Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

I can take a ploughshare and till a field to feed hundreds - or, alternatively, I can drive that very same ploughshare through your skull. The reason that you came to a particularly nasty and relatively sticky end is clearly not the ploughshare's fault.

I agree with the general consensus expressed in this thread – summed up pretty neatly, IMHO, in the Phantom cow of Justice’s parable - that science plays the role of a tool, and thus is neutral with regards to the question “will it destroy us?”

However, I think humans and general, and even many of us hypographers, have an overblown sense of our technological ability and will to destroy our own species, let alone Earth in its entirety.

Thus, I disagree with the assertion

Originally Posted by Boerseun

Also, Science is already perfectly capable of killing the entire Earth as it is - consider the lowly atomic bomb, for instance.

While the statement

Originally Posted by Boerseun

The distance between blowing up Hiroshima and destroying the entire planet is merely a matter of scale and cost.

is, in principle, true, we can just as truthfully state
the ability to break a stone with a hammer and shatter the earth into a gravitationally unbound swarm of fragments no larger than your fist is merely a matter of scale

As we discussed in the (highly recommended by me) thread “How to destroy the Earth”, if used 100% efficiently, all the nuclear weapons ever made have on the order of a 100-billionth () enough energy to destroy the Earth. Military experts on the subject generally conclude that an “successful” all-out nuclear holocaust would outright kill perhaps 33% of the humans on Earth, with perhaps an additional 75% of the survivors succumbing within a generation to various lethal collapse-of-civilization effects, for a total die-off of about 85%. In numbers of humans, this is equivalent to setting the word population back to about 1800 AD. In biological terms, it’s not a very significant die-off.

Likewise, biological weapon science in the past 30 years has had the humbling realization of the unlikelihood that even the most brilliantly engineered biological weapon is likely to be more lethal than those nature innocently throws our way from time to time. Macrofauna extinction on a practical human timeframe is a much more difficult evil feat than half a century of apocalyptic disaster fiction leads many to believe.

This is not to say that in the future, a human will not be capable of destroying the Earth, or at least all human life on it, but that present day capabilities are many orders of magnitude inadequate.