Man-Made Disaster

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Nuclear bomb rest, Bikini atoll and Enewetak, October 31, 1952

Of course we could just wind up doing ourselves in, either with the ubiquitous threat of nuclear destruction, or how about being overtaken by a grey goo created by self-replicating, unstoppable nano-bots? Sound crazy? Not to Prince Charles it doesn't.
Martin: To make a long story short, the problem with nanotechnology right now is that we're such in an infant state, this is exactly the time when mistakes occur and accidents happen. So you build a nano-bot, to do some innocent medical job, and we don't understand completely what we're telling it to do, and it just goes awry, the chances of it doing what's good are very low compared to the chances of it doing bad or a mistake happening. As far as nuclear, in the last two years, there's been ten. They call them "red button pushes", where we've armed our nuclear missiles because of mistakes. There's been more chance of nuclear apocalypse in the last two years, than there ever was in the whole Cold War.

Read more: Apocalypse Scenarios - Likelihood of Apocalypse - Esquire
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