Science will surely destroy the planet

[Shell B]

I think the number of people who want to destroy the planet is growing every day. You find quite a bit of them on the internet.

The internet is full of people being sarcastic and trolling. It is hardly an accurate gauge of the level of "crazy" in this world, though it is a fairly good indicator that people are strange.

There are more than enough crazies out there for something like this to be feasible.

Ah, but that is opinion. We have had men and women who were nuts enough to try to off large amounts of people, some of whom succeeded. Not a single one of those people was actually aiming to destroy the world, that I know of.

If you were halfway intelligent you could probably set off a regional skirmish which led to global war with a suitcase nuke and a youtube video.

Anything can set off a regional skirmish. However, regional skirmishes are rarely global. When they are, militaries are on alert for WMDs. While the potential for WWIII is absolute, the likelihood of it happening because of science is slim to none, in my opinion. It is people you should be worried about. They managed to kill shitloads of them with science back in the day too. Back then, weapons science was torture devices.

Yes, nuclear materials are hard to come by, but apparently people find ways to construct a reactor in their kitchen:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/...-reactor/1

Stable enough to launch at another country? A reactor is not a nuke, by they way.

The point is, it could be something very simple. A new invention could create weapons we've never dreamed about. It's inevitable given the march of technology that the destructive capability available to individuals will at some point match the capability available to nations today. There is no "should we do this" in science, it is only "can we do this". Did you know that when they first tested the nuclear bomb they were not absolutely sure whether it would burn off the atmosphere or not? They did it anyway, of course.

Oh, please. This is turning into a science is evil discussion. Here I was thinking we were just discussing a hypothetical and you launch into talking about science as if it were independently intelligent. Science needs people to do things. Not all people do not think about what technology will do when they develop it. Also, the development of the nuclear bomb was an arms race in one of the most important wars in history. The people who developed it had reason to believe that it didn't matter if it backfired, because another country was doing the same thing at the same time.

So, your argument about how certain factors might cause it to play out in certain ways isn't really relevant.

You did not demonstrate that. Your precise scenario involved a weapon built in someone's home and used to set off a chain reaction. When that happens, we call it domestic terrorism and it does not cause a chain reaction. Unless the person makes it look like a military move on another country or from another country, your chain reaction is not going to happen.

Sooner or later that kind of destructive power will be available to everyone, including the crazies who want to destroy the planet. Mutually assured destruction cannot be counted on to save us, so how can humanity deal with this issue?

Abortion.