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Comment by DuskStar | Hacker News Reader

Give it another 25 years; I'm sure we'll see genetically engineered plagues used by ethnostates (find some mutation that a large portion of your population has that your opponents do not & make that confer resistance) or as an instrument of genocide (the same thing but in reverse) by then.

Or if you're willing to plan ahead a little more... Develop the plague and the vaccine a decade or more before use, and spend the intervening decade adding it to childhood vaccines and seasonal flu shots. When it comes time for use, have the remainder of your population vaccinated.

I may be a pessimist, but I'd guess that "biological warfare is ineffective in achieving the aims of nation-states" won't be a thing forever.

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Hmm, in the past few decades we've seen fewer and smaller wars than ever before. Why do you think that trend is going away?

More likely, warfare biological or not is going to become even more rare and even less accepted.

If we keep up the forces that brought us peace, UN, EU, NATO, international trade, amongst many other forces, we're more likely to a world without war.

The US is threatening withdrawal from NATO, a member state is withdrawing from the EU, and international trade wars are heating up between the largest economies. I’m not sure I would count those trends as a sure thing, though certainly they probably have a good bit of wear left in them.

Brexit and Trump are most likely just temporary set backs.. indeed both are widely recognized as stupid (people saying otherwise usually does so out of political allegiance).

Viewed over the past 70 years, currents trends are merely a tiny bump. And indeed we don't see it catching on in the rest of the EU.

Note. We can't just hope for things to continue, but if we put in some work - odds are pretty firmly in our favor.

I hope it will be the case, but the continued existence of civil wars and failed states may put a damper to that.

It depends on your aims, and willingness to accept the consequences of potential mutations. Eventually the requirements to engineer and produce a plague will become something that can be done in a garage, and without the fundamental limits of something like a nuclear bomb for which plutonium is a required.

At that point, I suspect aggressive deterrence will be the only viable option.

Of course, it's also possible that by the point genetic engineering is sufficiently well understood and accessible to the public that someone could create a doomsday plague in their garage we'll have medical technology sufficient to deal with the threat. We've sort of followed that trajectory with computer viruses, after all.

This still doesn't say good things about the survivability of the 3rd world, though. Even though modern server, desktop and handheld devices (let's call these "people with high-tier healthcare") are rather well hardened, older systems (people without that healthcare) and IoT devices (pets/farm animals/crops/nature) are notoriously vulnerable.

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