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Comment by hamburga | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what's the state of the art of global ecology modeling? How well, if at all, could we model, for example, what'd happen if the Laternfly landed in Italy? Or what'd happen, for example, if we CRISPR gene-drived these bugs out of existence as so many are suggesting?

I get that this is very computationally and scientifically hard, in so many ways. But how good are we at this, at this point? How much harder should we be trying?

Given how critical this is for us to sustain life and adapt to the changing environment, it seems like a no-brainer that we should be pouring vast resources into ecology modeling. Maybe instead of building rockets to "make life interesting" (Musk) or to "build solar panels in space because people can have a right to consume exponentially more energy every year" (Bezos).

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This is actually a really interesting question. I imagine the complexity of the model to really accurately predict this would be practically unattainable currently.

You are introducing a new element to an environment without knowing how it would react to it. You could attempt to predict based on predators or food sources from its original environment and compare them to closest matches (if any) to the new environment.

This would make so many wild assumptions though that minor errors could result in cascading effects in a direction the model never predicted.

Doing some googling and found that there is the I = PAT equation which is just for human influence and is based on an extremely simplistic model. I think the nuances and details needed for an accurate ecosystem model would be several orders of magnitude more complex.

A model that could connect events like reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone with stopping erosion and other similar effects would be pretty incredible.

Seems a bit tacky to pick on Musk and Bezos here. How about any other big money endeavor as well like arms manufacturing and tobacco and war?

Good example of how celebrities are easier to target than faceless enterprises and realities that do far more harm.

And while we’re building our feel-good kumbaya wishlist, it would be cool if drug cartels solved our lanternfly issue as well.

Maybe instead of spending endless hours vacuously consuming entertainment of various kinds...or providing handouts for those unwilling to produce anything.

Musk and Bezos are doing worthwhile things. There are plenty of better potential funding sources for new projects.

But they have a disproportionate impact on mindshare -- on defining what the limited supply of professional scientists and engineers perceive as the most interesting and important problems to solve. This is a zero-sum game: every minute a bright college student spends talking about rockets is a minute that she's not talking about ecology.

> But they have a disproportionate impact on mindshare -- on defining what the limited supply of professional scientists and engineers perceive as the most interesting and important problems to solve.

The supply of talented (as opposed to just "professional") scientists and engineers is quite large and growing all the time. Space exploration, IMNSHO, is just as important as ecology, in the first place. However, there will still be plenty attracted to that discipline.

Believe it or not, the best and brightest are among the most motivated to seek their own interests.

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