This led Larry Niven to speculate that we may yet end up living virtual lives, protected from infection by never traveling and seldom being exposed to other people except through virtual reality. Tourists will be rare, intrepid explorers who carry massive amounts of recording equipment so that their experiences can be shared with everyone else. A world something like this was described long ago by the late Isaac Asimov in The Caves of Steel , and its sequel, The Naked Sun . This will be the theme of a book we are working on at present. We continued with some speculation about the impact of Lamarkian Evolution.
Evolution is thus slow and governed largely by chance mutation.
The Soviet biologist Lysenko was the last major figure to base a biological system on the Lamarkian hypothesis, which has been pretty well proven wrong, but it need not be wrong in an era of tailored viruses and gene splicing. The implications are profound. And that, I fear, is about all I recorded. I do recall that, asked to make a specific prediction, I said that it was highly likely that within our lifetime we will experience a plague as deadly as the Black Death, which killed a third of the populations of Europe and the Middle East. And the first to get it will be medical workers, health care providers, and emergency service workers.