The problem with your example is that sterilization is a side effect that would take a very long time to actually cause armageddon, and if civilization can produce GMO foods they can PROBABLY reverse whatever leads to the sterility.
A nuclear exchange that wipes out the key parts of western civilization could happen in 1 hour, and the war could be over in 1 day. If someone were to release a huge swarm of killer nano-machines, it might take months to years to eat the biosphere (again, the machinery I am talking about is NOT self replicating) but developing a countermeasure could take decades.
Another factor to keep in mind is that human biotech advances are very slow and incremental, due to extremely heavy regulation. There is a reluctance to take risks, yet if the risks were taken, far more rapid advances are likely. If a significant proportion of the population were sterile, this reluctance to take risks would be enormously reduced, and rapid advances could happen.
One apocryphal story I heard from a professor at Texas Tech Medical School was that most chemotherapy agents in use today were developed during the postwar period, when regulation was almost nonexistent and a researcher could go straight from the laboratory to the bedside of a cancer patient.
Hearing stories like this, and realizing that in the United States, something like 1.6 million people die every year ANYWAY, I think that regulations should be greatly reduced, but that's for another discussion.
Today's post, Raised in Technophilia was originally published on 17 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was My Best and Worst Mistake, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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