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How emerging technologies can help us fight the new coronavirus

By Kevin Esvelt

In nature, few species remain dominant for long. Any sizable population of similar individuals offers immense resources to whichever parasite can evade its defenses, spreading rapidly from one member to the next.

Which will prove greater: our defenses or our vulnerabilities? 

Humans are one such dominant species. That wasn’t always the case: our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in groups too small and poorly connected to spread pathogens like wildfire. Our collective vulnerability to pandemics began with the dawn of cities and trade networks thousands of years ago. Roman cities were always demographic sinks, but never more so than when a pandemic agent swept through. The plague of Cyprian, the Antonine plague, the plague of Justinian – each is thought to have killed over ten million people, an appallingly high fraction of the total population of the empire.

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