I have probably mistitled this category of existential risk.

I was researching transgenic experiments where goats were being altered genetically so that their mammary glands produce spider-silk (dope to be exact...the substance from which spider-silk is spun). To oversimplify, it is done by replacing portions of their DNA (or maybe it was RNA...I dont recall) with spider DNA, and using cloning technology to create the embryos, implant them, and raise the altered goats to become spidersilk factories. Similar experiments have turned goats into medicine producers.

The company doing this (and succeeding) was called Nexia Biotechnologies. I first read about them in the New York Times, and found subsequent material in National Geographic, on the company's own website, and in many other places. Recently the company was bought out, and I am not sure what has happened to the technology since, but it was while researching this form of transgenics that I learned of an existential threat.

While studying transgenics, I learned about the world's seed merchants and companies like Monsanto which controls a vast portion of the world's agricultural seed market. I guess it is no real secret that they have been developing for some time lines of seeds which will grow the desired plant, but in a sterile form. This is because farmers would previously buy only the amount of seed they could not generate from their own crops to replant the following season/cycle. By creating a seed that grows sterile plants, a farmer dependent on that type of seed would be required to buy all his seeds each season/cycle from the seed merchants, enhancing profitability.

The risk is this: plants are known to be highly susceptible to picking up the genetic traits of other plants in their environment. When pollen (and possibly any other transmitter of genetic code) from a foreign plant is received it is not simply ignored. Evidently the receiving plant makes some analysis of the genetic data, perhaps to pick up new traits like disease resistance, environmental hardiness, pest repellant capability, etc, and then mimics some of these traits in the next generation of its own seeds. I dont know if this process is a somewhat random one like might have been imitated in studies of 'digital evolution' done at Yale and elsewhere (where AI creates and recreates technological components with various random mods, testing each successive batch for improvement and then continuing to use only the improved designs as the base models for the next generations) or a more purposeful one...but the result is that plants around the sterile ones are at risk of picking up the sterile genes and producing a generation of sterile seeds. You may have heard more about this type of risk from farmers trying to maintain the purity of their 'organic' strains in fields near gentically altered crops...and failing.

Granted, the risk of spreading a 'sterile gene' widely is probably reduced by the fact that each successful generation of such plants should die out on its own. But if a 'super-contagious' version of this gene were developed/evolved that transmitted to all plants (or even just a smal but significant percentage of species) it could result in a rapid ecological meltdown wherein most of our food and oxygen producing plants could no longer reproduce. Even if that terrible case scenario seems far-fetched, there are other ways this type of risk could be a factor, especially in combination with other existential risks.

For example, if as a result of bio-terrorism or commercial warfare, a nation or corporation were able to reduce its competitors infrastructure to dependency on others by either introducing a disease that only their technology could cure or prevent (much as many seeds are now engineered to resist various pesticides/herbicides/diseases/etc)...we would be much closer to facing such an existential threat.

Obviously I am not quite at the same level of either understanding or ability to communicate the facts in this category of threat, but I am surprised we havent seen it discussed here as much as some things like nanotechnology, since the technology to create these types of genetic strains basically already exists...the only question is whether the morality/ethical restraint is present enough to prevent it from being used or if the only reason it hasnt 'cropped up' is that we are just one or two tweaks away from making such ventures profitable or strategic enough to be implemented against a target.

I would love to hear more on this topic from others involved in this forum who are more advanced and informed than myself.