Good post, but I’m not sure I agree with the implications around bioengineered viruses. While I agree we might build defenses that keep overall death rate low, biological and psychological constraints make these defenses pretty unappealing.
You mentioned that while biotech makes it easier for people to develop viruses, it also makes it easier to develop vaccines. But if the ability to create viruses becomes easy for bad actors, we might need to create *hundreds* of different vaccines for the hundreds of new viruses. Even if this works, taking hundreds of vaccines doesn’t sound appealing, and there are immunological constraints on how well broad spectrum vaccines will ever work.
In the face of hundreds of new viruses and the inability to vaccinate against all of them, we’ll need to fall back to isolation or some sort of sterilizing tech like ubiquitous UV. I don’t like isolation, and I don’t like how ubiquitous UV might create weird autoimmune issues or make us especially vulnerable to breakthrough transmissions.
Good post, but I’m not sure I agree with the implications around bioengineered viruses. While I agree we might build defenses that keep overall death rate low, biological and psychological constraints make these defenses pretty unappealing.
You mentioned that while biotech makes it easier for people to develop viruses, it also makes it easier to develop vaccines. But if the ability to create viruses becomes easy for bad actors, we might need to create *hundreds* of different vaccines for the hundreds of new viruses. Even if this works, taking hundreds of vaccines doesn’t sound appealing, and there are immunological constraints on how well broad spectrum vaccines will ever work.
In the face of hundreds of new viruses and the inability to vaccinate against all of them, we’ll need to fall back to isolation or some sort of sterilizing tech like ubiquitous UV. I don’t like isolation, and I don’t like how ubiquitous UV might create weird autoimmune issues or make us especially vulnerable to breakthrough transmissions.