Quote Originally Posted by OH58D View Post
There's always been the natural process of extinctions and plagues. In northern Europe and Scandinavia, there was still a massive Bubonic plague outbreak in Denmark and Sweden between 1709 and 1713, when it had already ended with most of the major nearby countries.

Now we have a new factor in potential man made bio weapons getting loose in the general population and creating a pandemic. Humans will kill themselves off despite what happens in nature.
Our days our numbered no matter what. Earth will only support animal life for another 500 million years or so and if in that time we haven't found a habitable alternative and the means to get there, we are done. And even if we find some "new Earth" that planet will have a finite period where it will support life.

And it's not a game we can play forever no matter how good out tech becomes. Then there is the problem of us, will we still be the same species in 100 million years let alone 500 million. The more tech dependent we become (and that is our tendency) the less sustainable we become when subjected to our actual environment.

And sure, we might fall victim to our new wonder weapons, we came close a few times in the 20th century of going into a full scale nuclear exchange. Cuban Missile crisis and Able Archer exercises probably would not have led to extinction, but it would have been really, really bad.

We also need to remember viruses are a life form, a life form that is ever evolving and like other life forms has a DNA mandate to reproduce and succeed. People tend to view them as some kind of random threat like a land mine. We don't really need to have a bio weapon escape the lab, there is plenty of bad shit already out in the wild that continues to adapt and evolve. We didn't invent AIDS, but it happened anyway and if it happened in the 17th century we might not have survived it.

And even if we do nothing wrong, which generally goes against human nature, while we are busy improving our bio habitat, we could take a gamma ray burst from some previously unknown source and still get checked out. Nature is an inconsiderate bastard.