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Comment by stevemadere | Hacker News Reader

To all the folks who are so concerned about bad actors trying to develop organisms that will harm people:

Have you forgotten that the world is full of bad actors who are literally trying to eat people? There are not merely thousands of them but hundreds of trillions of them.

They spend all day long everyday trying to find a random path to something that can eat you.

It is the height of hubris to imagine that humans could outcompete that.

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> They spend all day long everyday trying to find a random path to something that can eat you

It's more subtle than that. They spend all day every day trying to perpetuate themselves, which incidentally may be helped by eating you, but probably isn't. Much better to let you fly around the world and let you help them spread onto more surfaces.

> Have you forgotten that the world is full of bad actors who are literally trying to eat people?

Your premise here is false. If X thing is bad, a number of other people doing it doesn’t make it OK. If anything, it makes it worse, not better. If all your friends jumped off the edge of a cliff to suicide, would you do it?

Humans alone? Maybe not today. Humans and those organisms joining forces? I don't see how that would make the danger lesser than the random walk of those organisms unaided.

You're right. We should abolish anti-terrorism laws. Or rules outlawing murder for that matter.

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