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Nuclear Armament and the Arms Race

Both are highly dangerous. A nuclear or even a major conventional war gets out of control

all too quickly and destroys everything. Moreover, the risk of such an uncontrolled devel­

opment has been exacerbated for a few years by nationalist and isolationist tendencies and

new armaments on all sides, including nuclear ones. 2020 will witness the expiry of both

the Strategic Nuclear Forces Agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces

Agreement.

Game Theory  Interestingly, one can describe rearmament, arms races, nuclear exchange,

but also quite generally combat and competition strategies very well with the help of game

theory (and a lot of specific knowledge as an expert). Unfortunately, the explosive nature

of this new arms race is currently being suppressed, presumably because no one wants to

deal with this immanent and clearly too high risk in a seriously affected manner. Instead,

the fear is directed towards other, more tangible dangers, such as international terrorism or

radioactivity from nuclear power plants, both of which are negligible dangers. After all,

the UN has just begun the process of outlawing nuclear weapons since October 2016.

Moreover, one can deduce from systems biology considerations that it is important to

continuously make our current peaceful state more robust: Disarmament, especially

nuclear weapons, but also confidence-building measures are very important to prevent

exacerbations here. Manageable own examples of modeling attack and defense strategies

from infectious biology can be found in Dühring et al. (2015). Generally speaking, game

theory (Amann and Helbach 2012) and evolutionary strategies (Bäck et al. 2013) are

good bioinformatics approaches for modeling even such highly complex problems with

many parameters. 

Global Warming

Ecosystem Models  Another explosive problem is global warming. Here, it is the other

way around. The problem is not suddenly devastating, but will only strike in full force

around the year 2100. Since it is also the case that, as with fishing, the temptation is very

high to quickly grab a piece for oneself at the expense of others, there has so far been an

unbroken trend for more and more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Although the Paris

climate agreement of December 2015 gives us hope that concrete action will perhaps be

taken against this, only time will tell whether the amount of savings will be sufficient.

Here, of course, bioinformatics computer simulations directly help to simulate exactly

how the climate will change in the future. And other models (from satellite data, for exam­

ple) are used to measure exactly how the climate is changing right now. This is a blind spot

without bioinformatics, so it’s an ideal example of how bioinformatics approaches can

actively help here. A nice introduction to modeling such problems is provided by the paper

Lenton et al. (2008).

16  Bioinformatics Connects Life with the Universe and All the Rest