I don’t believe that present-day synthentic biology is anywhere close to being able to create “total destruction” or “almost certainannihilation”… and in fact it may never get there without more-than-human AI.
If you made super-nasty smallpox and spread it all over the place, it would suck, for sure, but it wouldn’t kill everybody and it wouldn’t destroy “technical civilization”, either. Human institutions have survived that sort of thing. The human species has survived much worse. Humans have recovered from really serious population bottlenecks.
Even if it were easy to create any genome you wanted and put it into a functioning organism, nobody knows how to design it. Biology is monstrously complicated. It’s not even clear that a human can hold enough of that complexity in mind to ever design a weapon of total destruction. Such a weapon might not even be possible; there are always going to be oddball cases where it doesn’t work.
For that matter, you’re not even going to be creating super smallpox in your garage, even if you get the synthesis tools. An expert could maybe identify some changes that might make a pathogen worse, but they’d have to test it to be sure. On human subjects. Many of them. Which is conspicuous and expensive and beyond the reach of the garage operator.
I actually can’t think of anything already built or specifically projected that you could use to reliably kill everybody or even destroy civilization… except maybe for the AI. Nanotech without AI wouldn’t do it. And even the AI involves a lot of unknowns.
I don’t believe that present-day synthentic biology is anywhere close to being able to create “total destruction” or “almost certain annihilation”… and in fact it may never get there without more-than-human AI.
If you made super-nasty smallpox and spread it all over the place, it would suck, for sure, but it wouldn’t kill everybody and it wouldn’t destroy “technical civilization”, either. Human institutions have survived that sort of thing. The human species has survived much worse. Humans have recovered from really serious population bottlenecks.
Even if it were easy to create any genome you wanted and put it into a functioning organism, nobody knows how to design it. Biology is monstrously complicated. It’s not even clear that a human can hold enough of that complexity in mind to ever design a weapon of total destruction. Such a weapon might not even be possible; there are always going to be oddball cases where it doesn’t work.
For that matter, you’re not even going to be creating super smallpox in your garage, even if you get the synthesis tools. An expert could maybe identify some changes that might make a pathogen worse, but they’d have to test it to be sure. On human subjects. Many of them. Which is conspicuous and expensive and beyond the reach of the garage operator.
I actually can’t think of anything already built or specifically projected that you could use to reliably kill everybody or even destroy civilization… except maybe for the AI. Nanotech without AI wouldn’t do it. And even the AI involves a lot of unknowns.