mRNA Vaccines are a Miraculous Technology

So is nuclear fission and fusion, which provide us with the potential for unlimited power and what feels like unlimited destruction.

Well, let me quietly point out an uncomfortable probability. As civilizations progress and their understanding of technology increases, there is undoubtedly an unlimited sequence of progressively more and more potentially destructive technologies.

At first, most emerging civilizations like your civilization believe that they actually control this risk. They think that by tightening central controls, they can somehow stop the 'bad guys' from getting the technology.

And then the penny slowly drops.

Nuclear technology was just the first of these devastating technologies. That's a somewhat easy technology to control. It does take significant resources to refine weapons-grade uranium, but the more small-scale reactors you have, the harder it becomes to contain.

But other technologies, like mRNA vaccines, are impossible to contain.

It's cool technology. During COVID, a Chinese scientist called Yong-Zhen Zhang sequenced the virus. Then another scientist called Edward C. Holmes posted the sequence publicly, which is not normally done. The COVID virus is RNA based and consists of only 30,000 base pairs, making it quite small.

The Moderna team was able to download, effectively, the "code" for the virus. From that code, they were able to use software to program our own bodies to generate an RNA vaccine effectively similar to COVID in some features but mostly harmless. It's actually very sound science and it makes sense.

The cool thing about a virus is it's half alive, half dead. It's a floating recipe that can take over a cell. There are some which are RNA based and some which are DNA based. It's a fascinating topic.