Let’s keep things simple two rules.
- No giving sentience, This is a no brainer issue.
- Let’s keep it to beings under the Animilia kingdom. “mutated virus/bacteria” is a common trope.
To start:
Let’s modify ants to have lungs.
Most insects are constrained by the amount of oxygen they can acquire through their exoskeleton.
Imagine how big they can get if they didn’t have that constraint?
Give human level intelligence to gorillas, this is worse then just human level chimpanzees in the fact gorilla’s are beefy and could rip the average human in to pieces. With human level intelligence they would be a force to me reckoned with
Rewatching the newer Apes movies makes me scared shitless whenever I see a gorilla on screen. They’re big, loud, strong as hell, and smart as a person. Especially the scene in Dawn when the guy goes back to the settlement to try to negotiate and you just see that gorilla come out of nowhere and just scream at the guy.
And then I laugh whenever I see one riding a horse and think “that poor horse.”
I loved the movie children of Men. It was very interesting. You might like it too. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
A malicious gene drive. Basically, use molecular tools to ensure that a gene is always passed down from a parent to its progeny, regardless of the other parent’s genetic makeup.
Many choices available: propagate resistance to a pesticide for mosquitos, guarantee Huntington’s disease in a family, or crash a population of beneficial species by reducing fertility, to name a few.
All life with gills learn to breathe air without water, and suddenly all marine life is competing with us for land space
In a push to deal with micro plastics, bacteria are developed to be able to break down plastic. Eventually, it gets into the plastic installed for a purpose and starts breaking that down.