Lifeboat Foundation

There’s the Fermi Paradox and the Drake equation, which many readers are familiar with. There is also lots of action in the astronomy community currently on discovery of new planets. Potentially habitable ones in the “Goldilocks zone” (not too hot, not too cold, juust right!), are hitting the national news periodically these days. For example Kepler-22b, Gliese 581 d (only 20 light-years away which is really close but, also, really far…), HD 85512 b, and some “KOI” planets are pretty intriguing.

Really, astronomy is just getting started. Now we know there are many billions of planets in our galaxy, so there must be lots that *could* support life. Even Titan (a moon of Saturn) might possibly have life of some sort; at least it has lots of organic molecules and more petroleum than we could ever burn, and we have actually landed there and taken pictures from the surface! (See http://www.astronomy.org/StarWatch/January/1-05-titan-huygens.jpg.) I keep one of those pics framed in my office.

In my view the next major step in habitable planet discovery is to detect oxygen in their atmospheres. That is a sure-fire sign of photosynthesis, i.e., extraterrestrial life.

Twenty years ago, way back in the primordial soup of the early Network in an out of the way electromagnetic watering hole called USENET, this correspondent entered the previous millennium’s virtual nexus of survival-of-the-weirdest via an accelerated learning process calculated to evolve a cybernetic avatar from the Corpus Digitalis. Now, as columnist, sci-fi writer and independent filmmaker, [Cognition Factor — 2009], with Terence Mckenna, I have filmed rocket launches and solar eclipses for South African Astronomical Observatories, and produced educational programs for South African Large Telescope (SALT). Latest efforts include videography for the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town October 2011, and a completed, soon-to-be-released, autobiography draft-titled “Journey to Everywhere”.

Cognition Factor attempts to be the world’s first ‘smart movie’, digitally orchestrated for the fusion of Left and Right Cerebral Hemispheres in order to decode civilization into an articulate verbal and visual language structured from sequential logical hypothesis based upon the following ‘Big Five’ questions,

1.) Evolution Or Extinction?
2.) What Is Consciousness?
3.) Is God A Myth?
4.) Fusion Of Science & Spirit?
5.) What Happens When You Die?

Even if you believe that imagination is more important than knowledge, you’ll need a full deck to solve the ‘Arab Spring’ epidemic, which may be a logical step in the ‘Global Equalisation Process as more and more of our Planet’s Alumni fling their hats in the air and emit primal screams approximating;
“we don’t need to accumulate (so much) wealth anymore”, in a language comprising of ‘post Einsteinian’ mathematics…

Good luck to you if you do…

Schwann Cybershaman

I am taking the advice of a reader of this blog and devoting part 2 to examples of old school and modern movies and the visionary science they portray.

Things to Come 1936 — Event Horizon 1997
Things to Come was a disappointment to Wells and Event Horizon was no less a disappointment to audiences. I found them both very interesting as a showcase for some technology and social challenges.… to come– but a little off the mark in regards to the exact technology and explicit social issues. In the final scene of Things to Come, Raymond Massey asks if mankind will choose the stars. What will we choose? I find this moment very powerful– perhaps the example; the most eloguent expression of the whole genre of science fiction. Event Horizon was a complete counterpoint; a horror movie set in space with a starship modeled after a gothic cathedral. Event Horizon had a rescue crew put in stasis for a high G several month journey to Neptune on a fusion powered spaceship. High accelleration and fusion brings H-bombs to mind, and though not portrayed, this propulsion system is in fact a most probable future. Fusion “engines” are old hat in sci-fi despite the near certainty the only places fusion will ever work as advertised are in a bomb or a star. The Event Horizon, haunted and consigned to hell, used a “gravity drive” to achieve star travel by “folding space.” Interestingly, a recent concept for a black hole powered starship is probably the most accurate forecast of the technology that will be used for interstellar travel in the next century. While ripping a hole in the fabric of space time may be strictly science fantasy, for the next thousand years at least, small singularity propulsion using Hawking radiation to achieve a high fraction of the speed of light is mathematically sound and the most obvious future. That is, if humanity avoids an outbreak of engineered pathogens or any one of several other threats to our existence in that time frame.

