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The Myths and Realities of Synthetic Bioweapons
Lasrick writes Three researchers from King's College, London, walk through the security threats posed by synthetic and do-it-yourself biology, assessing whether changes in technology and associated costs make it any easier for would-be terrorists to pursue biological weapons for high-consequence, mass- casualty attacks (and even whether they would want to). "Those who have overemphasized the bioterrorism threat typically portray it as an imminent concern, with emphasis placed on high-consequence, mass-casualty attacks, performed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is a myth with two dimensions."
Bloweapon.
Synthetic bioweapons are the name of the game in the Resident Evil franchise. Personally, I have always considered something like this to be a distinct possibility, so should we be surprised at this development?
Or should we all be calling for Leon S. Kennedy and friends to save the day once more?
IT would probably be easier, bot not exactly easy. Off course, terrorists could "cook up a weapon" as they need it, and if they can use suicidal people to do that for them, they have a severe advantage to military forces. Making such weapons is hard, but storing them is also quite hard. So if you use someone else to make it for you, these weapons are useless unless you use them immediately.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The greater danger is really a nation or researcher engineering a major killer (e.g. airborne ebola) and having it escape the lab by accident a few decades hence, kind of like the smallpox vials the CDC found...
Can you imagine how interesting these problems will get once humanity stops sharing a single atmosphere?
I predict the first human colony will be killed by terrorist bio-attack.
Apologies for bringing down the tone of the conversation, but I read this as "Myths and Realities of Synthetic Blowjobs". 0_0
I really need to get out more.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
...they do rank as DIY's biological warfare items.
awesome
People see what they have their mind tuned to! :-)
Only if he's had a good portion of canned beans.
Terrorist groups will now be chased on the probable intention they might have of using technology they don't have and they didn't try to develop in the first place.
On the other hand, we have people who actually had the intention to create this technology, spent the efforts and time into it, and now master it, more or less, which is at least suspicious.
I'm not saying I'm not concerned by the risk any crazy individuals could do crazy things. But I'm also, if not more, concerned, by the risk larger, organised groups as armies and governments would represent. A mass murderer with a gun would kill tens or hundreds of people and then would die or be arrested. An army with proper equipment would kill millions of people and may not be arrested.
I predict noone will hear about it on slashdot because while they continually manage to make the user think "they literally took the worst possible theme they could think of and made it real" - by the time Humans have a colony in space the site is likely to just be a single ad, marketing survey and ai-derived bot to subliminally influence the viewer into buying some stupid gadget.
I've always thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... ( from Poison Ivy) might be useful somehow in warfare. I got a dose of it last month from a trek through the woods and was really impressed by it's effects. I got a really light brush from a plant and the effects took better than a month to heal. Do a Google Image search and you'll see the effects can be very impressive.
Here, let's let nature take care of that for you.
> DNA synthesis has become cheaper
Does this mean that, in addition to the Zombie threat, we should be worried about Chimeras, dragons, giants and satyrs too?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
1) Total lack of ethics - and the resources to get away with murdering thousands of human test subjects along the way.
2) Suicidal tendencies - not just for individuals, but for the funding group. Because any realistically dangerous weapon will have a good probability of killing it's creators first, and a very high probability of killing it's creators in the long term (either directly, by evolution, or by revenge nuclear attacks.
3) You still need Highly intelligent and highly trained people involved. Most of whom lack Suicidal tendencies.
This armegeddon scenario is actually far more likely than a nuclear war, as that requires far more people to behave far more stupidly and unlike nanite fears, is actually physically reasonable.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Lots of generalities and assertions, no depth at all. Was this really worth being posted? They may or may not be right - but all you can have after reading it is an "opinion". No actual knowledge in that article, or even any insights. It is mere boulevard paper level journalism.
Also, what is missing is the speed with which the options increase. I just finished edX course MIT "Introduction to Biology" (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! WARNING: CONTAINS ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE! https://www.edx.org/course/mit...) and so much happened just the last 10 years! So an assessment of the danger of these developments that only looks at the current state (and what a bad job they do with this) is kind of useless.
Wow, way to knock down the straw man arguments.
Your basic premise is not the one that I have seen in most writings.
The premise I have seen is that once the knowledge for bio weapons in created, the EQUIPMENT/RESOURCES needed to create them will be much smaller than the equipment and resources needed to create a nuclear bomb.
You can know everything about building a nuke from scratch, and it will cost a country a huge amount to make one.
Once you have a few scientists who know how to make the pathogens, you only need a reasonable sized lab to create them.
The argument is against the US and Russia and China funding the basic research that is still needed to create this knowledge base.
The ladies writing the article have a sad lack of knowledge of the historical usages of bio weapons. It goes back to ancient times when corpses where flung into besieged cities. Wells were polluted with the dead. It was used often because it worked.
1970s television shows and the rhetoric after the WTC plane crashes suggest this is what terrorist cells want. It isn't although 3,000 deaths is an extreme toll. The WTC incident didn't damage infrastructure, it didn't overwhelm the emergency services long-term, it didn't create an exponential death-toll over time, it didn't close public events or services. It was the most terrorists could do and they did it cheaply.
Most terrorists don't want to the rule the world and the few that do, don't preach genocide. Terrorists essentially demand compensation from their victims: Which can't happen if the victims are dying or starving.
Any disease that spreads quickly can can cripple or destroy a country. This has already happened with livestock, like avian flu which humans catch. Other livestock have been decimated by diseases that humans can carry without suffering infection.
A terrorist could some-how, expose a plane-load of people to Ebola (spread by touch), before it lands in an western nation: No university education or complex machines required. This simple, low-tech scenario addresses the 2 problems of biological warfare: Delivering the disease to the target population and multiplying the spread of infection.
Ebola is worth mentioning because it has moved from a small, static population to a large, mobile population which has limited capacity for disease containment and treatment. Add to that infected people avoiding treatment and superior health services (other countries) failing to control the initial outbreak, the result is exponential growth. Those post-plague shows like 'Survivor', or movies like '28 days later' and 'Resident evil' don't describe how containment procedures failed but I imagine it started like this.