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Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

> While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself

I used to believe this, until the pandemic. Now I think bio weapons are infinitely more dangerous than nukes. Imagine if COVID was a few times more contagious and as deadly as it's close relatives SARS and MERS. Not a big stretch really.

We would be pondering extinction right now. If the power was still working.

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While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in the ranges 10-300 per 100k, meaning under 0.3% in the worst case. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... Not that pandemics cannot be properly devastating. During the bubonic plague up to 50% of the population died in many areas across the world. It was still no threat to humanity though.

A pathogen as deadly as the plague and as mysterious or intractable to medicine as the plague was in the 1200's released into a connected world such as ours would have an astonishing impact.

The threshold that matters isn't extincting humanity, but collapsing modern technological civilization. That's much easier to do.

The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the impact so far was so small. Lots of people are in dire straits, yes, but the world structurally didn't change much.

Very very hard to cause human extinction with a pathogen.

A pathogen could kill fast, in which case some islands would be warned in time to close borders and survive.

Or a pathogen could have a long incubation, in which case it is surely going to be somewhat survivable by some percentage of the population

Making it spread through the atmosphere worldwide, while remaining virulent in sunshine for weeks, would be a hard problem to solve.

Perhaps first deploy a highly contagious virus specific to humans that causes infertility but otherwise no symptoms. That would spread widely before detection. Followed by a highly contagious deadly pathogen that can be transmitted by any mammal: a vector that will kill tribes in remote forests that are out of contact with civilisation.

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