{"id":4222,"date":"2014-06-13T18:31:57","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T23:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4222"},"modified":"2014-06-14T07:22:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-14T12:22:35","slug":"nanotech-trashes-human-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4222","title":{"rendered":"Nanotech Trashes Human Race? (Or Good Old Fashioned Aggression?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was talking about reviews of various things in my last post, so I will make another review tonight. This review involves an article<\/a> in Real Clear Science, which in itself is a review of a conference report. The conference was about how humanity could go extinct by 2100. It was held in 2008 by the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This report identified 8 main ways of getting rid of us, making estimates of each extinction risk occurring over the next 85 years. These risk estimates range from 0.03% to 5% (which is fairly high, actually; the top four possibilities together combine to 12%, which is more than one chance in 10; although it might be argued that these probabilities are not completely additive). The Institute’s doomsday scenarios can be broken down into three major factors: war (regular war at 4%, nuclear war at 1%, and nuclear terrorism at 0.03%); disease (natural pandemic at 0.05% and the bigger risk of engineered pandemic at 2%); and surprisingly, nanotechnology (nanotechnology accident at 0.5%; nanotechnology non-accident: i.e., weaponized nanoparticles acting as an artificial engineered pandemic, 5%).<\/p>\n

Oh, and throw in the risk of some uncontrolled machine-based intelligence taking over all our systems and sweeping our species aside. That one comes in at an unsettling 5%. <\/p>\n

As to the pandemic risk: interestingly, one of the things that makes humankind more vulnerable to a wipe-out bug is the often celebrated trend towards increased worldwide intermixing of races and nationalities. It’s great that cheap transportation and enlightened attitudes are allowing the once largely isolated human tribes to intermingle and interbreed, such that in the not-so-distant future, all our children will be a coarse-haired shade of tan. No more race distinctions, no more Euro-Caucasian, black African, Middle Eastern, Native American, East Asian, South Asian, Hispanic . . . we will all melt together into a common \u201chuman race\u201d. You can almost hear a background choir right now singing \u201cWe Are The World\u201d. <\/p>\n

BUT . . . on the downside . . . this will give all the nasty pathogens out there a chance to come up with a bug that can take down every \u201cNew World Man\u201d and Woman on the face of the planet. In the past, when virulent plagues came around, the fact that certain people had distinct racial genetic characteristics provided a firewall against the universal spread of a disease. (Admittedly, sometimes it did not, such as the increased vulnerability of the Aztecs to pandemics carried by the Spanish New World conquerors). But now the human gene pool will become increasingly homogenous, and you know that pathogens, with their relentless trial and error process, will eventually stumble upon a \u201ckiller app\u201d, to paraphrase what our hip technology guru’s of today might say.<\/p>\n

Another homogenization factor: a recent article<\/a> in The Atlantic outlined the increasingly sophisticated technologies becoming available to couples having children, allowing increased control of their child’s characteristics and genetic makeup. This could well result in \u201cdesigner children\u201d, which will eliminate diversity by culling out embryos with odd or undesirable characteristics including high functioning autism or mild physical defects. The end result of this will be \u201cincreasingly diverse families making increasingly similar babies\u201d. These semi-clonal babies will raise the bar in terms of human abilities, but . . . some pathogen might eventually get their number, and then down goes the entire race.<\/p>\n

So, it was interested on the same day seeing this commentary<\/a> in RCS, disagreeing with an article in Mother Jones<\/a> about the dangers of nanoparticles, particularly when used as food ingredients. <\/p>\n

No, Mother Jones, nano-food particles won’t necessarily kill you. MJ was upset about the increased use of food additives that are delivered as nano-sized molecules, much smaller than the usual food proteins. Small molecules per se are not dangerous, but they can sneak dangerous stuff into places where it was barred in the past. If the author had read the other RCS articles that day, he might have hedged his bets against Mother Jones with two words: \u201cNot Yet\u201d.<\/p>\n

Strangely . . . the extinction article made no mention of extinction by weather pattern changes, e.g. starvation from global warming . . . although that could be feeding into the heightened risk of war. Still, you’d think that the prospect of drowning cities and mass starvation and the resulting chaos these would bring would have gotten more attention than they did at Oxford.<\/p>\n

And a P.S., not about the end of the world per se, but possibly about the end of respectable science reporting by the liberal media. I wrote a few sarcastic notes in the past about NPR’s Radiolab program, a weekly one-hour entertainment show hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich that manages to squeeze in some quasi-scientific topics. Well, I tuned in again last night, wondering if it had gotten any better. Sorry, but no dice. Jad is pushing his “cutesiness” to the limit, throwing in lots of little “yays” and giggles. Even Krulwich, the straight man, can’t be taken seriously when he contends that humankind is evolving and learning over time to become more peaceful, open-minded and “domesticated”<\/a>. Through nature and nurture, we are supposedly getting along better and better within our increasingly crowded and interdependent life circumstances. Aggression and violence are becoming things of the past. (Once again, cue the “We Are The World” singers — or maybe “Age of Aquarius”, i.e. “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions . . . “) <\/p>\n

And then I read the headlines about current happenings in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. And even if we aren’t fighting a bloody civil war here in America, our national politics seem to get more and more war-like over time; compromise is becoming a thing of the past. Sorry, Robert (and please, no pouting noises, Jad), but humankind still has a huge problem with tribalism. Despite Radiolab’s cotton-candy optimism, those Oxford folk still say that there is at least a 5% chance of human extinction over the next 85 years because of war or terrorism (and throw in another 5% for intentionally deadly nanoparticle epidemics, and 2% for an engineered bio pandemic). Barry Maguire and his 1965 hit song “Eve of Destruction<\/a>” might still be right! “Oh Jad you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction . . .”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was talking about reviews of various things in my last post, so I will make another review tonight. This review involves an article in Real Clear Science, which in itself is a review of a conference report. The conference was about how humanity could go extinct by 2100. It was held in 2008 by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4222"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4226,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4222\/revisions\/4226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}