While devastating, the Spanish Flu is hardly a civilization ending catastrophy. 25-40 million people worldwide died because of the Flu in the 1918-19 outbreak, and roughly 20% of the people who caught it died. While viral in nature, many of the deaths were caused by secondary bacterial pneumonia infections, which we can fight with anti-bacterial medications.
Back in the days of my undergrad days, when talk of this type
of technology was big, I remember one of my professors telling me
he thought it was time to start heading to Mars, cuz he understood
that not only could they resurrect old stuff, but they could
add other genomic sequences that could cause other effects...
the important stuff is that they could alter these viruses
to do more than would occur with normal "life" variations..
In fact, my colleages and I were asked to reconstitute and make ready for
injection, certain viral preparations that
were to be used in patients where the virus was to be injected
to the patient, and it would carry a genomic sequence to
certain body cells, and make the cells carry out different
functions...I think the term is called "transfection"...
they're also trying that with cancer....certain cells are
susceptible to different chemicals when a certain genomic element
is present, so they are "transfecting" the cancer cells with
the genome, then treating the cancer cell with the appropriate
molecule.
I haven't researched the final results of the studies, and I
haven't heard much yet, so I suspect the jury is still out
as to the effectiveness of this approach.
P.S. "Zero" is a concept. And also a semantic conundrum. I mean
how can you have "something" that is "nothing"? If it's nothing,
it cannot exist, therefore it can't be "something"....just
for your philosophical perusal....Ha! Wouldn't mind hearing your
thoughts on that anyway.