What could actually be achieved if r&d was pumped into biological warfare and all moral concerns were tossed aside?
>>65026057https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_VegetarianAn anon posted this back-when. Basically worst case scenario involved the Eurasian landmass being contaminated and uninhabitable
>>65026057Are you familiar with how mars is a dry lifeless ro k devoid of life? That could happen.
>>65026057Genecaste.
>>65026057Would it be an exaggeration to say that this would be more disastrous than nukes? It’s a lot easier to deploy a man-made plague without the enemy realizing it than it is to launch a nuke that isn’t detected in the atmosphere, so the threat of MAD isn’t really a deterrent
>>65026084The big problem is once the pathogen gets out in the wild it will mutate and spread in unexpected ways and likely become more deadly, or get leaked too soon and only kill old people and Italians, like covid.
>>65026098Would it be theoretically possible to make a virus that can’t mutate? That way it’s spread could be halted more predictably once the targeted population had perished
>>65026108>virus>not mutatelol, lmao. RNA is way too unstable for that shit. viruses pick up and drop random proteins all the time when they're reproducing, and they make enough of themselves that they practically force errors into existence by sheer weight of numbers.
>>65026116It's really neat when you think about it. Also consider how much of our own DNA comes from ancient viruses too.
>>65026057New frontier for MAD and a counter-balancing of non-proliferation doctrine, leading to escalation.If you've heard the motto, "Diversity is our strength", it's because viral diseases targeting common genetics are coming soon.
>>65026108Short answer, no.Long answer is that it would be EXTREMELY hard and actually make a far less effective weapon. Virii are fast mutators by nature. It's how they stay relevant when everyone who catches them will eventually become immune or dead. You'd need to engineer a pruning mechanism that eliminates any virus strain that mutates out of spec. However, the pruning mechanism would also slow the reproduction rate, slowing the spread of the virus. Virulence is also reduced as people knock down the virus more easily.
>>65026057mods will delete this, but Covid was Epstein's dead hand switch. Hence the unpresented totalitarianism, and sudden memory holing.
>>65026057>What could actually be achieved if r&d was pumped into biological warfare and all moral concerns were tossed aside?One scary possibility would be some sort of general subtle extinction thing. Like an airborne HIV style approach where it can infect but cause no symptoms for long periods and the payload specifically targets human gametes (sperm producing cells and eggs/ovum) and nothing else. You'd just sort of see a drop in fertility without anyone immediately realizing why or ever feeling ill, and if the incubation time was measured in years that'd be pretty ugly to deal with. With egg & sperm banks we'd have some runway, and could throw R&D into efforts to create eggs/sperm directly from stem cells and such, but that sort of approach could cause a lot of damage and chaos.Though a multistage bioweapon that just had a high mortality rate after an initial cough that goes away or something would be bad itself, no need for complexity. 10% of the population dying would fuck up Just In Time economies badly.Zombie shit like in RE or anything else is all magical fantasy wizard stuff, but modern human society isn't presently very well equipped to deal with "boring" very slow moving disasters that don't have immediate clear effects, or stuff that fucks with systems. Fortunately the same tech advancement that makes this more scary also makes counter measures more possible, better and better vaccine tech and protection protection and so on.
>>65026084Pretty muchNukes can be targeted, radiation cleaned upPathogens are much, much worse in either regard. Basically uncontrollable, difficult to contain and virtually impossible to get rid of once the containment is breached, unless every viable host either becomes immune or dies
>>65026413That was the plot of a Dan Brown book, Inferno I thinkTL;DR a guy released a virus that rendered 1/3 of the world population infertile, because "muh overpopulation"
>$30 million for a fucking dogWho were his customers for his stupid 60 mph dogs?
>>65026108The technology required to achieve that is in the vicinity of the technology required to create grey goo.
>>65026413>>65026757How hard would it be to weaponize something like that? Easier than targetted biowarfare? Like children of men type shit. I bet it would be WORSE than other forms of MAD. Imagine the whole world just giving up and knowing things would never get better again.The sheer nihilistic violence would be incredible.
