There is a fanfiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which reimagines JK Rowling’s books with Harry as a scientific prodigy and rationalist.

It’s quite long, and many people who start reading it don’t finish it. What’s interesting is that you can detect the exact moment someone bails on HPMOR based on their criticisms.

People who give up after the first few chapters complain that it’s smug and annoying, with Harry (the author stand-in) running circles around irrational wizards because he knows what a Fermi estimate is and they don’t.

But the people who quit 30-40 chapters in seem to have the opposite criticism: that the book isn’t delivering on its promise of a rational Harry Potter universe. JK Rowling’s world spins on nonsense instead of cogs and gears (as a feature, not a bug), and although you can temporarily restore order, entropy eventually reigns. Harry’s vaunted rationality doesn’t actually help him much – even when he wins, its usually by luck (eg, he happens to know a spell or possess a certain artifact.)

I wonder if HPMOR’s rationalism extends very far past the first layer of packaging. Blizzards of scientific buzzwords swarm the page (sometimes to soporific effect) but we’re still stuck in a world designed to be whimsical. The writing vacillates between an optimistic “science will solve our problems!” Neil deGrasse Tyson tone, and dark and angsty ruminations that read like the diary of a bullied schoolchild. It’s easy to suspect Harry is a stand-in for Yudkowsky himself – a guy with a fork in a world full of soup. Harry’s defiant rationalism is mocked and scorned by many of the wizards around him, and there’s a real sense of frustration and obstruction that can’t just be attributed to the feelings of the character.

One large frustration Yudkowsky has with the world is that people die in it. Read this monument to a deceased younger brother.

“I watched Yehuda’s coffin lowered into the ground and cried, and then I sat through the eulogy and heard rabbis tell comforting lies. If I had spoken Yehuda’s eulogy I would not have comforted the mourners in their loss. I would have told the mourners that Yehuda had been absolutely annihilated, that there was nothing left of him. I would have told them they were right to be angry, that they had been robbed, that something precious and irreplaceable was taken from them, for no reason at all, taken from them and shattered, and they are never getting it back.”

An ancillary frustration is with “deathists”, people who (he says) think death is part of the natural order, and indirectly enabled the death of Yehuda by various means (not financing biotech, not making cryonics a public service, etc). In HPMOR, this culminates with Harry reading (deathist) Dumbledore the riot act in ch.39.

“Uh huh,” Harry said. “See, there’s this little thing called cognitive dissonance, or in plainer English, sour grapes. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there’d be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you’re not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn’t getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they’d say no. And if you didn’t have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you’d have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing?”

I am a deathist. My logic is this: the train has already left the station, it’s moving fast as fuck, and we are all standing a mile from the platform. It makes no difference if you run furiously after the train, screaming and flapping your arms, or sit down and have a picnic. We’re all going to die, I’m 99% sure of this. I don’t worship death, or think death is a good thing. I just understand and accept its inevitability.

I read a few things on transhumanist sites, and my reaction was and remains “This is all dogshit. Nobody can do anything to stop us dying. If this is the state of the art, we’re doomed.” We don’t have ways of vitrifying brains without damaging them. Drexler style repair nanobots probably can’t exist. I’ve read things by Yudkowsky where he invokes a quasi-Pascal’s Wager, saying something like “even if it’s a long shot, isn’t doing something better than doing nothing?”…as if “doing something” is even in the same rhetorical ballpark as cashing in your retirement so Alcor can freeze your brain. There’s something to be said for relaxing and having a picnic instead of exhausting yourself chasing that departed train. As for “scanning” the human brain, here’s PZ Myers on his difficulties scanning tiny zebrafish brains. We don’t have the technology. Maybe we never will have the technology.

I think CS Lewis hits closer to the mark than Yudkowsky in Out of the Silent Planet, where the godlike Martian being Oyarsa explains how he taught the Martians to accept death.

“[…] Bent counsels would soon have risen among them. They were well able to have made sky-ships. By me Maleldil stopped them. Some I cured, some I unbodied——’

‘And see what come!’ interrupted Weston, ‘you now very few—shut up in handramits—soon all die.’

‘Yes,’ said Oyarsa, ‘but one thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.’

Weston writhed in the exasperation born of his desire to speak and his ignorance of the language.

‘Trash! Defeatist trash!’ he shouted at Oyarsa in English.”

Yudkowsky would no doubt join Weston in his jeers. But as Lewis said elsewhere, you cannot dim the sun by writing “it is dark” in the wall of your prison cell. HPMOR is an entertaining story, or at least the parts of it I’ve read. And I hope Yudkowsky is happy to share in Harry Potter’s quasi-immortality, because he’ll never get his own.

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.