s and plunked
down in the 1960s, an achievement which still feels 30 years ahead of its
time.

So it is really out of the question that this happened 5 to 10 years ahead
of schedule?  That some prole figured out how to somehow splice bat DNA and
pangolin DNA into a virus, and the lab safety protocol was inadequate and
she somehow caught it and gave it to others?  Or that it evolved somehow in
a bat and the bat was fed to a soup-devourer, who then gave it to others?  

Both of those horrifying scenarios feel plausible to me, and considering
that both the virus research lab and the bat soup purveyor were within
walking distance of each other suggests to me one of those two scenarios has
the ring of truth.

Robert and Keith, do guide us here, lads.

spike