Is a Rainbow Six kind of scenario feasible?In the novel the terrorists attempted to release a genetically modified Super Ebola at the Olympics in an attempt to infect the entire world to drive humans extinct
>>65026057Wild grass but genetically modified so that the pollen contains botulinum toxin. You inhale a few grains of pollen and it kills you, no need for a virus or any of the associated complications.
>>65026757>>65026769everyone knows frank herbert for dune but he did some kinda wild other books too. one was called "the white plague" he put out in 1982. american genetics guy has his wife and children killed by ira car bombing, goes insane, creates a plague that kills all women and men are carriers out of revenge. targets it at ireland, england and some terrorist country i forget. wild story. kinda visionary too this was way before human genome project and such
>>65026773No
>>65026057One of the most devastating methods of indiscriminate killing we could reasonably create with today's technology, i think.It doesn't even have to target people - when people feel sick they get help for it, more often than not. That risks early diacovery.Imagine a hyperspreading blight targeting corn or wheat, carried on the winds. Masses of feedstock wiped out before anyone even notices the infection. Food runs out, people die en masse. Systemic strain throwing nations into chaos. Or just something like covid, but worse - fast spread even while incubatory and asymptomatic, killing people at a double digit percentage months after exposure. Bioweapons are nearly impossible to corall once released and the measures required to try would be ruinous.
>>65026773With current tech probably not. There IS a known agent which is dangerous enough to be extinction level: rabies, which as far as I know has had one single case of someone surviving (and they were still crippled) symptomatic stage infection in the entirety of human recorded history (in contrast even the worst ebola is "only" 90% mortality which would still leave hundreds of millions of people). So something that dead looks physically possible. But evolution and the nature of physical reality works against it pretty hard, which is why we don't actually see it IRL. Evolution gets to work on anything multiplying and transmitting, and it's not favorable to kill all hosts. This can potentially be bypassed if you have reservoir species that it doesn't hurt much or at all and death to humans is a "side effect", but in turn such things don't transmit easily and don't work outside wherever the reservoir species itself can live. Outside infection, most stuff doesn't last very well, air is full of oxygen, light is full of UV, stuff dries out. If it kills fast and spreads well it'll get noticed pretty quick and information can spread even faster and stuff gets locked down. If it kills everyone it infects, then it'll burn itself out and everyone else "just" has to wait it out.That's a tight venn diagram of features. Which isn't to say such an effort couldn't do a lot of damage, but literal "extinction" is hard on an entire dynamic world with over 7 billion people when the minimum genetically viable population is like, 50k or something that's relatively a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. The kind of future tech that might make it possible seems to have a high chance to go along with other advances that'd render it harder at the same time.
>>65027371I agree with you that the science fiction versions too often focus on flashy hard to do stuff, vs much more modest boring efforts like as you say targeting food. You don't need a lot of damage to have major ripple effects. That also can potentially get around some of the typical "you can't target bioweapons!" stuff, because we do have pretty significant regional variations in diet and what gets grown. Something that targets wheat would affect the world different than something that targets rice for example. Rice eaters or wheat eaters can work to swap of course, but not instantly, and things that grow well in one environment don't necessarily grow well in another.>Bioweapons are nearly impossible to corall once released and the measures required to try would be ruinous.Eh, I think this is somewhat overdone though, at least depending on target. For anything purely direct human the rich world at least absolutely could near perfectly stop it at proven doable cost if the will was there. A HEPA PAPR+UVC system is completely doable right now at <$2k/unit, probably <$1k/unit at scale, and would provide perfect protection from every single possible airborne pathogen. Given we gave out checks for more than that much money to absolutely everyone obviously we could have invested in that instead.But other sneakier approaches that took politics into account could fuck up a lot of stuff.
>>65027396The only realistic bioweapon in fiction is the Cyberpunk “Monsanto decided to genocide all natural plant life to sell more glyphosate-compatible corn” thingI think it was biotechnica IIRC
Bioweapons are gay. Nukes mog the fuck out of stupid glass vials and coughing
Prevention is the main approach to dealing with plant diseases, as treating them after they develop is difficult. Furthermore, plant defense mechanisms, such as vascular blockage, often lead to self-destruction.
