In
the majority of these Possible Futures posts, I’ll talk about wondrous things
that will make our lives better and easier.
But not all possible futures are so rosy. For example, I’ve talked about genetically
modified plants to produce items to be used around the home. (See Firewood trees and Plastic plants.) While I do believe that genetically modified
organisms could – and hopefully will – drastically change life for the better,
I don’t want it to seem like I’m complete blasé about the matter and that
genetically modified organisms could only be used for good. And that’s a key thing I think many people
forget when it comes to genetically modified organisms. Technology is neither good nor bad, it’s how
it’s used. For example, a rocket that
launches a weather satellite to help better predict the path of hurricanes,
could also launch a nuke to anywhere in the world.
Genetically
modified organisms can be used to increase food production, create medicines,
provide useful items around the house, and they could be used by some nutjob to
unleash a plague. Biological warfare is
not new. In days of old they’d catapult
the corpses of plague victims into a besieged town, but nowadays it’s a bit
more sophisticated. As the technology to
modify organisms gets better, and cheaper, the day may come when the guy down
the block stops making meth and downloads the DNA of Ebola and gets to
work. You may say that there are rules
and regulations about biological agents, but what happens when the “arms” we’re
allowed to keep and bear are extended to mutated anthrax, you know, for duck hunting?
***
An
earlier version of this post appeared on Persona Paper in January 2015.
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