Hand in hand with any practical method of journeys to other star systems in the concept of the “sleeper ship.” Not only as inevitable as the submarine or powered flight was in the past, the idea of putting human beings in cold storage would bring tremendous changes to society. Suspended animation using a cryopreservation procedure is by far the most radical and important global event possible, and perhpas probable, in the near future. The ramifications of a revivable whole body cryopreservation procedure are truly incredible. Cryopreservation would be the most important event in the history of mankind. Future generations would certainly mark it as the beginning of “modern” civilization. Though not taken seriously anymore than the possiblility of personal computers were, the advances in medical technology make any movies depicting suspended animation quite prophetic.

The Thing 1951/Them 1954 — Deep Impact 1998/Armegeddon 1998
These four movies were essentially about the same.…thing. Whether a space vampire not from earth in the arctic, mutated super organisms underneath the earth, or a big whatever in outer space on a collision course with earth, the subject was a monstrous threat to our world, the end of humankind on earth being the common theme. The lifeboat blog is about such threats and the The Thing and Them would also appeal to any fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Blood Rites. It is interesting that while we appreciate in a personal way what it means to face monsters or the supernatural, we just do not “get” the much greater threats only recently revealed by impact craters like Chixculub. In this way these movies dealing with instinctive and non-instinctive realized threats have an important relationship to each other. And this connection extends to the more modern sci-fi creature features of past decades. Just how much the The Thing and Them contributed to the greatest military sci-fi movie of the 20th century (Aliens, of course) will probably never be known. Director James Cameron once paid several million dollars out of court to sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison after admitting during an interview to using Ellison’s work– so he will not be making that mistake again. The second and third place honors, Starship Troopers and Predator, were both efforts of Dutch Film maker Paul Verhoeven.

While The Thing and Them still play well, and Deep Impact, directed by James Cameron’s ex-wife, is a good flick and has uncanny predictive elements such as a black president and a tidal wave, Armegeddon is worthless. I mention this trash cinema only because it is necessary for comparison and to applaud the 3 minutes when the cryogenic fuel transfer procedure is seen to be the farce that it is in actuality. Only one of the worst movie directors ever, or the space tourism industry, would parade such a bad idea before the public.
Ice Station Zebra 1968 — The Road 2009
Ice Station Zebra was supposedly based on a true incident. This cold war thriller featured Rock Hudson as the penultimate submarine commander and was a favorite of Howard Hughes. By this time a recluse, Hughes purchased a Las Vegas TV station so he could watch the movie over and over. For those who have not seen it, I will not spoil the sabotage sequence, which has never been equaled. I pair Ice Station Zebra and The Road because they make a fine quartet, or rather sixtet, with The Thing/Them and Deep Impact/Armegeddon.

 The setting for many of the scenes in these movies are a wasteland of ice, desert, cometoid, or dead forest. While Armegeddon is one of the worst movies ever made on a big budget, The Road must be one of the best on a small budget– if accuracy is a measure of best. The Road was a problem for the studio that produced it and release was delayed due to the reaction of the test audiences. All viewers left the theatre profoundly depressed. It is a shockingly realistic movie and disturbed to the point where I started writing about impact deflection. The connection between Armegeddon and The Road, two movies so different, is the threat and aftermath of an asteroid or comet impact. While The Road never specifies an impact as the disaster that ravaged the planet, it fits the story perfectly. Armegeddon has a few accurate statements about impacts mixed in with ludicrous plot devices that make the story a bad experience for anyone concerned with planetary protection. It seems almost blasphemous and positively criminal to make such a juvenile for profit enterprise out of an inevitable event that is as serious as serious gets. Do not watch it. Ice Station Zebra, on the other hand, is a must see and is in essence a showcase of the only tools available to prevent The Road from becoming reality. Nuclear weapons and space craft– the very technologies that so many feared would destroy mankind, are the only hope to save the human race in the event of an impending impact.

Part 3:
Gog 1954 — Stealth 2005
Fantastic Voyage 1966 — The Abyss 1989
And notable moments in miscellaneous movies.

This week Reuters reported:

“As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized under a past North Carolina program should be compensated $50,000 each, a panel voted on Tuesday, the first time a state has moved to pay victims of a discredited human selection program.”

There approximately 2000 living victims of the eugenics experiment conducted between 1929 and 1974 in the State of North Carolina. The short report released at a late hour of the business day (3:26PM) in a non-graphic format only commanded ‘24’ tweets by the time that I wrote this article some 24 hour later. These are extremely small viewership numbers for the magnitude of this article.