>>65027739I think the main approach for anything that can't be handled with a spray is generally more mass destruction and replanting, at least for crops. As you say treatment can be work intensive, more so then it's worth outside of things of particular significance. Not really scalable for agriculture.We do have tech that could give far more resiliency there but the issue with an attack as always is time, if you can fix the issue with 5 years of work but you only have a few years of runway you're still in trouble.
>>65026057Not much.Losses to diseases dropped like a rock in the 19th century, before most vaccines and predating antibiotica by a century. Public sanitation did it.There are also hard limits to engineering - you want a fast mutating virus evading the immune system and vaccines? Say goodbye to transmission by air. You want a virus that's easily transmitted by air? Get vaccine'd in literal months.You want a fast killer? Burns itself out, outbreak contained. Long incubation period? The enemy's still shooting you.And then there's the problem of delivery: Missile? Kills the agent. Aircraft? If you have air superiority, why not just drop bombs? Human carriers? Congrats, you accidentally your own people.The modern nationstate is absurdly resilient to disease outbreaks, and getting it into a state where it isn't, well, you already won.
>>65027885>The modern nationstate is absurdly resilient to disease outbreaksreally? feels like it's going the opposite direction really everything has been so optimized to remove all slack in the system for max efficiency that we've got lots more single points of failure
>>65026762White women
>>65026068What a load of hogwash. Sounds exactly like British postwar "I helped too!" cope.
The thing is, everything that biological weapons can do, chemical can do it better and controllable. Biological weapon have problems of being too uncontrollable or it dissipate too early.
I still find it funny that in almost thirty years of this series existing, they've only managed to conjure up two even slightly credible buyers for any BOWs. That one eastern european shithole falseflagging them for an excuse to crack down on ethnic minorities, and that group of vaguely fascist Italian terrorists. The former results in the place getting jointly invaded by Russia and NATO like a day after evidence got out, which is also generally the issue with trying to tactically employ biochem. Not even getting into the private army running around that setting that'll bring the ax down on you of their own accord before even the US does it.Seriously though, it really annoys me that the vast majority of the time it's usually the dude making them that either deploys or accidentally leaks the stuff. Takes away the credibility of there actually being any buyers out there when we only see sellers.
>>65027381They intended to release it covertly during the Olympics to infect all of the audience, who'd then go home and infect their communities, then become symptomatic after a week or two, which would all but guarantee a global spread(The plot then gets kinda far-fetched when they also have a vaccine that they intend to distribute, which contains a slow-acting version of the same virus, because they're sponsored by a pharma megacorporation, as a just-in-case measure)In any case, even if you "only" killed like 50% of the population, wouldn't that cause a de-facto collapse of civilization (assuming a roughly even distribution across the world), with the resulting famines and whatnot killing most of the rest?
>>65027396I should have specified sociologically and economically ruinous rather than just generally, i suppose. Look at the response to covid, which was effectively a dry run with a cough. Bungled worldwide in every way imaginable - too severe, not severe enough, half assed and ineffective, exemptions left and right, all becoming a massive sociopolitical issue all over. While i agree that it'd absolutely be doable, there's no chance that people would act accordingly nor that the handling of something like a plague would be planned adequately. California isn't gonna react the same way Texas does to an outbreak in LA vs Dallas, whether on a governmental or individual level. The result, were things truly dire (high mortality and spread), would likely mean marshal law, curfews and a grinding halt to many operations. That in turn would have extreme economic and social impacts.It's very cliché, but one of the greatest threats in an outbreak probably won't be the disease as much as people's reaction to it.
