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Bill Gates Has Warned The World Of Terror Attack That Could Wipe Out Millions

Bill Gates Has Warned The World Of Terror Attack That Could Wipe Out Millions

Scary stuff.

James Dawson

James Dawson

Bill Gates has a track history of making predictions about the future, only for them to come true.

In 1999, he appeared to foresee that mobile devices would become increasingly popular. He predictied: "People will carry around small devices that allow them to constantly stay in touch and do electronic business from wherever they are. They will be able to check the news, see flights they have booked, get information from financial markets, and do just about anything else on these devices."

He also appeared to see social media coming. Gates' predicting there would be: "Private websites for your friends and family will be common, allowing you to chat and plan for events."

Almost two decades later we have over 2 billion users of Facebook.

Credit: PA Images

This could mean that a prediction he made earlier this year that a new form of terrorism could on the horizons that we are unprepared for should still be treated seriously.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, he said that bioterrorism could become a serious issue going-forward.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on creating vaccines that could stop the outbreak of future diseases but Gates said he is concerned the $700 million they are spending won't be enough to stop a terror threat.

"What preparedness will look like for intentionally caused things, that needs to be discussed," he said. "It's very hard to rate the probability of bioterrorism, but the potential damage is very, very huge," Gates said.

"I think an epidemic, either naturally caused or intentionally caused, is the most likely thing to cause, say, 10,000 excess deaths.

Credit: PA Images

The speech reiterated concerns he put forward during Reddit Ask Me Anything the year before.

Back then he wrote: "The problem of how we prevent a small group of terrorists using nuclear or biological means to kill millions is something I worry about," he wrote.

The states comes after Sam Altman, the president of the Silicon Valley startup accelerator program Y Combinator, told The New Yorker that he and others in the tech industry felt one of the most likely ways the world would end would be as a result bioterrorism.

"After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero," Altman said.


Credit: PA Images

Gates also said governments would need to get involved and work together to prevent bioterrorism because epidemics, he said, 'don't respect borders'.

"It's tricky because this is a global problem," Gates said. "So, how do countries work together, and which countries should put up which resources? Whether you're looking at this through a humanitarian sense or a purely domestic sense, [combatting epidemics] are investments that should be made."

This would all be a little less scary if it wasn't for his seeming ability to see what's coming.

Featured Image Credit: PA Images

Topics: bill gates

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