Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64839

by amichail • 19 years ago

3 22 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is such a thing feasible? Would you classify it as terrorism?

SamReidHughes• 19 years ago

I'd classify it as hubris.

aristus2• 19 years ago

Idiotically dangerous, for two reasons. The qualities you would eliminate are the very ones that help our survival as a species. Second, and more important, wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause.

amichail3• 19 years ago

...wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause.

So what would happen if war is never an option?

aristus2• 19 years ago

You're begging the question. There is no 'be violent' chemical in our brains. It's a complex emergent behavior. So your hypothetical virus would either be ineffective, or so effective it make the organism (that's YOU) unable to feed itself.

karzeem2• 19 years ago

"Wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources."

Often, but not always. The security dilemma is another major cause of wars.

phony_identity• 19 years ago

>> Always.

No, rarely. The Second World War was party about resources, in that Hitler wanted lebensraum, and the proximal cause for the USA getting into the war was Imperial Japan's desire for the oil and territory of the Dutch East Indies. But Japan only wanted to take that because its wars of conquest got it embargoed. Had it stayed peaceful it could have just bought the oil, a much cheaper prospect. So, it's more like the oil was an issue because of the war, not the need for oil causing the war. However, Vietnam, Korea, WWI, the American civil war, and the war for independence... what resouces are you talking about?

Zak• 19 years ago

Have you seen Serenity? It was the bad guys who tried something like that.

stuki2• 19 years ago

....Imagine how powerful you could get by finding a cure for that virus....

amichail3• 19 years ago

Cures take time and scientists can work on many such viruses -- though you would need to ensure that being infected by several such viruses does not yield bad results.

stuki2• 19 years ago

Once you found a cure, you could pick up a sword, or boxcutter, and force scientists to stop coming up with new viruses.

CamonZ• 19 years ago

Yeah.... that idea is never gonna backfire at you and wipe out all the human race

as• 19 years ago

There's an experimental webcomic about an alternate history of the afghan war where the military develops a spy network of millions of robotic spiders, but for lack of operators decides to open source their operation on the internet.

Among other novel uses of tech in warfare, they deploy an 'empathogenic' aerosol which goes to work on the empathy centers of the brain, making people permanently unable to kill. The story revolves around an American soldier who was accidentally exposed to it. See: http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/3.5/10_knife.html and http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/3.5/000_hospital.html and http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/3.5/11_epilogue.html

amalcon• 19 years ago

Not being a biologist, add a grain of salt and all that, but...

Of course not! It's just not even remotely feasible. There are two reasons, but I'll start with the big one.

We have shown a marked inability to micromanage "changing human nature for the better." We just don't understand enough about the brain to make e.g. violent criminals stop being violent, using psychology, drugs, surgery, or anything else really. See any crime statistics you like on the subject. The one exception is wherein we can stop someone from being violent, by basically stopping them from doing anything -- not a desirable outcome as applied to the entire human population.

The second reason it's not feasible is, well... What happens to the one guy who finds out about this, and spends a year in his basement becoming completely immune to the vector? People are resistant to gene therapy vectors from time to time, with no deliberate action. Deliberate action just makes this scenario more likely.

Eliminating violence is a nice sentiment, but this methodology is just not even remotely feasible. Ethics are a whole other can of worms.

jkush• 19 years ago

It's feasible, but not terrorism. If developed, aggressive humans would use it as just another tool to stay in power.

shiro• 19 years ago

You may find Stephen King's short, "The end of the whole mess" interesting. The point is how to define "better nature".

karzeem2• 19 years ago

Well, if nothing else, it would probably be one of the weirdest applications YC has ever gotten.

sanj• 19 years ago

The story is called "The Giving Plague", by David Brin:

http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague1.html

cellis• 19 years ago

What if by trying to deploy said virus, you started a war? Because not everyone, myself included, wants to lose their warmaking ability and/or skills.

jadams• 19 years ago

Feasible, no. Terrorism, no. Immoral, yes. Desireable, maybe.

cmars232• 19 years ago

I'd take such an action as a declaration of war on my own free will, and act accordingly.

Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

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