Brian nodded, "I’ve been reading every day recently. In fact, as the natural environment continually changes, species on our planet are going extinct daily, unable to adapt to the current environment—some due to temperature or..."
Dean interrupted Brian.
He exhaled a puff of smoke and organized his thoughts before saying, "Roughly, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean the self-destruction of humanity, especially in modern times. You know, despite the influence of the Blood Moon, the human population has actually been increasing."
Brian nodded. "Yes, the productivity of modern times is unimaginable compared to before. Now, many ordinary people live better than a lot of the nobles and powerful classes of the past. Also, the development of modern medicine is a very important reason."
Whether it’s food, comfort, or medical care, humans are currently at the best stage in history.
This is the benefit of a technological explosion.
Especially in the West.
Many of the ’white bread’ and ’expensive drinks’ that the nobles consumed are now just relatively refined hard bread and cloudy fruit wine... Even a vagrant can afford these, and might even grow tired of them.
"But this isn’t necessarily a good thing."
Dean flicked his cigarette ash, his tone a bit grave:
"Actually, in the early phase of the Blood Moon, after World War II, the United States accepted many outstanding talents from the German Empire, as well as the elite immigrants from various countries yearning for peace and stability.
So the Federation initiated a project named the Human Genetic Survey.
This project was initially set up based on the development of biological weapons.
At that time, people had realized that different races, due to environmental and dietary evolutions over a long period, have subtle genetic differences, resulting in slight variations in resistance to different pathogens.
Some people speculated that creating some sort of tailored biological viral weapon might be more lethal than modern weaponry.
However, due to technological limitations at the time, the research progress of the project was slow, only collecting many special viral samples from around the world. During this process, they also accepted many war criminals who should have been tried.
These war criminals, exploiting wartime chaos and cruelty through human experimentation, had relatively deeper research in these areas.
Their involvement sped up the research process.
This continued until everyone noticed the changes in the world.
The project took on more meaning and practical value, and the Federation invested more resources and manpower into it, persisting until about a decade ago, but in the end, the results were not good, and the project was forcibly terminated.
After listening to Dean’s explanation, Brian pondered for a moment, uncertainly said, "Out of control?"
"Out of control... was one of the reasons, yes.
In the research, they found that life would choose its own way out. Almost all viruses, due to large-scale deployment in live experiments, mutated at an alarmingly fast rate. The value of an uncontrollable weapon naturally decreased dramatically.
But that’s not the main reason for the termination of the project.
The main reason was that the project leader discovered that the genetic value of humans was continuously decreasing.
The primary causes of this were the advancement of modern medicine and increased productivity.
In the past, apart from the powerful, the average lifespan of humans globally wasn’t long. Those who survived from the lower classes had pretty good genes; the weaker ones either died young or early on, so the inferior genes couldn’t be passed down.
It’s different in modern times.
More and more chronic diseases are appearing.
More and more poor-quality genes are becoming stable dominant genes.
This group may not be numerous, but as human productivity and medical technology continue to improve, and everyone’s life is getting better, out of humanitarianism—at least on the surface—some infants who wouldn’t have survived end up growing up, becoming adults, and even reproducing.
In this process, the excellent genes that humans had taken a long time to stabilize are being continuously polluted.
Although hidden and slow, the overall genetic quality and physical condition of modern people are far inferior to those from a hundred years ago.
According to predictions, if it continues , the human population might experience a particular genetic disease at some stage that sweeps across the entire species, as if the planet’s self-cleaning ability decides to clear out humanity.
Even though this probability is very low, it concerned the project leader that if they continued to develop biological weapons targeting genes, it could turn this low-probability event into a high-probability one, or even cause a catastrophe for all of humanity by their own hands."
"They worried they’d be caught in it too, so they terminated the project?"
Brian was actually more concerned with the phrase ’large-scale deployment’ mentioned by Dean.
That is to say, ’they’ had already secretly done such things among the population; it was just unknown who the unlucky ones used as experimental subjects were.
But it was easy to guess.
It would be either people from the third world (not black), or their own people or allies from the United States.
Without their own military bases in those places with poor relations, they wouldn’t be able to conduct such operations easily.
In a sense, when their allies were also quite unlucky—not only did they have to be the donors and leeches needed for blood bags and chives, but they might also be done in without even realizing it. And if found out, they’d hardly dare to speak up, maybe even having to help cover up the mess...