I doubt its that dire. There are a lot of things currently that can destroy crops but they are mostly prevented from spreading by border controls on things like fruit not being able to cross over.

You're correct. Rice and corn are almost tied as staple crops. Wheat, potatoes and bananas trail those two relatively closely. There may be little genetic diversity inside any particular staple food, but there are nevertheless several unrelated staple foods that feed the world.

If blight were to wipe out one or two, things would get bad but I'm confident we'd pull through as a species.

There will be no famine as a result of a single type of crop in a local area getting killed. It still takes at least weeks for the virus to spread around to other crops which is plenty of time to become aware of it and stop its spread. There is also nothing preventing imports of healthy foods over the border.

There is also no real incentive to bring bad crops over the border to a safe area.

That's an extremely naive attitude. No famine looks that serious until it is already too late.

Assuming it's spread naturally of course. If it was a deliberate attack it wouldn't be quite so straightforward.

Fortunately the subset of People that are chaotic, bad, smart, and organized enought to pull this though is emptt

I assume you're joking?

USPS operates through rain, sleet, snow, etc, but not famine.

Yes, biodiversity in major crops is a serious problem.

Global famine? Give me a break.

That would require the failure of multiple crop species extending across thousands of miles. It's never happened in human history on that scale.

Why would it now? Yes, losing all the Cavendish bananas would be really bad. But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?

The biodiversity issue is intraspecies not interspecies.

> But why would a superbug that takes out all the bananas have any effect on the corn, wheat, etc growing down the road?

Simply, copies.

If a superbug is able to destroy all the world's bananas, it would grow in population 1 million fold to do so. A bacteria or virus with a million times as many members will evolve a million times as quickly.

Given such, a species jump wouldn't be hard to do. And after the first couple, the superbug would likely start to tailer itself to genes that many plant species share, making the next jumps even easier.

I suppose I should be sitting up in terror for the superbug that comes after us from ants, then? After all ants outmass humans worldwide by a decent margin...

Thing is, I'm pretty sure that ants and humans are only a few times further apart than potatoes and corn are. (Monocots and Dicots split ~140-150 Myr ago [0], Arthropoda and Chordata about ~1000 Myr ago [1]) (I initially thought the Monocots/Dicots split was further back... looks like a closer comparison would be to marsupials, diverging ~170 Myr ago)

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15114421

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10097391

What does the number of ants vs humans have to do with the population of a species ballooning 1 million times its original size?

Ah, so you think this virus will wipe out ALL plants everywhere simply because there are lots of copies of the banana killing virus?

There are already lots of viruses at scale that don't become superbugs and randomly jump the species barrier.

There haven't been a lot of species that are all genetic clones of each other until recently, either. Such a condition makes the arrival of a superbug much more likely.

A species entirely made up of genetic clones is what this whole thread is about. I'm surprised you missed this.

You seem to be acting under the assumption that virii are actively malicious things instead of mere self-propagating feedback loops. Propagation is what causes it to grow - killing its host is a dead end for growth.

This isn't Pandemic - there is no neural or neural analog on viruses - hell we couldn't even do that with networked nanomachines.

It would be far more plauisble for all housecats in the world to coordinate and plan the conquest of humanity as they at least have the ability to think and communicate.

This is hard to respond to, because I don't know what you think I think. I don't think viruses have some sort of “neural or neural analog” or coordinate in some way, so I suspect you don't understand what I'm saying.

I just think, on average, an individual virus particle will mutate at a certain rate. If there are a million times the population, a virus as a whole will then mutate 1 million times faster. So, if a certain virus would given a certain mutation, would jump to another species, and that had a certain chance to do so, then that same virus with 1 million times its normal population would have 1 million times the chance to do so.

That's about as spelled out and basic I'm able to make it.

FWIW, if this were likely, it probably would have already happened. That's the paradox of superbugs.

It did already happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana

Grapes too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight

Said the man after his doctor diagnosed him with a severe risk of heart attack.

Bananas are a good example they are all clones, 95% of banana exports come from a single cultivated variety, the Cavendish.

Especially because before 1950 the Gros Michel was about as popular as the Cavendish now. And then it got wiped out by a fungus so instead of diversifying, all banana plantations collectively switched to Cavendish. Now there is a new fungus the Cavendish is susceptible too, so perhaps in a few years we'll all be eating something else. Hopefully more than a single alternative variety is found this time...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana: "After years of attempting to keep it out of the Americas, in mid-2019, Panama disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4), was discovered on banana farms in the coastal Caribbean region. With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel."