Maybe this is a hot take, but I watch and read all kinds of crazy stuff. Learning how to make a bomb should be accessable to everyone, although not necessarily the tools to do so. I’m a firm believer in freedom of information, and I find the idea of preventing people from learning whatever they want to be no different from book banning.

Besides, if they’re willing to learn how to make a bomb for malicious reasons, then they are dedicated and clever enough to research. As such, there are countless, far more destructive paths they could pursue. If you want to disrupt an entire town, you don’t bomb city hall. You plant thermite(not a bomb and incredibly easy to make) on the water tower. If you want to disrupt a city, you isolate viruses using a $15 home crispr starting kit and use random uv mutations to move it towards being more deadly and infectious, because you presumably don’t know how to gene edit using that $15 kit(which is also incredibly easy, but very tedious. If you can pipette, you have all the physical skills required).

My point being that the idea that this information isn’t safe to be made public falls flat, because the internet enables significantly more destructive information to be available to everyone. The best way to conquer your fears is by understanding them. Now instead of an irrational fear of bombs, you understand the exact mechanics of the bombs and have the knowledge of when to have a rational fear of them.

I fear I did a poor job explaining, so let me give you an example: what do you think would happen if a nuclear missile was ACCIDENTLY DROPPED onto your house? What do you think would happen to your neighbors? The wording here is very important.

Perhaps you’ve watched too much crazy stuff because there is no way you’re going to make a deadly and infectious virus with “a $15 CRISPR starting kit”.

You right, I misspoke. I would be making a deadly DISEASE, not virus. CRISPR is a bacterial editing process, I haven’t heard of any way to use crispr on viruses. Also, I just googled it, the kits have gone up to $50 now.

Even then, you won’t be able to do that. CRISPR is a precision technique and you need exactly the right protein to make the alterations you want. You can’t get that in a starter kit.

You also can’t random bullshit go! your way with UV cause it will straight up kill bacteria and the ones that don’t die will just be more resistant to UV damage.

Stop watching the crazy stuff :)

I was being very general and oversimplifying, but I think you may have misunderstood my post. I did a poor job explaining, so that’s not on you, but I did make it fairly explicit that for most people I had assumed they WERENT using crispr, just the kit.

As for the UV resistance, disclaimer: I haven’t ever done this. I am not speaking from experience, nor do I have the prerequisite information to confidently argue I am correct here, but I do believe you are slightly mistaken. I would love for you to correct me, especially if you actually do know what you’re talking about, unlike me.

this seems to suggest that UVC can induce mutations so long as you include a repair agent. From what I can gather, the UV damages the cell in such a way that would kill it normally, but by repairing the cell wall you can increase the chances the cell will heal with mutated DNA.

this seems to suggest that you can use UV to enhance or diminish existing traits in a bacteria, which is pretty much exactly what I was referring to.

this even seems to suggest that UV radiation induces a faster mutation rate than bacteria that naturally mutate quickly. This effectively eliminates the possibility of something similar to a placebo, showing that UV is more effective than otherwise naturally waiting for mutations.

Again, I could be mistaken, and there’s a bunch of specifics in those studies I didn’t quite understand. But I’m confident I got the general idea, and as such it seems a fairly difficult task to show that my original assessment was incorrect. This is going to sound facetious but I promise it’s not, I just value my word choice: I genuinely appreciate your attempt to correct me, and if you have any other information you feel would be beneficial to the discussion please don’t hesitate to share it with me.

Yes, you’re mistaken. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

None of these studies are done with a DIY set, they’re done at million-dollar laboratories by professionals. Two of these studies found exactly what I told you in the previous comment, that the bacteria became better equipped to deal with UV damage.

The second study is interesting, as they found a way to select the bacteria to produce the chemical of interest. But you won’t be able to do this with a DIY kit either.

And lastly, how are you going to determine whether you’re even on the right track? Do you have a whole bunch of rhesus monkeys that you can inoculate to see whether they die and infect each other?