If one individual has the means to deflect an asteroid onto collision course with Earth, another individual—let alone a team, a company or a government—will have the means to deflect it away again.
I’m not so sure.
Once upon a time, if an animal wanted to kill another animal, the only way to do it was to actually go up to the victim and break their neck, tear their guts out, or the like. Once proto-humans came along, they (we) devised rock-throwing, spears, and other techniques of killing at a moderate distance. Later, bows and ballistae; still later, guns; and so on.
The fact that we have invented nukes does not mean that we have invented the ability to protect against nukes. The fact that we have invented Anthrax Leprosy Mu¹ does not mean that we have invented the ability to protect against it. In general, technology has frequently favored the attacker, such that modern geopolitics is dominated not by fortifications to render a defender immune from any attack, but by the threat of retaliation from the defender or defender’s allies: mutually assured destruction.
Human intuition is indeed so constituted to find that line of argument persuasive, but reality differs. Genghis Khan killed more people than Hitler (even in absolute numbers, let alone as a fraction of people alive at the time). The Mongol sack of Baghdad killed more people than the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki all put together. Synthetic diseases add nothing to the picture; nature throws incurable diseases at us all the time. The 1918 flu killed more people in one year than all man’s ingenuity had done in four. If SARS hadn’t been stopped by quarantine, it would have killed more people than any human agency in history.
And yet the meme that individual power is the danger we must fear, may yet prove deadlier than all of those combined. No weapon, no disease, has by itself the power to extinguish the future. A sufficiently appealing and plausible sounding meme just might.
Here is one of the more conservative estimates, putting 40 million on Genghis Khan’s account, which suffices to establish the original claim. (The total for World War II is somewhat higher, but includes all theaters of the war—and is of course much smaller as a fraction of people alive at the time.) Higher end estimates are necessarily less precise, but I’ve seen it suggested that the Mongol invasion of China alone may have caused up to 60 million deaths (out of a total population of 120 million) once the famines resulting from disruption of agriculture are fully accounted for.
I’m not so sure.
Once upon a time, if an animal wanted to kill another animal, the only way to do it was to actually go up to the victim and break their neck, tear their guts out, or the like. Once proto-humans came along, they (we) devised rock-throwing, spears, and other techniques of killing at a moderate distance. Later, bows and ballistae; still later, guns; and so on.
The fact that we have invented nukes does not mean that we have invented the ability to protect against nukes. The fact that we have invented Anthrax Leprosy Mu¹ does not mean that we have invented the ability to protect against it. In general, technology has frequently favored the attacker, such that modern geopolitics is dominated not by fortifications to render a defender immune from any attack, but by the threat of retaliation from the defender or defender’s allies: mutually assured destruction.
¹ or any other biological warfare agent
Human intuition is indeed so constituted to find that line of argument persuasive, but reality differs. Genghis Khan killed more people than Hitler (even in absolute numbers, let alone as a fraction of people alive at the time). The Mongol sack of Baghdad killed more people than the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki all put together. Synthetic diseases add nothing to the picture; nature throws incurable diseases at us all the time. The 1918 flu killed more people in one year than all man’s ingenuity had done in four. If SARS hadn’t been stopped by quarantine, it would have killed more people than any human agency in history.
And yet the meme that individual power is the danger we must fear, may yet prove deadlier than all of those combined. No weapon, no disease, has by itself the power to extinguish the future. A sufficiently appealing and plausible sounding meme just might.
[citiation needed]
Here is one of the more conservative estimates, putting 40 million on Genghis Khan’s account, which suffices to establish the original claim. (The total for World War II is somewhat higher, but includes all theaters of the war—and is of course much smaller as a fraction of people alive at the time.) Higher end estimates are necessarily less precise, but I’ve seen it suggested that the Mongol invasion of China alone may have caused up to 60 million deaths (out of a total population of 120 million) once the famines resulting from disruption of agriculture are fully accounted for.
Thank you.