So what might actually work?

I have always thought Ebola could be promising – although not in its classical form. The trouble with Ebola Zaire is that it’s too good at killing – subjects typically end up bedridden and dead before they’ve spread the plague too far. Difficult to get exponential growth (ie, an epidemic), especially in a first world country.

(By the way, I should mention that Ebola Zaire will probably never become airborne, due to complex reasons relating to its structure. The airborne variant, Reston, is not dangerous to humans.)

For a truly weaponised version of Ebola, I refer to the work of Serguei Popov, a Russian molecular biologist who has done more to advance the cause of pathogenic bioweapons than any man alive. His main work (much of which is now public record, thanks to Mr Gorbachev) was genetically engineered pathogens that would use the body’s immune system against it – causing brain damage and paralysis.

“With the myelin toxin, the infection might initially show symptoms like those of typical plague or mild pneumonia,” Dr. Popov writes. The hybrid genes that he and his team engineered would themselves be spliced into some more innocuous bacterium like Legionella pneumophila, the bacterium responsible for Legionnaire’s disease. Thus, Dr. Popov continued, victims would first show pneumonia’s typical symptoms. “So the person would be treated for those and feel healthy. Then the disease’s second wave would come two weeks later, and it would be devastating.”

This is essentially a “glitch in the Matrix” type of plague that exploits the way the body responds to to pathogens. Two things are especially brilliant about Popov’s work.

First, there’s a “cooling off” period of weeks or months, where the person thinks he has a cold or a flu. In fact, he’s a walking ebola bomb, infecting everyone he touches.

Second, this “splicing” can occur with anything, even a lowly rhinovirus. To keep ebola out, you would literally need to screen against things like a mild cough. And that’s if you knew it was coming.

You might even get symptomless infection – and with a long period before the “switch” goes off, things would get very interesting.

Imagine aerosols released in Tokyo, New York, London, et cetera, infecting the world’s busiest travellers, who then go on to spread it far and wide. Nobody knows. It might show up in blood tests, or it might not.

The aerosols should also be distributed among scientists, research teams, missionaries – typhoid Marys who will take it to the deepest recesses of the world. No surface clean is enough. We need to reach into every crack and corner to eradicate the human germ.

A million people charting a million courses across the world with a hidden disease riding their trail, despoiling the ground they walk upon, killing long after they’d departed.

The incubation would be long.

But the end would be short.

Imagine a falling china plate, and that terrible moment of clarity before it shatters on the floor.

Such was the work of Dr. Popov, not long may he live.

On a bleak island in the Aral Sea, one hundred monkeys are tethered to posts set in parallel rows stretching out toward the horizon. A muffled thud breaks the stillness. Far in the distance, a small metal sphere lifts into the sky then hurtles downward, rotating, until it shatters in a second explosion.

Some seventy-five feet above the ground, a cloud the color of dark mustard begins to unfurl, gently dissolving as it glides down toward the monkeys. They pull at their chains and begin to cry. Some bury their heads between their legs. A few cover their mouths or noses, but it is too late: they have already begun to die.

Ken Alibek – Biohazard, 1999

It’s time to put the hand lotion away and face facts: Hiroshima is overrated.

150,000 dead seems like a good start. But think of the cost. Per dollar, the Manhattan Project was the most expensive funeral pyre in history. Concentrating enough U-235 for one small fission bomb cost the United States taxpayer two billion dollars (do the conversion to 2014 money yourself, genius), all for an explosion that was survivable a few kilometers away. It’s safe to say that the Japanese less money building the city than the Americans spent destroying it.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I wish I could get Oppenheimer to pad out my resume. He seems like he’d be good at it.

In the past, there were better ways.

During the sack of Urgench, Genghis Khan gave 50,000 Mongol soldiers the task of killing twenty-four Persians each. So 1.2 million would have died. The Great Khan could not split an atom, but he knew that splitting a man’s heart ventricles usually does the job.

Better technology does not linearly scale up to bigger body counts. In fact, the better technology we have, the less we are inclined to do with it. Give a man a machete and he’ll make a pile of severed hands and ears. Give a man a Trident Boat or a MOAB and he gets delusions of being a peacekeeper – and who wants that?

But we can’t eradicate the human race with machetes. So what else is there?

The problem is huge. Seven billion souls, and counting. They exist on the Skeleton Coast and in the Arctic and in the Himalayas. The human virus now fills every ecological niche.

Seven billion piles of shit. How do we clean up this mess? At least Hercules had a broom.

After years of planning and simulation models, let me give you the ideal solution: we need to get people to kill other people, while leaving the killed blind to the fact that they are being killed, and leaving the killers blind to the fact that they are killers.

Every possible problem is overcome. No ethical doubts, no wavering, no defense mechanisms at the level of state, community, or individual. If we achieve this, the human race will be over like night follows day.

Sounds impossible. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe we’ve got a friend in the Department of Health or WHO, and there’s some new chemical in the water or some new schedule of vaccines that will kill everyone.

It’s possible that this could go undetected. Occasional leaks of information would seem indistinguishable from tabloid fodder. If someone has already set the gears in motion that end the human race, then I salute you, sir. My only regret is that you have made this piece redundant.

But suppose that’s not happening. Where do we go from here?

Many deathists think sterility is the sine qua non of ending the human race. This could be achieved by contaminating the world’s water supply. I would caution them against hope. Sterility will stop new humans from being born – but you’ve still got a lot of humans left alive. So long as they exist, the risk is that they’ll find a way to artificially generate babies, and there goes your ballgame.

What if everyone goes sterile tomorrow? Humans will still exist on earth for another seventy or eighty years. That’s a lot of time for someone to screw something up.

No, I don’t think too much of forced sterility. From the hard deathist perspective it’s a motivational trap – it makes us think we’ve eliminated the human race when we’ve only put a small speed bump in the way.

Actual dying is required.

How about a viral plague? You already know the problems there – they’re obvious, and they’re fightable. You can quarantine a plague. You can inoculate against a plague. Worst (best?) case scenario: a plague devastates the earth, a small country or holdout bars its doors and survives, the plague burns itself out, and then humans repopulate the earth. All you need is a few survivors.

Nanotechnological viruses carry similar problems, with the added issue that nano-scale machines have weaknesses that DNA/RNA viruses don’t. Say what you will about HIV/AIDS (and I say it’s overrated as hell), but at least the HIV retrovirus doesn’t die when you hit them with a jolt of static electricity. And it doesn’t help that we have yet to build one.

Planet-eating “grey goo” is for science fiction novels. It will never exist.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the wad of cash you put in the fight manager’s pocket so that he “accidentally” crushes an Ambien into the other dog’s morning chow.

Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. The nuclear fallout will create cool mutations in your sheep.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. But only if a small group of rich people agree with them.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Other than natural disasters, war, famine, plague, asteroid impacts, rinderpest, gamma ray bursts, economic externalizations, Black Swan events, the hand of God, large groups of thoughtful committed people, small groups of thoughtless committed people, small groups of thoughtful uncommitted people, and alligators in the sewers, they’re the only thing that ever has.

Measure twice, cut once, cut once more, read instructions, curse, fling random tool on the garage floor, curse again as it is the exact next tool you needed, give up.

Good things come in small packages, which are then broken by mailmen trying to jam it into your mailbox instead of ringing at your door.

You’ll breed more flies with honey than with vinegar.

You miss all the shots you don’t take. The same cannot be said for the man on the grassy knoll.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Just so long as you never return from that absence.

Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. You’re now a mile away from him, and you have his shoes.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Then Rupert Murdoch looks up and says “is the photo op over? No, seriously, can I go now? Babies are gross.”