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Comment by dosy | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I think we should stick with what we do know and improve less-risky strategies, rather than opting for the nuke from orbit option we don't know. Also, with polio eradicating the virus might have been our only option. Here we have others. So it's not the same thing. Plus, I feel for mosquitoes as living things. </fulldisclosure>

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No one is suggesting we eradicate all mosquitoes, just the disease-vector ones in areas where they are a problem. But yes, the law of unintended consequences will probably apply.

But it's worth keeping in mind that Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds.

As for you last comment, well even the Dahlia Lama swats mosquitoes.

As far as I can tell, the eradication of hundreds of species of mosquitoes is being suggested by many.

I'm going to need a source on that. Fewer than 30 out of 3000 species of mosquito feed on humans. There is little reason for us to bother with the rest.

As I've stated throughout this threat, it isn't just about mosquitoes. Honestly I would not mourn mosquitoes if every last species was exterminated. What concerns me is the social impact of further establishing humanity as the arbitrators of which species get to live and which deserve to be exterminated. It won't stop at mosquitoes; the extermination of mosquitoes will be used to justify even more exterminations in the future.

(Furthermore exterminating a species just so the human population can grow even faster will lead to an incredible amount of additional extinctions due to habitat loss. Humanity is growing fast enough already; we don't need to optimize for this any further.)

It doesn't necessarily follow that preventing death would cause an increase in population. A high mortality rate is corelated with a high fertility rate so that population grows nevertheless. In fact, it is when the mortality rate is the lowest that the spread between mortality and fertility rate is the lowest, resulting in the smallest population growth.

Waiting for economic factors to suppress the birth rate is the milquetoast approach I described earlier in this thread that is causing incredible environmental destruction. It's nothing more than an excuse to turn a blind eye to the problem.

Just recruit a few of the millions of people whose lives will be saved as environmental activists to warn against the dangers of tampering with nature and the social effects will balance out.

I appreciate your Machiavellian/pragmatic streak.

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