lizardkid wrote:well rook, think about it. most mechanical inventions are worn, cars and robitic industry come to mind, so the next big obstacle, one of Earth's last, is biological. we're still working on the DNA code, bioengineering is on the rise, it's the new magic. imagine an experiment that bolstered your memory 100x without side-effects? or, liek tom said, something that placifies an opponent?
a zombie outbreak would be EXTREMELY difficult to engineer, how would it spread besides those few zombies? how would you manage to control them or make them smart enough to control themselves?
seems unlikely to me, at least in hte common sense. i can see a cranial poison, but not a zombie outbreak.
Sure! lets see what you say 28 days later!
lol, seriously, making such a virus infectious would have to be simpler then actually causing it in the first place. People are looking into these sort of things, and have been for a long time, in essence to cure psychosis and dementia effects. TO cure things you need to know how it works, thus its a two way street, although I dont think this is a realistic fear... like for example... an enormous asteroid WILL hit the earth in the future likely killing most of its population(unless it is redirected before it gets here) and the sun WILL go supernova one day and render the earth pretty much useless. A plaguelike virus that causes dementia or psychosis or especially more advanced mind altering effects is only something that could be feasible, not an ievitability.
But bio-engineering is not the only wave of the future, mechanical and technical fields are not tapped out by any means. Especially fields like bio-mechanical and minitiarization.
for hog's post.... Bio-mechanical stuff does have uses, and the only reason it makes me nervous is stated also in that other post...
4. The conflict between transnational corporations and average consumers will reach some sort of crisis. One of the insights I gleaned from reading Henry Adams is that some sort of financial crisis in the 1890s (Adams isn't perfectly clear on the cause) allowed a paradigm shift in this country, taking power from the individual and granting it to the corporations, suddenly creating a dichotomy between industry and the worker. (I'd love to do more reading about this.) This conflict has only intensified over time, and corporations have only grown in strength and arrogance until they've reach their current might. Something has to change, and I think it's going to happen in the next twenty years.
the classic sci-fi horror story comes about when this is resolved in favor of the corporations. Mix that with the capabilities of technology, such as implants and bio-engineering... add to it that one possible evolution of the corporatation is to replace 'government by the people for the people' with 'government by the corporations for its people' and in by 2030 we may all be playing Robert Deniro's part in 'Brazil'. Government, controlled by the wealthiest corporations, who have the technology, to not only monitor, but possibly control the average person.
There is a current apathy about such things really... and a backlash against unions(which to be fiar, are often guilty at some levels of corruption, and thus have brought it on themselves) which is another scary order of the day in this respect. People really need to care more about the power of the corporation.
(think micro$oft)