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Comment by anonacct37 | Hacker News Reader

How many planets do we have? By my count it's one.

What's our track record on changing ecosystems to fix problems without creating worse problems? Zero out of how many?

I hate mosquito too, and they are probably useless, but no good engineer makes changes without a backup and a tested rollback strategy, where's our backup?

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Not zero. Here are some changes we've made that affected the living things around us, but they were worth the risk 1 Indoor plumbing 2 elimination of wolves and other predators around us 3 elimination of lice and rats from our bodies and homes 4 vaccination

Eliminating wolves contributed to higher deer populations and an increase in the number of deer ticks that spread Lyme disease to humans. Intensive forestry operations also help to increase deer populations as they like the more open spaces that result from clear-cuts.

It's a bit different in that this isn't a permanent change. This won't wipe out mosquitos everywhere just yet. The infected males will mate with females, and their eggs will be nonviable.

Then the males will die, and wild males and females will continue to mate and produce viable offspring unless the process is repeated. There's plenty of room for finding errors and fixing them --up until all mosquitos are eradicated.

When’s the last time anyone died of smallpox? As a species, we seem demonstrably better off for having arrogantly removed it from the planet.

I wasn't trying to come across as an anti vaccination person. I realize just about everything is related to ecosystem, but what I meant by "changing ecosystems" was specifically related to introducing species and modifying species, not taking medicine.

Rabbits in australia are a pretty famous example, but I can't walk out my door without seeing numerous fails related to introducing plant species.

Smallpox was made extinct (aside from samples in labs) and as far a I know there haven't been any problems from that.

Sure, but the only possible side affect of eliminating smallpox was increased population growth. Different than introducing an organism who's evolution we don't control into the wild.

These mosquitoes have undergone induced sterilization. By definition their evolution is completely controlled.

What's the margin of error?

On what basis do you claim that this is the only possible side effect?

I think "zero" is being a bit uncharitable. What about plant and animal reintroduction programmes? What about culling invasive species? Use of firebreaks? Eradicating disease? Did you have any incidents in mind when saying active management results in worse problems?

What are you talking about? We change the environment all the time. Mostly there are minimal side effects. People are scared of the exceptions, because that is what gets the most attention. Its all just conformation bias and fear mongering.

Thank you. Every time we are so sure of something being totally safe, it's just the sign we don't know enough about it.

Honestly I sometimes wonder how we still haven't killed ourself already. We are very lucky bastards.

We have a rollback mechanism. This system requires the continuous introduction of new infected males.

If we find that eliminating this particular mosquito species is harmful. We can just reintroduce them from somewhere else.

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