<div dir="auto">It's quite terrifying yeah. And I think just as grim as the physical danger is the particular social effect of a deadly contagious disease. Covid didn't worry me much but the way people turned into paranoid selfish irrational crazy people definitely did. I don't think the downstream effects of that will shake out for a decade or more, and by then something worse will probably come along. <div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Sorry to be a doomer but man, that whole covid thing really fucked everyone up. I desperately hope we can have a few years of the good times again. Heck maybe it's just this damn country and I need to move somewhere else. To where I don't know. Mexico seems nice </div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Feb 1, 2023, 12:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <br>
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From: <a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">spike@rainier66.com</a> <<a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">spike@rainier66.com</a>> <br>
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>...Dang this version of reality is just... weird. Reality is just too<br>
weird. spike<br>
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While marveling that the actual real-life Bond villain, when finally being<br>
revealed, looks as goofy as Dr. Evil, a most disturbing thought occurred to<br>
me. I vaguely buy the notion that this guy was blowing smoke to get his<br>
boyfriend into bed, that sounds plausible enough. <br>
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But... if a company really did want to create a new virus and proactively<br>
develop a vaccine for it, that would be the ultimate cash cow. It would be<br>
the perfect Bond James Bond adversary, with all the classic features: kill<br>
millions while making one hundred billion for the bad guy.<br>
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A company like Pfizer likely wouldn't do it, but the disturbing part is<br>
this: anyone can do directed evolution. It doesn't take a company. If<br>
covid can jump from a bat to a human, it can jump from a human to a bat<br>
(biology hipsters: ja?) <br>
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It is easy enough to intentionally catch covid. Bad guy does that, goes<br>
home, extracts a cc of her own blood, injects her pet bats, waits for them<br>
to get sick and some to die, extracts a few cc of blood from a dead bat,<br>
centrifuges out the RBCs and stuff, filters the plasma/virus mixture to<br>
concentrate the virus, reinjects the concentrated virus to a bunch of<br>
healthy bats who survived the infection (so their immune system is pumped),<br>
wait a few days, take out the dead ones, extract their blood, centrifuge,<br>
filter, repeat, until the bad guy (who looks far less goofy than Jordan<br>
Walker) selectively breeds a planet killer, in her own home with zero<br>
collaborators, no one to leak anything. Neither Bond James Bond nor OKeefe<br>
James Okeefe can stop the bad guy because no one knows she is doing it. <br>
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This is a big planet with a lot of potential bad guys. We have no way of<br>
knowing how many are doing directed evolution on covid. This would be a<br>
black swan that doesn't require enormous amounts of funding or any<br>
particular brilliance. And all along we thought it was going to be nukes or<br>
malicious AI that did us in.<br>
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spike<br>
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