> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did

No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.

Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important.

If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.

But that's not what GP was saying.

We, today, have the ability to dictate what others tomorrow over- or under-appreciate as doom and gloom. Whether there is a cognitive dissonance is irrelevant, but what actually happens is very much only avoidable going forward, not looking back.

In the same context, The debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Matt Riddley is an interesting one http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/progress

The problem would be even higher by a seemingly dormant disease agent, which first infects nearly all of humanity and then wents time delayed into action.

Nobody suspects the flue.

The variance of the fat-tailed distribution of casualties of nuclear warfare post-M.A.D. is much higher than during WW2, and is may be more prone to inadvertent unintended catastrophe than an epidemic now that we can research them, but that's also unforeseeably variable.

> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did

Yeah, but without bacteria we wouldn't be where we are today. Whatever that means.

I would not identify rather specific technologies accelerating the reach of the dysfunctional into "technology in general", just like I wouldn't lump together the bacteria that caused the plague and those that live in my stomach.

Yesterday's risks were exogenous. Few were existential.

Today's are engogenous. Several are existential.

Erm, endogenous.

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