"Once a planet gets infected with humans there's nothing you can do to get rid of them. "
One can only hope !
The Bill Joy thesis isn't about conventional events you mention, it extrapolates an exponentially-increasing ability to make mass destruction, such as self-replicating nanobots and genetically-engineered epidemics, just in the next 30 years.
The problem is, as he sees it, that big-effect technology is getting easier to make, such as the teenagers in Japan who shut down a good part of the internet worldwide for 10 hours. He postulates the same for bio and nano type "events", and suggests we close the door to such developments, for example, destroying the last existing smallpox samples, rather than keeping them for study. Sounds impractical.
But the question is, what is practical? And how comfortable can we be with the current state of defensive research in these areas?
To me it implies a Manhattan Project approach with survival of the species in mind, not just military domination.
You either try to put on the brakes and hope for the best (Bill Joy), or go all-out to anticipate and engineer defenses, assuming as Robt Metcalf does, that eventually there will be no more secrets. |
