We're running a series of companion posts this week to accompany our special edition Ars Lunch Break podcast . This is the first of three guest posts centered around Rob's TED talk below. Tomorrow we'll have a post continuing the discussion from geneticist George Church, and Thusday we'll have one from microbiologist Andrew Hessel.

The H5N1 flu strain makes SARS and swine flu look almost cuddly. But though it kills higher percentages of infected patients than even Ebola, this ghastly flu variant claimed just five human lives over the past three years. Happily, it’s barely contagious amongst humans.

In 2011, two separate research teams—one in Holland, the other in Wisconsin—set out to repair this "defect" in H5N1. By carefully manipulating the bug’s genome, they soon had something just as lethal as the classic edition, but also wildly contagious. And if it escaped the lab, scientists believed it “would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths,” according to the news arm of one of the world’s top academic journals, Science.

For his part, the head of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, Dr. Paul Keim, said, “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one.” An anthrax expert, Keim added, “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

Good news, everyone...

2011 was an ancient year in the brief history of synthetic biology, or synbio. Our H5N1 researchers were almost uniquely equipped and qualified for their deeds back then. But technical advances have since made genome-editing projects like theirs far less daunting—and future advances will one day make them trivial.

A case in point: the most celebrated technique in genetic editing, CRISPR, was harnessed two years after the flu hackers completed their work. Progress in the broader synbio field has since accelerated on all fronts. Genetic sequencing is advancing at rates exceeding that of Moore’s law—which itself has already reordered society.

Further breakthroughs in genetic editing are in the pipeline. Meanwhile, the art of synthesizing DNA code from scratch has turned commercial and had its first IPO.

These advances aren’t intrinsically evil or saintly. They’re just astoundingly powerful. I explored them in a TED talk, which released today, and is embedded below. In it, I conjure a little ghost story—one I wish was implausible, but is anything but. Imagine it’s 2026, and a brilliant virologist creates a bug more lethal and transmissible than that mutant H5N1 flu. Hoping to advance science and better understand pandemics, they also design it to incubate for months within bodies before causing outbreaks. This could let it infect much of the world before the first whiff of danger.

2026 is a perfectly safe year. Our virologist has blameless motives and an airtight lab. More important, it would take an extremely rare genius—like our scientist—to actually animate a living critter from the DNA code they've created. To anyone less skilled, it’s just an inert string of Gs, As, Ts, and Cs.

Then the scientist's university, like hundreds every year, gets hacked. And the text file containing their DNA string joins the pirated Abba and Breaking Bad files in countless illicit online stashes.

Time passes, and synbio’s progress continues to make Moore’s Law look pokey. Ever more powerful and simpler tools enable far-less-specialized intellects to modify and weaponize our virologist’s work. Its variants become renowned and ubiquitous. And eventually, the trick of infusing them into living substrates becomes something smart teens can handle. This could take a decade—or perhaps somewhat longer. But best case, this is a mid-century problem.

When the clock goes red

Facing such a problem, we should ask if (and why) anyone would ever want to commit murder on the scale at which a release of this kind of bug would unfold. And asking that, we should consider how many people die each year in the act of killing as many strangers as possible. Digging into this reveals that the darkest nihilists aren’t limited by their consciences or ambitions—instead, they're mostly constrained by the weapons they can access.

If it’s a knife (as in Japan, last month), two or three victims may die. If it’s semi-automatic weapons (as in Orlando, Las Vegas, or Newtown), dozens might perish. If it’s a commercial plane with a suicidal pilot (as with Germanwings flight 9525 or possibly Malaysia Airlines flight 370) hundreds can die.

Imaginable near-future pathogens could kill millions, or even billions of us. Since existing nuclear and biological or chemical warfare technology has enabled governments to kill at this scale since the start of the Cold War, we might take comfort that no one has yet hit the red button. But governments also spend trillions on deterrence, diplomacy, and game theory—tools that are well suited to moderating angry institutional impulses.

Very different strategies and budgets will be needed to dissuade thousands of teetering loners from Stalin-grade killing sprees. Bioweaponized factions will be even more daunting, whether we're talking about death cults, racists who train viruses to kill selectively, or eco-terrorists seeking to rid Gaia of humans. And again, all these are mid-century problems. They're on the horizon.

Cheer up, weepy genes

With all of this doom and gloom, you may not suspect your humble author of being a hot-blooded synbio booster. But I believe this field could be the greatest boon to humanity in all of history. Advances resulting from research in synthetic biology could heal our bodies, our planet, and our often-brutal relationships with other creatures—and that’s just the start.

I’ll add that time is on our side, for now. The most virulent dangers are years away. The worst could-be perpetrators may not be born yet. The darkness that led to Columbine and Newtown is exceedingly rare in humanity, and those it afflicts should always be outnumbered millions-to-one.

Our deliverance lies in synbio’s own Promethean labs. And in the spirit of biomimicry, we should use its tools to start building an immune system—one for the entire biosphere. I sketch the rawest outline of such a system toward the end of my talk (starting at 13:04). And while my “ghost story” may stick in more minds, the actual message is one of empowerment and optimism.

Time is on our side, for now.

Not being a scientist myself, I fact-checked and road-tested every element of my talk with a dozen top synbio experts. Their unanimous consensus is that we can dodge this bullet—if we start architecting our immune system now. And over the next two days, two brilliant thinkers will contribute pieces to Ars exploring this system’s foundations.

Tomorrow, George Church will write about the path to agile, networked, ubiquitous germ-detection systems—systems which can alert us about natural and artificial pathogens alike, promptly after their first emergence (this is mentioned in my talk at 13:22). George is one of the world’s most influential bioengineers, and his Harvard lab has spawned a dizzying range of innovations, techniques, and startups. He has also been advocating for surveillance systems in the synbio field since 2004.

On Thursday, founder & CEO of Humane Genomics Andrew Hessel will discuss the path to a highly distributed manufacturing base for printing vaccines (mentioned in my talk at 13:37). If we prioritize the core technologies, this could easily extend to every pharmacy—and one day, even our homes. In dynamic disease environments, traditional vaccines are crippled by distribution and storage challenges, as well as by their innate incapacity to adapt to new threats and mutations. Coupled with the detection systems George calls for, biomanufacturing at the edge would harden us against manmade scourges, as well as to ancient ones like the flu.

Synthetic biology could yield a level of human flourishing that defies imagination. But to paraphrase my friend Naval Ravikant, technologies this powerful are like a coin with immortality stamped on one side—and annihilation on the other.

This is a coin we must not flip. Foresight and action can plant it firmly on the ground, with the correct side up.