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Comment by sudhirj | Hacker News Reader

That’s nice. But how do we kill them all? Whatever happened to that experiment with using CRISPR to make them sterile?

This checks out with my anecdata, though. When I’m out with my spouse the mosquitoes seem to prefer only me. I run hotter, sweat more and have painful allergic reactions to every bite. Kid got my genes here and has it even worse.

>how do we kill em all

A low cost, low tech method to kill mosquitoes in a room guaranteed:

A (foldable?) 6x6 foot mosquito zapper powered by a small lead acid battery (should last a few days?) will do wonders world wide right NOW.

The current must be safe enough for babies to touch. Cos people will zap themselves guaranteed.

I'll love it if someone could create one using those dc high voltage generator kits from eBay or AliExpress. And make tutorial for it.

Light is not a strong attractant for mosquitos. A CO2-emitting zapper works better.

It's that big for a reason. The human in the room is the attractant.

The large size increases the probability that the mosquito will electrocute itself while running around.

This seems like a phenomenally bad idea.

Many areas of rainforest are only protected against illegal logging operations because they are dense with malarial mosquitos.

Easy, use CRISPR to make trees immune to chainsaws.

Stopping illegal logging is worth the death of hundreds of thousands of children every year? That is a low ball estimate of the death due to mosquito borne illnesses.

Yes, the rainforests are irreplaceable and a key part of the biosphere. Making them vulnerable to removal could easily be worse than the deaths due to mosquito borne illnesses.

So our only hope against humans doing illegal logging is malarial mosquitos?

At the moment, yes.

Protecting the rainforest is fine, but relying on loggers being scared of mosquitoes isn’t an effective way to do it. What if they find good repellents? Or start spraying the forest before logging? We can kill the mosquitoes and work to save the forest, they’re not exclusive.

Yes - the mosquitos may one day not be effective in protecting the rainforest.

You are saying we should make that happen as soon as possible.

Killing the mosquitos is not exclusive with working to save the forest only if you have another way to save the forest.

Nothing has been able to prevent the illegal logging except mosquitoes. What is your suggestion?

That's a solved problem: landmines. \s

Actually not a bad suggestion, except that land mines are much easier to defeat than mosquitos.

This seems like phenomenally bad logic.

We shouldn't work to eradicate a worldwide pest that causes hundreds of thousands (millions?) of annual deaths because it might encourage more logging?

The solution to every big problem humanity faces will inevitably create other smaller problems for us to solve. Two steps forward...

It’s guaranteed to cause more logging, and the problem caused is not smaller.

Don’t straw man. Steel man if you are serious about debating this.

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