Governor Beverly Perdue provided political backing for the aforementioned compensation derived by a five member task-force. While this information may just seem as common as Interpol discovering some Waffen SS General in his late 90’s, it is not. The political and legal implications of this executive decision are wide spread. It is not the normal protocol of any government to give legal and financial incentive to its constituencies to demand (and receive) any type of indemnification. A greater question for the NC-Governor and the task force is: Why? While I’d expect to see some District and possibly even the Supreme Court push back on this legislation, there is a real opportunity posed to the pseudo-democratic body that is the United States from a legal, socio-cultural, and technological standpoint. Of course there is a real threat posed from an economic standpoint. Every affected entity (individual or institution) seeking reparations for their abuse, from slavery to agriculture subsidies, has some new grounds for argument; and further, in the fashion of capitalistic we should assume that every ambitious attorney is paying attention.

Pandora’s passions for chaos provides all the incentives that federal, state, and local governments need to keep denying the need to even consider reparations for the many socio-cultural, ethnic, gender, and preference groups that are deemed “undesirable” by the most conservative and elitist of us all. Transhumanists have long had ties to eugenics,but ideas on how to improve the genetic composition of a population have to ensure that individual choice to (or not to) participate at their own risks/reward.

The lack of ethics that human-kind has witnessed by technological elites will over the others has been consistently dangerous to the optimal operation efficiency and effectiveness of our species. While it is likely impossible philosophically for human’s to actually have a nature about themselves, the one thing that we’ve always tried to do is control our situation to better manage the risks of uncertainty. It’s not an ill mission, but the pathology of our altruism often shows that it is our most stifling virtue. Projecting our idea of greatness onto the entire population is not progressive, even as technology progresses. As we merge away from the socio-cultural conservatism of the past century(s) and our diverse preferences become cliché, let’s be conscious to honor and protect choice, and continue to scale the distribution of information to individuals and institutions alike.

– originally from Integrationalism

The Journal for Biological & Health Innovation is accepting papers for peer review now. This journal is specific to Africa and our thoughts, theory, research, practice could have a huge impact on the expeditious development of the rest of the world technologically.

Part 1: 10,000 years      Part 2: 100,000 years       Part 3: a million years    Part 4: ten million years

Ten million years ago, things were very different. It is thought that our ancestors of that time, roughly 400,000 generations ago, were hominids (Latin: Hominidae) who had not yet branched out into their current descendant — orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees — and us. The hominid family and our genus, Homo, are well-known, landmark taxa in our evolutionary tree. However there are also superfamily, subfamily and other auxiliary taxa that are instructive (or maybe just confusing!) to mention.

The hominid family forms a branch of the hominoid superfamily, which also includes gibbons. The hominids branch in turn into orangutans and the hominine subfamily (last syllabus pronounced like the word “nines”). The hominines branch into gorillas and the hominin (no “e”) tribe, which in turn branches into chimpanzees and bonobos, on the one hand, and the hominan (with an “a”) subtribe on the other, of which we are the only surviving example. The hominans contain the genus Homo, or humans. This terminological mess of hominthises and hominthats may seem ridiculous! And maybe it is. However, one way to help remember the ordering is to keep in mind that the homin– terms are — almost — in alphabetical order from smallest to largest grouping: hominan, hominin, hominine, hominid, hominoid, with 1 exception. Hominid is out of order but at least next to the other d-containing name, hominoid.

Some milestones of prehistory. About 75 million years ago, primates split off from the rest of the evolutionary tree of life, or the Linnaean taxonomy, after Carl Linnaeus (1707−1778), the Swedish scientist who created this branching map of evolutionary relationships that bears his name and is still with us today. 75 million years is a fairly long time ago, even for biological evolution; our roots go deep! Apes diverged from the monkeys about 32 million years ago. Apes were the first “hom-,” the hominoids. The great apes, technically the hominids, came along around 19 million years ago. They include orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. Moving into the upper reaches of the 1 – 10 million year ago time scale, a likely common ancestor race of all living hominines, from gorillas to us, but not orangutans since they had already branched off, was the Nakalipithecus. A partial fossil was found near Nakali, Kenya. This hominine is just under 10 million years old.

