Y Combinator’s Sam Altman: Biological warfare is the biggest threat

Sam
Altman, president of Y Combinator, speaks at the Wall Street
Journal Digital Conference in Laguna Beach, California, on
October 18, 2017.
Lucy
Nicholson/Reuters

• Y Combinator president Sam Altman says people are not as
  scared about biological warfare “as they should be.”
• In the event of an apocalypse, Altman has a go bag filled
  with water, a gun, a tent, and other supplies. 
• Bill and Melinda Gates have also said a global pandemic is
  the biggest threat to humanity right now.
• Several scientists agree about the possibility of an
  infectious disease killing millions of people around the world,
  though some believe a natural pandemic is more likely than
  biological terrorism.

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator — Silicon Valley’s

largest startup accelerator — believes biological warfare is
the greatest threat to humanity, and people “aren’t as scared
enough about that as they should be.”

Two years ago, Altman said he would escape to New Zealand with
billionaire Peter Thiel in the event of a pandemic. Altman
recently told
Bloomberg that he was just joking back then, but the
33-year-old has certainly put thought into emergency planning.
Altman’s go bag includes a gun, water, a tent, batteries,
antibiotics, blankets, and gas masks. 

“The world is so interconnected
now that if anything was to happen, we would all be in pretty bad
shape, unfortunately,” Altman told Bloomberg. “I don’t think you
can just run away and try to hide in a corner of the
Earth.”

New Zealand has
become a popular destination for many tech millionaires
worried about an upcoming apocalypse. According to Bloomberg,
seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have bought bunkers and placed
them in New Zealand over the past few years. 

Last year, LinkedIn co-founder
Reid Hoffman
told The New Yorker he believes more than half of Silicon
Valley’s billionaires
have purchased some form of “apocalypse insurance,” like an
underground bunker. 

In addition to Altman, Melinda
Gates
has previously said that biological terrorism is “most
definitely” the biggest global threat she can imagine within the
next decade.  

“A bioterrorist event could spread so quickly, and we are so
unprepared for it,” Gates told Vox founder Ezra Klein in a March
interview. 

Bill Gates shares his wife’s concerns, and the two have written
extensively about the threat of infectious diseases, both natural
and human-made. In a 2017
op-ed for Business Insider, Bill Gates wrote that an airborne
pathogen has the potential to kill more than 30 million people
within one year. Such an outbreak, he wrote, could occur in the
next 10-15 years.

Several experts echoed these concerns; George Poste, an ex
officio member of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on
Biodefense, previously
told Business Insider that a pandemic strain as bad as the
1918 influenza will inevitably emerge one day. Poste,
however, said a devastating bioterrorism attack is less likely
than a natural pandemic due to the complexity of executing
biological warfare.

Either way, Bill and Melinda Gates maintain that the world is not
prepared enough for a pandemic. Melinda Gates has advocated for
the creation of a group like the CDC that would solely focus on
bioterror, monitoring the world for outbreaks and creating
appropriate safety standards.