>>65028364Kinda interesting, it occurs to me reading your posts that a pandemic is sort of like a war in regards to imposing a certain amount of "seriousness" on politics that we don't see a whole lot in advanced societies today. War has become one of the, I dunno, "great exposers" I guess? Our technological advancement and built up capital has gotten so great that when it comes to normal life we have stupendous margin for error and suboptimal choices, which seems to have resulted in a lot of people and particularly politicians getting the habit that >"nothing matters we can just decide what reality is and impose that on the world"or variations, how things look and "vibes" ends up dominating more and more. But when you go to war your enemy gets a hard, physical vote. No matter how shiny your military parades and how much propaganda you force on your own population, kinetics cannot be fooled. Incompetence, laziness, corruption, and failure has direct, understandable results. A pandemic is also like that, the disease is just a force of nature and how a society actually responds for real matters. The details are critical. We seem to have gotten worse and worse at taking things seriously and that could be a big deal if we faced something actually really bad.
>>65028119>knowing this little about the insane British WW2 programsThe Brits were fucking insane, I don't mean amazingly good I mean mentally unstable.
>>65028137To be fair not Ukraine got its entire presidential guard taken out by like 10 lickers and they were only stopped by Tyrants, so the BOWs themselves are pretty strong if you can use them without getting caught Also the virus itself has a 90% mortality rate and it can spontaneously spawn lickers and other super mutants not only zombies which are pretty strong too in modern games ( 6 fucking 9mm shots at close range to the head to drop one zombie and they dont actually die they just go into topor mutating into something stronger)
>>65028137>Seriously though, it really annoys me that the vast majority of the time it's usually the dude making them that either deploys or accidentally leaks the stuff.I used to feel this way but after witnessing the last decade of tech startup founder and VC and private equity shenanigans I kinda wonder if it's actually more accurate then I gave it credit for. People pouring tens of billions into shit making no money that might never make any money (or at least nothing like the investment) doing circle jerk mutual buys to drive up share prices without any real sales, with founders who walk the line of genius, insanity, and used car salesman and often do some cool stuff before going off the deep end and shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot with a shotgun? That's sorta uncomfortably not so dark humor anymore.
>>65029194Yeah it was essentially a scorched-earth solution.Goes to show that the taboo against biological weapons is essentially based on the MAD doctrine only moreso because at least with a nuclear decapitation strike there's a theoretical scenario where your opponent isnt able to deliver a counterstrike. But the lead time on biological weapons "kicking in" is such that your enemy has plenty of time to reciprocate in kind.
>>65026098I thought diseases generally mutated into less lethal versions, because when they mutate into something too deadly they tend to burn out faster than they can spread. The exception being diseases that are very deadly but over long timespans, like syphilis or GRIDS, because they still have that window to spread
>>65026057I feel like there's got to be better uses for the biotech that company has other than making zombies and giant mutants
>>65027371>Imagine a hyperspreading blight targeting corn or wheat, carried on the winds. Masses of feedstock wiped out before anyone even notices the infection. Food runs out, people die en masse. Systemic strain throwing nations into chaos.Chinese spies and agents have been repeatedly trying to develop viruses and pests to unleash on US mainland agriculture. The US has also been subject to many waves of invasive species being brought over and causing ridiculous damage that is barely contained even now. There was already a huge ecological collapse when the american chestnut was all but driven extinct by the blighted japanese chestnut, then kudzu, wild hogs, etc. And this isn't even getting into the shit that Bill Gates was doimg trying to develop an airborne virus that makes people allergic to eating meat to force the population into bug eating and veganism because muh cow farts create global warming.People would panic if they knew biowarfare has been already employed against them for decades. They think it's only about zombies and flus.
>>65029854It's amusing that this is exactly the sort of total schizo post (winking at, but not going all the way into obvious 5G MIND CONTROL CHIPS territory) I'd expect to get put up by1: An actual fucking head case.2: An agent of an enemy disinfo op that was actively trying to make people dismiss concerns about biowarfare.
>>65030006They said the same about the coof before all the info came out, calling something a conspiracy theory is basically calling it "true but we can't talk about it yet"
when you think about it, our DNA is just a highly evolved virus
The 3D printed organs, unlimited blood and gene therapy/targeted drug therapies are all fantastic things that will be of military utility.
>>65033174Eukaryotic cells are in a very simplistic way a colony of bacterium and viruses that eventually got stuck together.