Gorillas then split off around 7 million years ago. Chimps and bonobos split from our common ancestral species roughly 5 or 6 million years ago. That species enjoyed considerable success in its day, spawning almost 2 dozen separate identifiable human-like hominins. Most are somewhat obscure, though our earlier-mentioned friends neanderthalensis, habilis and ergaster are among them. Although only 1 strain survives today, us, this remarkable species has pretty much achieved world domination. The jury is still out on its fitness to rule but the question will certainly be resolved sooner or later. Perhaps you are reluctant to call such extinct species as Homo habilis (Latin for “handy man”) and Homo ergaster (“working man”) human. If so, recall well-known hominid Groucho Marx, who famously opined, ” I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

The dramatic changes over the past 10 million years will most likely be mirrored in the next 10 million. But how? There are many ways, but let us focus on brain size and intelligence.

Humans may be characterized as big headed, and we’re proud of that. Our brains are big, bigger than all but a few very large animals, elephants and whales in particular. But we are way ahead of even those animals on other crucial brain measurements. Since the brain mass of a species tends to increase with species body size, but not as fast, a measure called encephalization quotient is often used to express the deviation of brain size from what would be expected for a given body size if the organism had an average encephalization quotient of 1.0. On that metric, human brains are over 7x bigger than expected for an organism of our size. No other animal is that high. One survey puts elephants and whales at 1.3x and 1.8x respectively. Bottlenose dophins get to a little over 5x, and their brains are in fact close in size to ours, possibly making them geniuses of the animal kingdom. White-fronted capuchin monkeys get to almost 5x although absolute brain size is a lot less than for humans because their body size is so much smaller. By contrast, cats are 1x, while dogs are 1.2x. The lowly and somewhat homely opossum, at a mere 0.2x, might thus be characterized as better endowed with beauty than brains.

Even ignoring body size entirely, we are still way ahead on the number of neurons in our brains. Those big animals with brains bigger than ours actually have fewer neurons, the information processing units of the brain. By analogy, ordinary computers are getting more powerful year by year not because they are getting bigger but bcause their processors are being made with more information processing units (which for computers are not neurons but transistors). These transistors are actually getting smaller over time. Thus computers, as they get more powerful, are actually getting smaller, not bigger.

A dramatic process of brain enlargement in our past began approximately two million years ago. Our brains have literally tripled in size since that time. Presumably, that is why some primates like bananas, while some of us like books in addition to bananas. What if this process continued? Will our brains triple again over the next couple million years, giving us descendants who chuckle condescendingly at our admiration for mere books as we might chuckle over a monkey’s admiration for mere bananas? Would such brainy descendants find the solutions to our most vexing problems of war and peace, poverty and excess, illness and health, love and hate obvious and easily taught in elementary school? Perhaps they will, but there are serious limits such rapid brain growth. These limits appear to forbid brain size (measured as number of neurons) from increasing at a rapid clip forever. Specifically, another tripling would, it appears, rqeuire major changes in brain structure surpassing the structural differences between human brains and those of other apes — in short, a major evolutionary leap requiring significantly more than a measly few million years. On the other hand, doubling brain size can be done more easily (and presumably quickly) because no major architectural changes would be necessary. Thus, our brains can fairly easily double, but tripling would be more problematic.

Here is a mathematical explanation of why. First, the brain is composed of many chunks which must communicate with each other. In contrast, the old syncytium theory that the brain is essentially a big blob of weakly organized tissue, sort of like a big ball of cotton, had been largely disproved by Spanish neuroscientist Ramon y Cajal by 1900, a feat for which he won the Nobel prize in 1906. The bigger the brain, the more chunks there are that need to communicate. The more communicating chunks, the more neurons need to be devoted to communication (thus acting like the telephone wires and internet cables of the brain). Let’s see why this is a problem.

