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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (5435)	10/16/2001 2:48:51 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi MSI; No, I'm not worried (for the survival of the human race) by bio weapons. It's pretty obvious now that Anthrax is not a particularly horrible weapon of war. That it's the only one that the US combat forces are immunized against would suggest that bio weapons aren't that big of a deal. Maybe in the future, but I doubt it. In our fairly distant past, on the other hand, there are plenty of successful examples of the use of bio weapons. Since then the advantage has been entirely to the defender. Humans have a tendency to fear obscure and rare ways of dying. We get frightened by ebola "epidemics" that leave 99.9% of the people in cities untouched, and this in cities where the medical care consists of routinely using the same unsterilized needle to inject vitamins into dozens of sick children. A handful of deaths is a tragedy, millions of deaths are just a statistic. The fact is that we're all doomed to die, but statistics would indicate that bio terror is unlikely to be the agent. Just looking at (my guess of) the numbers, the big danger is starvation / exposure due to military action. Somewhere below that is death by bombs dropped by aircraft, and then mines and artillery, and finally small arms fire. Oh, and a few hundred thousand people were killed by nuclear weapons in the past 100 years. By the way, I agree with Hawkmoon about the ineffectiveness of a terrorist attack with radioactive dust. It's a good way of really pissing off the population, but ineffective at killing. (Most applications of force against civilians are like that. The funny thing is that the same applications of force against the military is much more likely to be politically effective. Why is that?) Humans think of themselves as being so frail, but the fact is that we are brutally tough competitors, from an ecological viewpoint. Go ask a spotted owl, a killer whale or a lion about what humans are like. On a modern battlefield almost everything once living, even the trees, is dead, dead, dead, but the humans are mostly alive. And they're shooting at each other. The reason is because humans are better at survival than any other large animal. Once a planet gets infected with humans there's nothing you can do to get rid of them. You might as well just wait for the star it orbits around to go red giant. -- Carl