|
Future Pandemic RisksThe COVID-19 pandemic is just the first modern (since 1918) major pandemic, but there will be far worse ones in the future. This is basically just a small training exercise in comparison. The COVID-19 virus actually does not have a high fatality rate in terms of percentage, including less than 1% in some places, whereby the vast majority of people have fairly mild symptoms. However, a few percent of a large population is a very large number. Unfortunately, in the emerging area of synthetic biology, something far worse could come out of a laboratory. Unlike in history, we now have the technology to modify viruses, and that's exactly what many laboratories are currently doing, trying to modify known viruses to see how they might mutate to infect people other ways, and then trying to create vaccines which work, and getting ahead in the market. However, synthetic biology includes creating completely new viruses which are entirely different from anything humans have experienced before. Never before in history have we had this technological capability. This is new, and it is getting riskier every year. Humans won't go extinct due to nuclear war, nor global warming, nor an asteroid impact, nor many other things. There would always be survivors of those events, though the world may be a very different and difficult place to live in. However, biotechnology, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology are different, and could easily make us extinct on Earth. In my analysis, it's not a matter of whether or not it could happen, it's a matter of when. For more information on that, please see my website on human extinction risks by virus, synthetic biology, biotechnology, or nanotechnology . A permanent solution to the survival of humanity, such as the children and grandchildren of many people on this planet today, and young adults today (which does not include me), is basically colonizing the Moon, especially the poles which have abundant water and other chemicals necessary for life, frozen in shadowed craters in the poles, as covered at permanent.com , Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term .
The author of this website, physicist Mark Prado, is also on the Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation which has the mission of "Safeguarding Humanity". Before, he worked in advanced planning in the Pentagon space program, and did other work which revealed to him just how extremely dangerous the world is becoming. We are a wildly crazy species.
For a directory of pages on this website, please see our SiteMap, where you might find some more things of interest.
You may contact us via our contact page.
|
Menu: Site Map
|
