Wow. I gotta get on the ball; last things stood, I was the one who said the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to you -- though I don't remember what it was!
That said, I think you have about as much of a chance as creating grey goo to wipe out humanity as you do having a direct hand in the LHC creating a black hole to wipe out humanity. Yes, you personally -- that should tell you what I think about most doomsday scenarios. This sort of "fear of the mad scientist" goes back a long ways, and is especially prevalent in modern culture. I can think of dozens of movies where the premise is "well-intentioned but misguided mad scientist (or lab scientists working on government funded programs, the more realistic of the two mostly unrealistic scenarios) experiment with Things Nature Never Intended Man To Know, and Bad Things Happen. It obviously betrays an underlying anxiety about scientific advancement among the members of our society, but it is somewhat depressing when people take mostly irrational fears about one are of near-future science and apply them to other areas of newly-developing science. I hope, at least, that the histrionics who are seriously worried about grey goo realize that that is a nanotech scifi doomsday nightmare, and not a basic at-home biohacking one, and that they're just using that term for lack of established Canonical Thing To Be Afraid Of With This Area of Human Knowledge Advancement.
You're doing a good job managing these questions; better than I would have the patience for. Thanks for being the public face of this stuff -- I'm hoping people are coming away with their interactions with you with their concerns addressed and their fears explained and reasonably satisfied. They seem to be.
(Note, I don't fault people for having these fears -- society, through bad popular science articles and popular science fiction, haven't exactly been good at preserving realism when looking for sensationalist or thrilling new threats to create to further a plot, and the overall quality of scientific journalism is such that it's hard to tell a serious article about a serious technology apart from an article about a pseudoscientific synthetic hysteria, and thus no reason for those not familiar enough with the subject to realize what is unrealistic fluff and what is reasonable reporting. I suppose the problem is the need for mass media to appeal to the lowest common denominator of its readership.
no subject
That said, I think you have about as much of a chance as creating grey goo to wipe out humanity as you do having a direct hand in the LHC creating a black hole to wipe out humanity. Yes, you personally -- that should tell you what I think about most doomsday scenarios. This sort of "fear of the mad scientist" goes back a long ways, and is especially prevalent in modern culture. I can think of dozens of movies where the premise is "well-intentioned but misguided mad scientist (or lab scientists working on government funded programs, the more realistic of the two mostly unrealistic scenarios) experiment with Things Nature Never Intended Man To Know, and Bad Things Happen. It obviously betrays an underlying anxiety about scientific advancement among the members of our society, but it is somewhat depressing when people take mostly irrational fears about one are of near-future science and apply them to other areas of newly-developing science. I hope, at least, that the histrionics who are seriously worried about grey goo realize that that is a nanotech scifi doomsday nightmare, and not a basic at-home biohacking one, and that they're just using that term for lack of established Canonical Thing To Be Afraid Of With This Area of Human Knowledge Advancement.
You're doing a good job managing these questions; better than I would have the patience for. Thanks for being the public face of this stuff -- I'm hoping people are coming away with their interactions with you with their concerns addressed and their fears explained and reasonably satisfied. They seem to be.
(Note, I don't fault people for having these fears -- society, through bad popular science articles and popular science fiction, haven't exactly been good at preserving realism when looking for sensationalist or thrilling new threats to create to further a plot, and the overall quality of scientific journalism is such that it's hard to tell a serious article about a serious technology apart from an article about a pseudoscientific synthetic hysteria, and thus no reason for those not familiar enough with the subject to realize what is unrealistic fluff and what is reasonable reporting. I suppose the problem is the need for mass media to appeal to the lowest common denominator of its readership.