It's a Hot one

So I picked up The Hot Zone at work the other day. I'm a slow a reader so it will take me a few more days to get through it, but it's a crazy book. It's all real accounts about viruses, that when they get you, they really get you.

I was struck by this one part about this guy from the CDC who first photographed and named Ebola, a nasty little virus that kills nine out of ten of its victims. When asked if he ever worries about a world-wide plague, he stated, 'A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out.'

Now when I read this, my first thought was something like, this guy scares me. He really scares me, given that he works for the Center for Disease Control. Control. He's supposed to be controlling the disease, not thinning us out. But then I got to thinking, what if there was such an event. What if there was an airborne Ebola, perhaps like the Bird Flu, which I'm reluctant to learn about. ...mainly because it just doesn't sound scary. It sounds more like something out of a South Park episode. 'Oh no, Kenny, the birds are sneezing.' Plus, the mental image of that is kinda cute.

But nine out of 10 people gone, that's a lot of people. Or even just one out of three like the bubonic plague in Europe. The CDC guy makes it sound almost like a good thing, (the first third of) the book makes it sound inevitable, but what would it be like? Would life go on as normal? How would it affect everyday life? I mean, would it affect the economy? Would there still be poor people or powerful people or political people? Would there still be crime and manipulation and exploitation and greed? Would there still be stupidity? After it peaked and passed, would there still be hunger, thirst, pain, suffering? Would there still be war, wealth, poverty, or religion?

While the answer is probably a single yes, what if it did create some strange utopia where every one was treated equally and every one was important because every one survived? What if the Georgia Guidestones are right? What if they are a sign from some greater society and we need to 'Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature'? Many smart people say that forest fires are a good thing for forests... what if a disease is our forest fire? No wonder it's called the Hot Zone. And good thing I have health insurance.

This is probably why I'm such a slow reader, I start thinking on a tangent and pretty soon I'm running around naked in some utopian paradise with waterfalls and unicorns. Oh... I would definitely be the tenth person.