Suppose 3 chunks, 3 people, 3 computers, 3 offices, or 3 of any kind of communicating entity all need to communicate with each other. How many communications paths are needed? Three: one between A and B, one between B and C, and one between A and C. Suppose we add a 4th communicator, D, that needs to communicate with all the others. How many more, new paths are needed for all to communicate? Four minus one, or three: between D & A, D & B, and D & C. We added one more communicating chunk and needed to double the communication paths. The problem just gets worse the more chunks we add: the thousandth chunk requires adding 999 new communication paths, running between the new chunk and each of the previous 999. The fourth chunk needed 3 more paths but the thousandth needed 999! Thus adding one new chunk to a large brain that already has lots of chunks requires lots of extra neural tissue to be added for communication purposes. In practice, this is the white matter of the human brain cortex which, because of this problem, forms a disproportionate fraction of the human brain compared to other primates. It gets progressively more biologicallly expensive to incrementally increase brain capacity and humans are in the zone where this expense starts to become prohibitive of dramatic increases.

Of course, only doubling our brains is nothing to sniff at and could lead to impressively brilliant descendants, even if much more than doubling proves unachievable. We can only hope that such high-flying beings can still smell the flowers and, indeed, enjoy an occasional banana.

References

Part 1: 10,000 years      Part 2: 100,000 years       Part 3: a million years

A million years. A hundred thousand years ago people looked like — and were — people. But go back a million years and things were different. For one thing, the modern lack of other species very similar to us (i.e. also in the genus Homo) did not hold. There were others, very similar in many ways, yet different as well. Not only Homo floresiensis (the “hobbits”), but also Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis. Antecessor lived up to about 800,000 years ago and was roughly the height of modern humans, though of more robust build. Bones showing damage from stone tools suggest that antecessor both practiced cannabalism, and used tools, sometimes at the same time.

Their brain size was about 20% below ours, which still counts as large and, apparently, intelligent. With a low forehead and not much chin, they are only known to have lived in Europe. Homo heidelbergensis lived more recently than antecessor and may in fact be evolved from antecessor, just as we will evolve into something different if we survive long enough. They lived more recently than antecessor and may in fact be evolved from antecessor, just as we will evolve into something different if we survive long enough. First discovered in the form of a jaw found near Heidelberg in 1907, Heidelbergensis stood tall, about 6 feet in Europe and often exceeding 7 in South Africa, and was muscular and strong. The European population of heidelbergensis is likely to have evolved into the Neanderthals. The African population may have evolved into modern humans, which would make heidelbergensis our common ancestor. Compared to heidelbergensis, however, we have higher foreheads and flatter faces, and are smaller boned. (Technically speaking, heidelbergensis was “robust” while we are “gracile.”) In this we are not unlike a heidelbergensis child, illustrating our neoteny — the slowing of development, tending to lead to the retention of childhood characteristics into adulthood. Neoteny is considered a broad characteristic of modern humans compared to our ancestors. It helps explain our relatively long trunks, short limbs, small brow ridges, small noses, high foreheads, and flat faces. This trend may continue into the future. Neoteny is also a broad characteristic of dogs, which are neotenized wolves.

To further illustrate the amount of evolutionary change that can occur in a million years, consider the modern primates most closely related to humans, chimpanzees (Pan Troglodyte) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). These species split from their own common ancestor roughly a million years ago. The bonobo is smaller than the chimpanzee, but behavioral differences are dramatic. Far less aggressive than the chimp, the bonobo is known for its unique sexual life. Bonobo sex, both hetero– and homo-, has an important place in the everyday function of bonobo society, for example in smoothing over conflicts to avoid fighting. This seems to be absent in the larger, more aggressive and dangerous chimpanzee. Additionally, bonobo society is mostly matriarchal (female dominated) while chimpanzees are highly patriarchal (male dominated), with a dominance heirarchy in a troop placing essentially all adult females below all adult males. Given such huge behavioral differences, it is likely that Homo heidelbergensis temperament, behavior, and society differed considerably from our own (and from traditional human tribal societies, which also tend to differ greatly from each other). Behavioral differences likely exceeded the not inconsiderable differences in appearance and physique. We will never know this for sure, of course, but we can make some guesses about them. The general developmental principle that humans are neotenized relative to their predecessors most likely influences our emotional development as well, resulting in human adults having some temperamental characteristics more typical of heidelbergensis youths than heidelbergensis adults. If one has trouble believing that neotenized physical characteristics have much to recommend themselves for physically dealing with the world — running around, finding food — as I do, then one must suspect that it is the neural and temperamental characteristics provided by neoteny that drove the neotenization of our species, with our also-neotenized physical characteristics being an accidental side effect. So what might those neotenous brain and mind-related traits be?

