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Comment by bglazer | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count.

I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. All of these interact and define a design space that nature has been searching for at unimaginable scale for as long as humans have existed. And yet here we are! Seems like “wiping humanity” might be really hard, perhaps impossible for a virus.

Perhaps I’m being uncharitable or insufficiently creative, but these people strike me as deeply unserious in their engagement with the actually real physical world of biology.

EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?

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But a virus's "goal" would not be to wipe out a species, that would be a dead end. Nature has explored flight on an unimaginable scale, yet our machines fly better (at least in most aspects) than birds, some even go to space.

I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds. Our flying machines combust jet fuel, birds can fly by ATP. Not to mention earth-destructing.

And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)

> I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds

This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds!

You have to look at the energy spent for moving a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits)

For a plane that’s roughly 80 tonnes of kerosene for 170 tonnes dry weight on a similar distance (787). Energy density of fat and kerosene are actually pretty close so you can just look at the kg of fuel burned per kg of payload for the trip. For a bird that’s 1kg of fuel per kg transported and for the plane that’s ~0.5kg per kg. So roughly twice as efficient.

So from a pure energy point of view it’d be more efficient to put all the migratory birds in a 787 than letting them fly on their own!

Fascinating! Though how much of that would be due to a birds baseline metabolism? Wouldn’t be a fair comparison if that includes the birds basic energy costs of living.

Did some quick maths, it’s roughly 10% for the bird (2W, approx. 4g/day of fat, over 10 days) so not negligible but doesn’t change the full story.

And you could argue the plane also has a baseline metabolism ;)

Haha thanks for the check, I am, tbh, pretty surprised. It's within the same order of magnitude, which is interesting too.

To be completely fair to the birds, I think a lot of this comes from the fact that what matters for flying efficiency gets better as you size up thanks to the square-cube law: the drag is reduced and the engine efficiency increases.

You could not scale down a plane to the size of a bird and match their efficiency. On the other hand you also couldn’t scale a bird to the size of a plane so I guess we can call it even!

Yes, but also viruses do not actually have goals as such - maybe 'replicate' could be their only goal. So a virus _could_ come up with a mutation that kills all its hosts, it just dies out as well in the process. Not very reassuring for the host!

As a slight aside - since I was talking about the weakness of biological analogy on HN recently - the way humans fly is very very different to how (most) birds do. If nanomachines actually could be built by humans (non-biological nanomachines) they might be as different to virus/cells/organisms as plane wings are to bird wings.

Of course, also please do not prompt a frontier model to make nanomachines, either, thankyou.

Biology is very messy and very data constrained. We think that human anatomy works one way- but surgery and radiology are hard because every human is very different.

Missing organs, odd tissue performing unclear functions, different, new or missing muscles.

It’s unclear whether a world ending virus is even possible. There might be better luck with prions, or fungi.

yes - I don't want to publicize what I know. I worked briefly at a leading university bio lab. It's haunted me for awhile that it would only take 1 disgruntled postdoc to wipe out humanity. There are {AI things} now that will tell you how.

I currently work in a chemical biology lab and I don’t think one disgruntled postdoc could wipe out humanity.

Also disgruntled is more or less unnecessary when combined with postdoc. Sort of goes without saying.

Are you asking for humanity to be wiped out so you can win an argument on the internet?

I'm going to remove specific reference because I think even being directed to the right thing is dangerous. You are right.

Was that also the case before AI? Or is it novel?

The obvious argument is that natural organisms are restricted in ways that artificial ones are not (e.g. natural viruses are not selected to kill their host too quickly, natural selection can only reach solutions which can be reached incrementally).

>EDIT: Also, in this world, couldn’t an AI just “one shot” a vaccine and an effective treatment?

This does not follow automatically. E.g. it is enormously easier to create an ICBM than to create something capable of intercepting an ICBM. Some technologies naturally benefit an attacker and some naturally benefit a defender.

Same idiots think folks are at risk from firearms printed from a desktop PLA 3d printer

An AI doesn't need to kill even nearly 100% of humanity in order to render us a non-threat.

Also there are plenty of doomer scenarios along the lines of e.g. some ethnosupremacist cult making a virus that kills everyone outside of their group.

One of the scariest science fiction stories I've ever read is "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert... yeah, the Dune guy. In this story a molecular biologist's family is murdered in a terrorist event, goes insane, and decides to create a plague that is carried by men but kills women, so that everyone else has to experience the loss he did. It's not scary because the story is any more particularly filled with death or destruction or gore or other viscerally scary things like that. It was scary because as I was reading it, there was no hole in the logic I could take refuge in. There's simply no reason that book can't happen.

And that was my reaction 15 or 20 years ago. It is only harder to poke holes in the logic now than it was then.

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