Bing/Discovery present short video debunking ideas about doomsday viruses

James Williams narrates a 2-1/2 minute Discovery Channel video in which he asks “Could a Single Virus Destroy Humankind?”, link (website url) here (no embed offered).

Bing says this is the stuff of sci-fi horror movies. Williams says that such a virus would have to be asymptomatic while it was transmissible, which is usual except for STD’s. But people may shed some viruses (even smallpox, and certainly flus) before they are noticeably sick.

During the 1980s, there was right wing speculation (“There’s always a first time” – the idea of “eventually” in mathematical analysis or topology) that HIV would mutate into something casually contagious (an idea the right wing could make political use of then); I even heard this at an AIDS convention in Houston in late 1984. But such a virus, in changing transmissibility, would probably adapt to the host and become much less lethal.

The Ebola virus is generally transmitted only in blood contact, but it was thought that the Ebola Reston virus in 1989 (among chimps) was airborne.

In my novel manuscript, I speculate that a virus, containing a radioactive isotope and generating buckeyball-like micro black holes, could cause people to consolidate “identities”. There was an idea vaguely like that in the 1999 horror film (Universal, John Bruno) “Virus” (where an alien life form on a boat views people as “viruses”).

Here’s a table on how things would work in my novel. Not sure it will mean a lot, but I want is somewhere online.

Kind of person	Count	Awake	Memory trace	Kids	Marriage	afterlife	virus	example
Orig angel	144000	Continuous	Real	Yes	Yes	immortal	immune	Toby, Matt, Frankie (corrupt)
New angel	Converges	Continuous, benign infection	Real memories; can share dreams of very few people, not always permanently	No kids unless eternal marriage	Kids if eternal marriage; must get old soul to have kids	Immortal	Immune w exposure	Sal
Old soul	F (C(new angel))	On permission	Image memories	Yes, must have	Yes	Immortal	No im, sudden non-perm changes	Bill
Ordinary person		Continuous	real	Yes	Yes	Grace or rebirth	No imn	Ali
Ordinary angel		Continuous	Image, shared; other person in dreams	Yes. Must have	n/a	immortal	Immune, must recover	Randy