It might be that governments are the cause of new bio weapons being
unleashed on populations. Look at the South African attempts at race
selective weapons.
Or closer to home, the AIDS connection.
See:
QUEER BLOOD: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot by Alan Cantwell Jr., M.D., published
by ARIES Rising Press, P.O. Box 29532, Los Angeles, California, 90029 $12.95 (Telephone: 213-462-6458)
for one view of this.
Best Ralph
At 06:56 AM 7/1/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Anders Sandberg [asa@nada.kth.se] wrote:
>>I think you underestimate the problem (I call it the problem of
>>destruction). Nukes are local disasters, but other weapons of mass
>>destruction are global disasters (like bioweapons for
>>example).
>
>I don't. Bioweapons haven't proven very successful in reality, and I don't
>see why they should be a global disaster; sure, they spread, but in most
>cases they either spread so slowly that cures can be found or so fast that
>they wipe out the carriers before they get very far. I'm sure we can breed
>some bioweapons to wipe out the vast majority of humans if we try hard
>enough, but it will take a lot of work and a lot of money.
>
>>Note that the real worry is crazies, rational evil people don't do
>>anything that would wipe themselves out or cause an enraged humanity
>>to track them down.
>
>And, outside governments, crazies with mass destruction weapons are quite
>rare; crazies tend not to amass the amount of money required to build
>weapons which can kill millions or billions of people.
>
>>there is no way of
>>protecting oneself from a nuclear fireball (other than hiding in a
>>nuclear bunker all the time).
>
>Nonsense. There is a very easy way to protect yourself; don't be there
>when it happens. There are many obvious nuclear targets on this planet,
>and avoiding those reduces the level of danger by many orders of
>magnitude.
>
>>In
>>the extreme case there exists some technology that allows you to
>>destroy the world from the comfort of your home;
>
>So what? If it exists then you get off Earth. I don't see why we should
>keep trying to play King Canute rather than accept reality and deal with
>it. If that technology exists it will be used regardless of all the
>precautions you may take to prevent it; if you're there you're dead. So
>make sure you're not there.
>
> Mark
>
>
Ralph Lewis, Professor of Management and Human Resources
College of Business
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, California
rlewis@csulb.edu http://www.csulb.edu/~rlewis