Питер Уоттс: Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow

Certain people who place emotion above intellect have called what happened to Donnie Maass a crime. They are wrong. What happened to Donnie was only a tragedy, and it was a tragedy with a silver lining. The real crime would be if we let squeamishness prevail, if we turned our back on this opportunity to make the world a richer, better —yes, even a safer place. Donnie would want us to push on, and it is for Donnie—and for all the children of the world — that our first commercial batch of vampires is gestating even as we speak. We anticipate FDA approval within the month; and in the very unlikely event that that doesn’t happen, a number of third-world countries have already offered to host our research under very favourable tax and regulatory conditions. The potential benefits to mankind are incalculable—and with the proper safeguards in place, we can virtually guarantee that nothing will go wrong.

Thank you.

In fact, their extinction may have released the so-called Toba Bottleneck : most of the human race died off about 73,000 years ago, and numbers remained very low until about ten thousand years ago, during which time we began an unprecedented expansion that continues to this day. This bottleneck has traditionally been blamed on a massive volcanic explosion in Sumatra, and a consequent volcanic winter; but the timing is interesting, to say the least.