From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 02:54:18 MDT
On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> Well, I might sound a bit anachronistic but the good old physical barriers
> are still likely to be enormously effective against any bioweapons the
You, of course, realize that this lacks the familiar smell of security by
snakeoil, and doesn't come with flashy hitech image (mind scanners!
biometrics! mana flux detectors!), so it's unlikely to be implemented.
> non-SI attackers could make. Face masks, hand washing, eradication of rats,
> and mosquitoes, netting over beds, DDT spraying, quarantine - all these will
> make most attacks manageable (meaning - non-existential), except for the
> stealthed ones, with an ostensibly innocuous microbe spreading freely, and
> then converting into a virulent form (could be done with a telomere-based
> generation counter). Luckily, this is still some way off in the future.
We're not very far away from blanket DNA screens for pathogens. At some
point not very far into the future we might even see total sequencing
become trivial in cost, and be implemented as routine test.
I think by the time we can engineer such stealthy pathogens we will be
ready to detect them, and bubble up (physical barriers) in time. Low-tech
people, obviously, will be so screwed.
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