The Scientific Revolution: Bringing an Extinction Level Event Right To Your Door

I’m not quite old enough yet to spend my days considering how I, as an individual, will die. I have seen so many things in my former life in the hospital that it would be almost impossible to pick one as the most likely cause of my demise.

Increasingly I have considered that what finishes me off will most likely take a whole load of other people with me. A nuclear winter from Yellowstone popping off cutting the food supply, a pandemic like Ebola sweeping the globe, bad weather causing widespread famine or maybe a solar flare ending life as we know it. All of these things could, and possibly would be what I call an AELE…an Almost Extinction Level Event. I say almost because all of them would see some people surviving, and hopefully one of them would be me.

The last year or so though, my thoughts have drifted from an AELE, to a total ELE, an Extinction Level Event that actually kills off the entire human race.

I believe this threat will come from the combined efforts of scientists and doctors who have not considered the effects their tampering will have in the long term. 

The last 50 years has taken man on a medical and technological journey that is still gathering pace. We have moved from a species who cooked fresh food that was home grown or, at worst, locally produced, to a species that is being forced to consume genetically modified foods that are often produced half a world away.

We used to have kids who played outside, naturally maintained their weight and slept well due to the amount of exercise they were getting. Now we have obese kids who often move only if they really have to, who are rarely disconnected from their electronics even when they should be sleeping.

• Synthetic biology, where biology and engineering come together will most likely have currently unknown consequences, and by the time those consequences are known it could be far too late to address the problem.
• Nano technology may be great for medical diagnosis and treatment but if used for warfare would have unknown outcomes most of which would not be good. Computer driven intelligence is indifferent to consequences. The technology has no concept cause and effect.
• The dismantling and reassembly of DNA, designed to eradicate certain conditions is all well and good. The long term effects however have not been studied. DNA is prone to all kinds of changes and no one has any idea what will happen to that tampered with DNA when it is transferred to the next generation.
• Artificial intelligence allows more and more power to be packed into smaller and smaller packages and if combined with nano technology or biotechnology could quite easily start a chain reaction that can’t be stopped. What that chain reaction would be I have no idea, but particularly if it was in military hands I doubt the outcome would be good.
• The God mentality of creating entirely new organisms for use in medicine and agriculture is frightening to say the least. It is likely that at some point one such organism will fail to ‘turn off’ when it should, again, the technology has not been around long enough to know what the result of that would be.

Then we have to consider someone going rogue. A scientist or doctor seeing for example, a military application and deciding to sell the information  to a foreign nation. It could be even simpler than that, scientists and doctors are no better than the rest of us regarding plagiarism of ideas and methods. They are also increasingly working for big salaries in large corporations such as Monsanto and Big Pharma whose aim is gain, rather altruistic notions of feeding or healing the world.

All of these things give rise to the potential or error or terror…the potential of mistakes and corner cutting for profit, or the deliberate manipulation for government, military or terrorism purposes.

All of the large corporations are notoriously secretive and we only have their word regarding what they are working on.

There is a massive gap between the development of new technologies and a full understanding of where those technologies will lead us. The effects that they will have on us and the planet we inhabit is far from certain, and that in itself is a major cause for concern.

Take care

Liz