Well in such a catastrophic event I imagine there will be no courts or money or corporation left so the point is moot

Safety regulations are already abound, and it's not hard to make new ones. I've been to many labs, and trust me, they treat safety with a lot of priority. Of course you can't prevent EVERY accident but if we were that scared of the unknown, where would we be? In caves, huddled around each other, fending off wild animals. (I've been playing too much spore)

I find it hard to believe that Nanites can self-replicate without us putting them in check. They'd need human-like intelligence to get around our hardware or software limitations.



Why do you belittle humanity so much? I think you take for granted all that we've done so far. Look at your computer. Do you understand how much research and forethought was put into that? All those tiny switches and diodes and capacitors and disks and semiconductors.. all flowing with electrons produced miles away from your house. Oh, and the fact that we even know what an electron is?

You think it's arrogant to think we can improve ourselves and our habitat? We already have! Before we invented all these new medicines, you'd be considered lucky to live 40 years. Now you can live past 90. You live in a house made from hundreds of materials that keeps you warm in the winter, stores days old food, contains machines that enable you to communicate almost instantaneously with people on the other side of the planet. You can get almost any product you want delivered to you in a day, you're kept alive by an infrastructure of farmers, manufacturers, couriers, and retailers, you're protected by policemen, firemen, paramedics, doctors, and surgeons, not to mention that government thing that protects you from monsters in your closet, and you think we're arrogant to try out even more new ideas we're getting? If you lived in the turn of the century, would you call Henry Ford arrogant for thinking he can mass-produce a metal carriage powered by exploding gasoline, and that said automobile would enable an explosion of global trade?

The question then is just how likely the risk has to be of a catastrophic outcome in order to justify not doing the experiment. I don't think that can really be knowable much of the time either. So in short, we are pretty much stumbling in the dark most of the time and there isn't much that can be done about it. Science is inherently an existential threat to humanity.

I'm not saying they are idiots or they don't know what they are doing. The entire point of an experiment is that the result is not necessarily known, they are doing things where they can only predict the outcome and then figure out what happens based on the results of the experiment. Like the LHC that just came online recently, there was in fact a possibility that it could destroy the earth. The odds of that happening were insanely small according to every qualified scientist, but they existed. Getting back to the topic at hand, when it comes to things like nanotech and genetic manipulations the outcomes are not known but its certainly possible that they pose great risks. It's really Joy's "the future doesn't need us" argument that I'm getting at here. I'm absolutely not saying that we should give up on science, if anything we need more, but lets be honest about the risks.

Hence why I despise the concept of capitalism.
While it promotes creativity, it's done so for the purpose of acquisition. Thus it also promotes greed, selfishness, and if the money is right - far far worse. It creates a system in which it's always in a company's best interest to make money. And in order to do so, many companies do questionable things. Sure we can try to prevent problems with regulations and fines, but that can be like kicking over an ant-hill - the ants will just dig deeper next time. We already see companies sidestep the rules on a daily basis by going international and hiring cheap labor because the US minimum wage is higher than they want to pay.

So lets say you have a new medicine or technology that could revolutionize the world in a good way, but it could lead to equally bad things and the government forbids the research at the demand of the people - stem cell research, for instance. What's preventing a company from simply opening a lab in another country that doesn't care and researching it there in secret? Who would ensure their safety mechanisms are sufficient? What happens if they aren't?

Sure you have your movie-spoof crazy people out there who might want to research something for purely destructive means. But in my book, they're far less a threat to this world than a powerful corporation fueled by the almighty dollar.

I think you are talking about things above you level of knowledge.  We know that if we put this bit of DNA in a chicken embryo, its tail will have 13 vertebrae instead of 5, but we do not know WHY.  We do not understand WHY proteins fold, but we know they do and that it means something, but are struggling with HOW they fold.  There are many fundamental things that we know happen, we know if you poke it it might do this, but not the HOWS or WHYS.  Until we do, our "improvements" may destroy the good that was already there, but we failed to comprehend or understand.  I really think you do not understand just how little we really know about ourselves, let alone the universe around us, and I am talking strictly concrete sciences.  I truly believe that learning the HOWS and WHYS of our biology and chemistry will unlock far more than any drug will.  I mean come on, every drug made only works for some people, but we can not identify them before hand for many drugs or even WHY that drug did not help them.

There is far more to learn that the tiny fraction we already know.  You really need to think bigger about the bigger picture.

We can not even make honey or fully understand how a bee does it, do you really think we can build a machine to make this planet that was fine without us for how long...better?

I think if we're prepared to begin exploring bioengineering, particularly with people, we have to accept a couple foregone consequences:

1)  Designer babies.  This will happen.  There's no stopping it.  Once you can go through and decide just what genes you want your child to have, people will put personal preferences.  This includes ethnicity and sex.  It could also include sexuality(if it's ever found to have a legitimate genetic component).  I know there are many, including self described liberals that don't like that idea.

2) Sacrifice.  Science is not perfect.  Nothing is done on the first try.  There is much, often exhaustive, trial and error involved these practices.  Once you move up to human trials, what are you willing to sacrifice to obtain these technologies?  How many human lives do we experiment on to perfect our techniques?

Interestingly enough, we got much of our knowledge of human anatomy from records kept by German scientists at the end of WWII who had no qualms with boiling someone alive to find what the maximum heat tolerance is for a human being, for one example.(yes, it applies.  I'm not arbitrarily bringing Nazis up)  That's the level scientific research gets to without limits placed upon it by society.

3) Ethics.  What do we value?  Do we actually value human life?  Do we consider ourselves more than our fellow creatures? 

I think that ethics, unfortunately, are like the definition or pornography:  it depends on what the community allows and permits.  I am certain that there are experiments now that you and I think are just fine, ethically, that our forefathers would shudder at if alive today.  As much as we would like there to be black and white in terms of right and wrong, we will never get to a level that satisfies all.  No matter where we place the line in the sand, some group will be on the other side and will do whatever it takes to either move the line, or the folks on the opposite side.