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0 pointsbh4216y ago0 comments

Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds.

Fuel, jet fuel.

Biology doesn't produce the wheel.

Tumble weeds? Insects which curl up into a wheel to quickly roll away from danger? Can a car drive up stairs?

Indeed if we genetically engineered a large animal to run on gasoline AND provided it with an ample supply of gasoline, it would move faster than anything else... as long as it had gasoline.

If we engineered a bacterium to eat oil and/or gasoline and dispersed in the gulf.... already there, eating oil, consuming the oxygen in the water in the process.

If we added it to an oil well... already there, lots of bacteria deep within the earth, eating everything from metal to methane. Probably not consuming the world's oil reserve only for lack of oxygen or any other oxidizer.

...some possibilities, some terrifying.

Ebola, HIV, the flu de jour all quite terrifying, all 100% natural.

And unlike you, they don't care. They will keep evolving and trying to kill you as fast and as hard as they can, every minute of every day.

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WilliamLP16y ago· 1 in thread

> Ebola, HIV, the flu de jour all quite terrifying, all 100% natural.

If you can't imagine anything more terrifying than those, it is a failure of imagination. See Jared Diamond's point about how when humans and large animals coevolved gradually in Africa, the animals could gradually adapt, whereas when fully evolved homo sapiens were introduced in the rest of the world 40,000 years ago, almost all the megafauna were killed off almost immediately.

> They will keep evolving and trying to kill you as fast and as hard as they can,

Thankfully, this is wrong. Diseases that kill you quickly are at a severe disadvantage.

bh42OP16y ago

I can easily imagine an HIV that's as easy to transmit as the common cold.

Franky we got lucky with HIV, it could have been something like that and we along with cheetahs and a few other species don't have much genetic diversity within the species and are thus susceptible to extinction via disease.

This is why I want the biotech pedal to the metal. Because in my opinion the probably of us accidental creating something horrific are far less then something horrific being created quite naturally. Like in some shared living space with humans and domestic animals, it could happen in any given moment and spread quickly around the world. We don't need labs to die of something horrible.

ars16y ago

> Indeed if we genetically engineered a large animal to run on gasoline AND provided it with an ample supply of gasoline, it would move faster than anything else... as long as it had gasoline.

Do you think gasoline is magic? Gasoline has almost exactly the same energy content as fat. Tons of animals have access to fat.

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