The Game of Life - My Prediction

I don't know if you ever played the Game of Life on a computer? It is a game that I first played on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP something, the model is lost in the fog of time.

The rules are quite simple, 

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite, two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead, (or populated and unpopulated, respectively). Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

But the thing is that it is a simple model of how a virus spreads and that leads me to my prediction.

I can't even count the number of science-fiction books where the plot is a virus wipes out a civilization?

We have seen a number of plagues in our lifetime. For me my first plague was the Polio epidemic, that one really made an impression on me. Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and MERS are just some of the other major virus outbreaks.

Over 4 million people have died of COVID-19 worldwide out of 7.8 billion people is a small percentage of the population but here in the U.S. it was enough to lower the life expectancy and make COVID-19 the number one cause of death in the U.S.

The population of the world has increased as a result of vaccination, in the past viruses kept the world population in check. Think about it. The black plague wiped out a large percentage of the population of Europe, smallpox wiped out most of the indigenous population of North America, plagues are nature's regulators. When the population gets too large, wham! Along comes a plague. 

But humans like to play with Mother Nature. Vaccines upsets the natural regulators, we are not dying off at birth, and we continue to have large families and the population of the world is skyrocketing.

As the world becomes overpopulated we become ripe for viruses.

You know how those ads about disinfectants that kill 99% of the germs? What do you suppose happens to the 1%? We just created a colony of germs that are resistant to disinfectants. Germs and viruses are alive and they mutate all the time, Mother Nature like to experiment and keeps on trying different versions of itself. Some versions are flops but others take off and spread, that is how we got the Delta variant of COVID-19.

My prediction is that we are going to see an increase in plagues like COVID-19, this is only a drop in the bucket until one mutates and we have no weapons to fight and it spreads faster than we can find an antidote.

I don't know when but we will see a super plague that is resistant to treatment, then we will become like some dystopian sci-fi novel and the Wheel of Time will complete its cycle and a new species will emerge.

It is the Game of Life.

If you want to try playing the Game of Life here is the link.