The sad, scary fact is that we live in a world where accidental diseases have already been created that approach 100%/100% contagious/lethality (or end-stage effect) in their targeted hosts. This isn't science fiction. I wish it was, but it's not.
I know that at least three of these diseases were created as an accidental byproduct of legitimate medical research. No, I can't describe them, as I am under several non-disclosure agreements.
I suspect that eventually something like this will get out and into the human population.
It's hard to imagine something that always kills everyone who contracts it, and that always infects everyone exposed. It's easy to imagine something killing most people, or simply rendering them susceptible to something else, or sterilizing or blinding almost every mammal on the planet or something like that.
The havok something like that would play on national infrastructure suggests that even two weeks of nationwide shutdonw/disruption would result in a downward spiral from which we (i.e. the West) could not recover.
As an example of potential chaos, the CDC recently released a plan wherein, in the case of pandemic flu, airline flight attendants would be allowed to diagnose and refer to quarantine anyone they suspected was sick. !!! Think about it - IF a very contagious and lethal disease began spreading through the population, the US government is willing to consider letting people with no medical training decide who goes into three-day quarantine and who can go free. Doctors? Test kits? Nah. Just flight attendants.
When you fly as often as I do, you come to the realization that most flight attendants are only marginally smarter than bugs, and not very well equipped to deal with anything more traumatic than a noisy child.
There are no medical facilities for holding people at airports in the US. I'm not sure they'd even have the authority (let alone the capability) to stop people from leaving anyway. I guess airport security could shoot folks, but that wouldn't lend itself to controlling a chaotic situation.
In other words, the capability to wipe ourselves out is well established (including the nuclear problems already mentioned). The ability to defend against or mitigate a nationwide catastrophe is not.
Blah!
TZ
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So how do you see it all ending?
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by mista_mo
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