We are such an arrogant specie.
I'm not.
If you can't see the difference between defence and offence, local area of effect and genocide...
What do you think a person's immune system does to smallpox when they have been inoculated against smallpox and they are exposed to it?
We're not actively killing mosquitoes just preventing them from breeding.
Me, I say kill the mosquitoes.
(Although, honestly, even if you did have such a plan, I'd still say kill the mosquitoes in addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15665373)
You can only maybe guaranty fast.
And the unknown is huge on this one. Just like the potential horrible consequences.
The way you talk scares me a lot. I feel like I'm in front of the stereotypical american gun owner in tv shows.
If natural selection was at play, I should have died when I was 12 without my appendectomy.
Human are all about saying not today to the God of death. For them self.
So I just wish we continued this "not today" things, but with a broader perspective including not sawing the tree branch we are sitting on. Like destroying the entire ecosystem with our brilliant ideas.
Plus, there is a lot of BS with this "killing millions" arguments. As I lived in Mali, and worked in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya, I can tell you that:
- people there consider it like a big flu. It only kills the very weak, others just have it like you have a running nose in the winter. And those people are weak because we destroyed their countries, we still leach them, so they have poor infrastructures and poor access to major resources, including food, clean water and decent hygiene.
- We have had a cure to most forms of malaria for several years now. Not something experimental or mysterious. I just went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris for that. You have protocols based on Malarone (surprise, it's not the preventive-only drug they tell you it is, it can cure as well). But besides tropical disease expert doctors, nobody will let you know that. And Malians don't have the money to buy it anyway. See previous point.
So mosquitoes are not the problem. The problem is that our system are killing millions.
Should we solve that problem by a collective suicide ? Apparently death of the mass is the popular solution to people dying.
The mosquito is a special case considering how it carries lethal diseases, of course. So to me, control is certainly acceptable (mass extinction, I'm not so sure either).
My guess is at any rate that this won't be a mass solution even if it 100% works -- applied at too much scale and a likely result is mosquitoes will develop resistance to Wolbachia (just as they have with chemicals when we tried massive control with pesticides). As a localized solution, this is intriguing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074
Is the selective pressure that strong that an animal family that generally doesn't bite humans and ouf of the tiny percentage that does there is an even smaller percentage that carries a bacteria that can kill humans is required for the entire families survival?
No insect is killed. The only change is that the mosquito doesn't carry a bacteria. Yet you equate that to the destruction of an entire species.