Life Under the Bell Jar

By studying chimpanzee droppings in remote African
jungles, scientists reported yesterday, they have found direct evidence
of a missing link between a chimpanzee virus and the one that causes
human AIDS.

Scientists have long suspected that chimpanzees are the source of the human
AIDS pandemic because at least one subspecies carries a simian immune deficiency
virus closely related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

But because the simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, was identified in chimpanzees
in captivity, researchers could not be sure that the same simian virus
existed among these apes in the wild.

It does, the team of American, European and Cameroonian
scientists reported in the journal Science. They found it by testing
hundreds of chimpanzee droppings collected in Cameroon.

The genetic and immunologic tests were developed in stages over the past
seven years to help trace the evolution of H.I.V. and solve the mysterious
origins of AIDS, said Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn, a virologist at the University
of Alabama in Birmingham.

The new findings, she said in a telephone interview, do not explain
the entire chain of events that led from the first human H.I.V. infection
to the infection of 65 million people around the world.

from the New York Times

Rationalists will say this shows that overcrowding,
poverty and intimate contact between humans and various other animal
species means we will see an increasing number of diseases and plagues
jumping species, interspecies mutations destined to eventually cull the
overpopulation of the planet in a Malthusian nightmare.

Those of a truly conspiratorial bent will note that
were one determined to create a deadly plague, a good space to start
would be the genetic blueprint of a virus affecting our closest biological
relatives, the chimpanzees.

Either way, by God’s hand or man’s, infectious diseases
seem destined to proliferate in the future, further informing the Dowbrigade’s
dark vision of what lies ahead for us all. We see increasingly common
and extreme germ phobias breaking out in the general populations, millions
of middle-class Howard Hughes spending billions to seal themselves off
in hermetically controlled environments.

Most people will never go out. Food will be
delivered by robot cars or guest workers from whatever national cuisine
provides
the meal, and irradiated before allowed into the home. All informational
and sensorial information about the outside world will come through the
eventual successor to fiber optic cable – phone, interactive TV, games,
Internet, first-run movies, work, payment for work, etc.

No one will actually take traveling vacations anymore,
unless they have a very strong deathwish. Besides, with gasoline and
jet fuel at $135 a gallon, it’ll too expensive to go far. Instead, VR
travelogues, media immersion rooms and designer pharmaceuticals will
assuage the seemingly universal human need for vacations.

Education will be solely on-line, as will art galleries,
sporting events, musical performances, political rallies and private
parties. Disease and terrorist attacks will make it too dangerous to
gather large groups of people anywhere without a secure military perimeter
and health screenings for all participants.

Actual physical proximity will become the ultimate sign
of trust and intimacy. Letting another person into the same room with
one would have many of the same implications that sleeping with someone
does today.

Of course, not everyone will be able to afford this
new hermetic lifestyle. Which is why while life expectancy for bubble
people should rise towards 110 or 120, in the less fortunate corners
of the world, with plague, famine and resource warfare rampant, it should
fall to 25 or 30. Maybe it will balance out, and the world’s average
life expectancy would stay the same, but we doubt it.

What does all this mean to normal, average Joes
in today’s America? Try buying stock in drug companies, and make sure
your medical
insurance is paid up…