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Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

#4
Idiotically dangerous, for two reasons. The qualities you would eliminate are the very ones that help our survival as a species. Second, and more important, wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause.

Re: Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

#5
post #4

Idiotically dangerous, for two reasons. The qualities you would eliminate are the very ones that help our survival as a species. Second, and more important, wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause.

...wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause.

So what would happen if war is never an option?

Re: Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

#8
post #7

....Imagine how powerful you could get by finding a cure for that virus....

Cures take time and scientists can work on many such viruses -- though you would need to ensure that being infected by several such viruses does not yield bad results.

Re: Eliminating wars by designing and deploying a highly contagious brain virus to change human nature for the better

#10
post #5
post #4

Idiotically dangerous, for two reasons. The qualities you would eliminate are the very ones that help our survival as a species. Second, and more important, wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause.

...wars are always about population pressure and competition for resources. Always. Your virus could poop Valium and morphine -- but it wouldn't change the root cause. So what would happen if war is never an option?

You're begging the question. There is no 'be violent' chemical in our brains. It's a complex emergent behavior. So your hypothetical virus would either be ineffective, or so effective it make the organism (that's YOU) unable to feed itself.
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