One trait relates to the fact that retaining juvenile characteristics tends to delay adulthood. This means a longer childhood, which today’s developed nations use for extended schooling. A lengthened childhood period helps here, as you can’t teach an old dog new tricks (so the saying goes). In fact, human childhood is so long that most other animals die of old age in the time humans take just to grow up. By extending youth, humans likely have a longer period of high neural plasticity, supporting improved ability to learn over a longer period of time. Still, like old dogs, old humans in some ways learn less quickly. In the future, if neoteny proceeds further, that may change.

Dogs can serve as more than a source of sayings. They also provide a great example of neoteny themselves. Dogs are a neotenized form of the gray wolf, domesticated at least 15,000 years ago. Since that time, they have held on to their position as “man’s best friend” in large part because of neotenized aspects of their temperaments. Why? Remember that a standard gray wolf is *not* man’s best friend. A gray wolves would *eat* a man (woman, and especially child) if it figured it could get away with it. Gray wolves (fighting weight may exceed 120 pounds) are definitely not good with small kids, like so many dogs are. Wolf puppies, however, are cute, fluffy, playful and fun, like many adult dogs. (In fact, so are the fiercest lion and grizzly bear cubs.) Thus neotenized mammal adults like us may be expected to be comparatively friendly, sociable and playful. And cute: we appear genetically predispositioned to find juvenile characteristics like short arms, roundish, flattish faces with short or no muzzle, and small noses endearing. Can you think of any politicians that one might suspect benefit in popularity from possessing neotenously cherubic or “cute” physical features? Many other animals are analogously programmed. This helps the young to benefit from, rather than be forced to compete with, the superior experience, skill and strength of parents and other adults.

The amounts and types of evolutionary differences between us and H. heidelbergensis suggest the amount and types of evolutionary change we may undergo in our next several hundred thousand years. Thus our brains may enlarge, perhaps by around 20%. Will that make every man an Einstein, every woman a Curie? Perhaps (and perhaps much more than that). Einstein’s brain was on the small side, but surely an extra 20% would be good for something. Considering bodies, with heidelbergensis’s robust physique and our gracile one, if this trend continues basketball has good long-term future prospects, while sumo wrestling may eventually face some challenges. No need to panic though — at a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years there is plenty of time for sports franchises to adapt to changing times. Moving to neoteny, a continuation of the trend toward increased neoteny suggests a distant future of shorter limbs and longer trunks, baby-faced adults, and more playful, friendly cultures. Hopefully, increased neoteny, by in a sense lengthening youth, will result in longer natural life spans, since getting old is not exactly a sign of youth.

Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, split from their most recent common ancestor about a million years ago and thus their differences form an interesting animal analogy to the amount of change we might expect in ourselves at that time scale. They look quite different and act even more differently, with chimp society patriarchal and bonobos matriarchal. While chimps are promiscuous in a sense any human can understand, bonobos raise to a whole new level the integration of sex into multiple facets of daily life. Bonobo philosophy seems to emphasize the “make love not war” concept far more than humans. There may possibly be human swingers and adult industry careerists who could empathize with bonobo society to a degree, but to most of us it’s pretty alien. In a million years our descendants may be similarly alien to present day human understanding, but the only way to tell for sure is to wait and see. Since no one except a few die-hard singularitarians expect to be able to wait that long, the curious will simply need to use their imaginations, so imagine away if you like and bon voyage.

Notes

“Bones showing damage from stone tools suggest that antecessor practiced cannabalism, aided by tools.” Y. Fernández-Jalvo, J. Carlos Díez, I. Cáceres and J. Rosell, Human cannibalism in the Early Pleistocene of Europe (Gran Dolina, Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain), Journal of Human Evolution, Sept.-Oct. 1999, vol. 37, no. 3 – 4, pp. 591 – 622. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724849990324X.

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilization.

The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time.

The research has caused a storm of controversy and divided scientists, with some saying it should never have been carried out.

The current strain of H5N1 has only killed 500 people and is not contagious enough to cause a global pandemic.

But there are fears the modified virus is so dangerous it could be used for bio-warfare, if it falls into the wrong hands.

Virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands lead a team of scientists who discovered that a mere five mutations to the avian virus was sufficient to make it spread far more easily.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2066624/A.….z1f4YLcKcp