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Comment by throwuxiytayq | Hacker News Reader

We don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.

I think that the difference may be that there's relatively little benefit or desire to researching children falling out of planes and we have fairly easy ways to study the question indirectly (accelerometers, cadaver studies, animal studies, etc.).

Also, there are numerous examples throughout history of people performing evil human studies; so while people may not have studied children falling from planes, people have studied equivalent things.

We actually did, it's a solved problem.

Research bans do not inherently work.

Treaties need enforced, and the Streisand effect and arms-race dynamic play into the game theory as well.

There is no potential profit in researching that, this isn’t the case with mirror chirality organisms.

Without directly addressing your proposed experiment, the history of aviation was filled with all sorts of grotesque experiments on humans. Absolutely disgusting stuff, like suffocating people to simulate high altitude flight. There was an ethical quandary about whether to use this data (IE, as citations).

but would a ban really stop somebody from trying?

If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.

That is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.

We're not talking about a targeted weapon, we're talking about accidentally unleashing an unstoppable global pandemic. If only China is risking that, the odds are better for everyone.

Why wouldn't they make it into a targeted weapon? Us humans turn everything else into a weapon.

We are talking about an all-infecting pandemic. You can certainly weaponize it, if you think global collapse sounds fun. What you can't do is target it.

If you and only you (and maybe some allies) also make an antidote or vaccine, it is targeted at everyone who doesn't. And that is a huge blackmail opportunity.

OFC, if any leader worth their salt will respond with "Hell NO, if you threaten us again with that, or we find any sign it is released, we'll nule everything in your land and anywhere it is found. Even if a vaccine/antidote works for humans, destroying the animal & plant populations would just result in the surving humans to die slower of starvation.

Thinking about this for a few seconds, it is really pointless, and maybe one of the most serious examples of "Just because you can do it, think hard about whether you should do it". The answer is Fck NO. (And I'm almost always in favor of tech advances.)

Because wiping out all of the world's importers/exporters would cripple China.

If they somehow survive of course.

it can be targeted during war.

By something liable to end human life when it inevitably adapts?

It actually makes sense to just go ahead and go to war with anyone who works on such weapons.

This sort of rhetoric is disgusting, and likely the exact sort that will lead to mass death incidents in our lifetime. I hope you think about that when such comes to pass.

I'll die happy, knowing "I told you so."

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