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Comment by 5350-uiop-1130 | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that any advanced civilisation reaches a point at which a vast amount of destructive power becomes accessible to individuals. At this point it becomes only matter of time until that civilisation is destroyed.

The analogy I use is to imagine that every adult human on Earth woke up tomorrow morning with a button on their wrist that could destroy the Earth. How long do you think we would last?

We haven't reached a stage where an individual can create a nuclear bomb, a new kind of super-virus or some other doomsday weapon but I imagine its not an implausible scenario in the future. I think this is kind of a wall that all advanced civilisation may hit at some point.

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It’s not hard to imagine in the near future that having a PhD in biology and access to a moderately equipped lab would grant a person the ability to create super plagues capable of killing most humans.

Couple that with the wide spread nihilism that wants to destroy the world because they can’t stand the injustice of life, and it’s a pretty good bet our time as a species is limited here.

If I were king for a day I’d do everything I could to get the message out that things are getting better, injustice is shrinking every year, and there is hope.

A way out would be to quickly move our brain to machines and build fully autonomous and self sustaining asteroid sized ships (could be built in situ). To function as backups and spreader for our civilization

> It’s not hard to imagine in the near future that having a PhD in biology and access to a moderately equipped lab would grant a person the ability to create super plagues capable of killing most humans.

Pretty sure that's already the case.

This is an interesting theory I have considered as well, however there is a reason to disbelieve it. It assumes at its core the diffusion of some form of highly destructive technology, and that the technology will be unleashed in an irreversible way before it can be recognized and “put back in the box”, or it can’t be “put back in the box”.

These assumptions individually seem strong but together they get quite weak. For example, diffusion of civilization over several planets before this technology is diffused provides a potential firewall. (For example, once the technology is recognized, an orderly exodus is made which forcibly leaves behind any trace of it.) Alternatively, the diffusion itself may not occur as well, similar to the current life-ending technologies we have now that can only be created by state actors.

It is a legitimate prospect — but hinges upon several aspects hung together to get to a point where it’s an inductive invariant explaining fermi.

Maybe a biological weapon being unleashed from some genocidal nutcase's basement hobby laboratory?

Do note that it is orders of magnitude simpler to reach the technological level necessary to create the means of causing the collapse of civilization than to create the means to colonize other worlds. There are places on our own planet far more hospitable than any other world in our system that we haven't yet colonized, yet we are potentially a few political incidents away from nuclear annihilation.

this is a good theory but you don't even have to look at it as, "each being has the will to destroy everyone". way more likely that it's a natural byproduct of existence that can't be adequately anticipated such that the species can do something about it. We're already on the edge of waiting for the bacteria that can't be killed, the climate disaster that destroys our food supply, etc. (you might say climate disaster is adequately anticipated, but while science is anticipating it, the whole of the species is unfortunately not).

This is why they're orbiting at a safe distance and waiting to see what we do when we discover antimatter bombs for ourselves.

Like "Mail order CRISPR kits for everyone"?

The scary part is that there actually already is a web site that sells those...

Probably an arms race would make defense technology good enough to limit the consequences of it.

If that happened you would probably see (wealthy) people migrating to underground bunkers to protect themselves and interact using VR. That could be one of the explanations why they don't go out to create colonies and make enough noise for us to detect them.

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