[tivert]

> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.

Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.

And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.

Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.