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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Nukes have signatures. This does not. Just a little aerosol in your general vicinity would likely do the job and you'd never be the wiser. Besides that it is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to do this than build a nuke once you can mail order for genetic sequences delivered to your door.

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The Problems with Bioweapons (and you need bio here, either a bacteria or virus that delivers the crispr genedrive, a single spray won't be enough), is that they evolve.

Your super virus that you developed to only kill people living in southern florida? Yeah, that now developed to also kill people in new york. And now it's the whole world.

That's not how it works.

It would work like this: you'd design a bioweapon to hit the Jewish people exclusively (they're the punchball of history, forgive me using them again as an example but I think it is a likely occurrence if this sort of thing is to happen). Then it will may evolve to hit others.

Sorry but I don’t understand how your point differs? I think the gist was that it’s weaponized for a certain group and then evolves to target a much wider group. Isn’t that the same thing as you mentioned?

I purposely didn't select any specific ethnicity or other genetic factor to avoid tapping into stereotypes or causing offence (except to people living in Florida, sorry but not sorry).

Genetic weapons will use genetic factors.

Correct but nobody has proved that new yorkers don't have a common mutation that forces them to live in that city.

You don't need to prove nonsense. You also can't prove the absence of nonsense.

Correct, but I can substitute potentially offensive or offputting labels with nonsense to get a point across.

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