GMOs, together with massive animal agriculture are a black swan in the making.
Let's modify the organisms, create billions of them, have them as a testing ground for bacteria and viruses, let the bacteria and viruses evolve to eventually kill the resistant individuals, then after it happens we need 10 more years until more than a thousand billion individuals produce a human targeting strain.
There is absolutely no scientific way anyone can measure the risk without the effect of time.
Not to mention that my story is only one outcome out of many downsides and it's already happening with antibiotics abuse in animal ag.
The avian flu is a good past example. The disease sparked from a population of animals we raise the most. Hundreds of billions of chickens were Petri dishes for the ultimate strain of mammal killers. Intuitively these kinds of situations are inevitable.
Animals have been genetically modifying themselves to have stronger immune systems for millions of years. Are you proposing to halt evolution through natural selection?
I don't understand how people don't get that... Like, half of the concern about global warming/climate change isn't warming per se - it might be a good thing if we'd be able to grow food in Siberia - but change - the unforeseen, unpredictable consequences of throwing a complex chaotic system out of a balance it's maintained for millions of years. Now exactly the same applies to GMOs, but all of a sudden the "scientific community" reaches the opposite consensus.
Other techniques can produce genetic changes just as large as direct genetic modification. For example, irradiation, interspecies hybridization, and selective breeding. So your "black swan" argument is invalid.
Which of those techniques can implant virus/bacterial gene into plant DNA?
It’s like saying “nuclear bomb could happen randomly in the universe” like yeah, it could (and there are actually examples of natural reactors), but what are the odds, versus human engineering?!
