• Question: could humans create a disease that could wipe out humanity

    Asked by midget to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Yo Yehudi

      Yo Yehudi answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Probably! There are diseases that have wiped out huge amounts of humanity already in the past, like various historical plagues. More recently, we’ve seen how fast ebola can spread in Africa – really scary stuff. We might not even need to create something for it to wipe us out – it could be that it mutates naturally.
      On the other side of things, there’s always a chance that remote areas might not be affected by the Big Bad Virus, so humanity might survive anyway.

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      I think it’s more likely that we’ll accidentally spread a preexisting disease so far that it almost wipes us out. At the end of WW1, an outbreak of Spanish flu killed almost one in every twenty people then on earth and infected 500 million; the Black Death in the mid-1300s may have killed over half the people in Europe – with modern air travel it wouldn’t be hard for a lethal disease like these to spread far and wide. We have much, much better medical care now than then of course, and disease-causing organisms tend to avoid being so deadly they kill everyone they meet (they can’t spread if they do), so it’s probably unlikely the disease would wipe us out entirely. But, look on the dark side, it might lead to wars or starvation that would get the people the plague missed..!

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