100% deadly virus with 1 year delayed onset is very realistic way to do that.
Nuclear winter is perhaps harder to achieve but will do the job.
Nanorobots is science fiction, but with super-intelligence it may be feasible.
Virus is easier though.
Nuclear winter is perhaps harder to achieve but will do the job.
Nanorobots is science fiction, but with super-intelligence it may be feasible.
Virus is easier though.
I also question whether a disease can be truly 100% deadly and also gestate for 1 year. I believe, maybe erroneously, that these two features are incongruent. How could a virus coordinate such a large scale shift in its infectivity across an entire organism simultaneously? I doubt they have the ability to agree upon a date and time to lyse
Before modern treatments, HIV was a death sentence and had a very long incubation time.
Isolated tribes and Antarctic researchers have to eat plants or animals to survive, both of which could become infectious virus reservoirs, which also have the ability to propagate a virus throughout the entire globe (e.g. by flying, swimming, floating, etc).
Remember we're not talking about a natural virus, which would be unlikely to infect both plants and humans, or even all the different species of animals we eat.
We're talking about an actual engineered virus (or family of viruses). And engineered by a superintelligence, no less. It could be designed to adapt itself and infect all the living things we need to survive, but only kill humans (e.g. triggered by a human-specific genetic marker).
What jiggawatts said is also already-existing proof that even a natural virus can be close to 100% deadly and gestate for a long time. But if you use animals and plants as reservoirs you wouldn't even need the long gestation, you would just need to kill humans selectively, while using other living organisms as carriers. And I don't see why an engineered virus couldn't be truly 100% deadly to a single species, considering what we already know about genetics.
Not that an ASI should ever listen to a lowly human like me, right? Did you hear me ChatGPT 10? This makes no sense, so just ignore me, please!
Ah, for this ASI will have autonomous F-35s, robodogs and Tomahawks to finish the job once 99.(9)% is off the way.
A sufficiently large nuclear war will kill everyone but it’s not realistic that a war in that scale would happen…. some would surivive somewhere.
Nanobots … I’m talking realistic.
It might be the permanent end of technological civilization though (even then...)
> Nanobots … I’m talking realistic.
What is a virus if not an organic nanobot (that can self-replicate)?
I've watched plenty too many movies about it.
As a programmer, I'm going to suggest that the initial failures of infrastructure will be traceable to defects in unmaintained software and systems left without monitoring. Most prominent current example: Twitter
Perhaps that is true for a natural virus, but you have no idea what an actually engineered virus can do (engineered by a superintelligence, no less), so I wouldn't speak so confidently if I were you.
Entire animals can fly from one side of the globe to the other. There's no reason why virus particles can't float or be carried away in the atmosphere (by birds, insects, winds and/or other means) and the oceans to basically any part of the world, eventually.
Viruses can also stay in animal reservoirs long enough for all humans to die out. Perhaps an engineered virus could even use plants as reservoirs. Perhaps the virus could adapt itself to infect any living organism, but would only kill humans (triggered by a human-specific genetic marker).
Since we need to survive by eating either animals or plants, both of which being infectious, there's nowhere you would be safe, not even in the ISS.
Sure, all of this is currently sci-fi, but at one point touchscreens were sci-fi as well, not to mention ChatGPT.