AHC: Plausible Near Total Extinction of Humans (No ASB/Space objects)

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
I think this thread is in danger of producing effective, non-ASB solutions. It seems no one with actual specialist knowledge have offered solutions, but it should be closed before this happens.

There is very little chance that someone would post classified data here, even sensitive is also quite unlikely.

Your concern is, however, not entirely misplaced, although not in quite the manner you phrased it. If you ever what to have the absolute %$#^ scared out of you, go to either a University or really well funded public library and take a look at the materials that are openly available and the message boards that are available to "professionals and students". Even do some digging around on the 'Net and you will find plenty of Boards where BIOENGINEERING is openly discussed by "advanced amateurs", down to reagents, growth mediums, and tinkering with viruses and bacteria.

The cost of this sort of work is dropping every day, and the efforts that were once the domain of Nobel Laureates is now basement lab accessible.
 
As the title says, is there a plausible way of making a huge majority (99/100) of humans dead?

Not really.

HIV is probably about the only virus known with a death toll that high - and it is hard to spread.

If you're looking at a virus, you require high infection rates (number of new cases from a single patient), long incubation period (so quarantines can't be put in place), and a mortality rate that's up there with the very worst.

We simply don't have the understanding to be able to engineer such a virus, and the chances of it evolving on its own are astronomically small.

-------
Nuclear war.
Would kill a lot of people, sure. Most people, if it were bad enough. All of them? How? You'd need to add Cobalt (or whatever) layers to your Hbombs (which they don't have now) to get that kind of thing.

----
Yellowstone/Deccan traps
Piffle.
Sure you get that kind of death toll on the (sub) continent where it occurred, and massive death toll elsewhere. But 99% of humanity? Nope. No way.

---
Heck, even a Chicxulub level impact would only destroy MOST humans.

---

So. Probably ASB?

Destroying the majority of humans is 'easy'. Destroying civilization is 'easy'. Getting that kind of death toll is NOT. Humans are resilient and adaptive, and are harder to stomp out than cockroaches.
 
There is very little chance that someone would post classified data here, even sensitive is also quite unlikely.

Your concern is, however, not entirely misplaced, although not in quite the manner you phrased it. If you ever what to have the absolute %$#^ scared out of you, go to either a University or really well funded public library and take a look at the materials that are openly available and the message boards that are available to "professionals and students". Even do some digging around on the 'Net and you will find plenty of Boards where BIOENGINEERING is openly discussed by "advanced amateurs", down to reagents, growth mediums, and tinkering with viruses and bacteria.

The cost of this sort of work is dropping every day, and the efforts that were once the domain of Nobel Laureates is now basement lab accessible.
I know:
No need to post classified data. All of this is publicly available in databases.
Most of the generally available schemes are amateur works and they don't/wont work or will be to complex to be copied by an amateur. Need extensive development. Or just as likely, the amateur cannot tell sense from nonsense. That is not really scary.
Maybe I am just being paranoid and nothing sensible will come from this.
 
The cost of this sort of work is dropping every day, and the efforts that were once the domain of Nobel Laureates is now basement lab accessible.

These days, biotech is experiencing the same growth of early personal computers. In IT we went from 4KB single board, keyboard programmed computers to 400$ notebooks than would kick an early Cray ass in little more than 30 years. Using the same "Moore Law" by 2050 the only thing between a a biotech hobbiest and smallpox will be torrenting from some dark net site the variola-major.dat file.

Mass extinction thru a bioengineered pandemia is one of my solutions to Fermi Paradox. Say hello to the Great Filter :D.
 
Top