A Bug's Death (2003)

nytimes.com

21 points·saryant··6 comments

People can wake up and spend the entirety of their day enclosed in various climate controlled environments, travelling on man-made surfaces using energy from burning dinosaurs to propel them, sit down and write about potential ecological hazards from genetic engineering. New York itself can't bear the thought of having nature among it, so they put cars into central park.

This is clearly more informed than many other opinion pieces out there, but it's hard to escape the feeling that someone from an alien species reading it and considering the world we live in would not immediately start laughing from the utter satire it is.

>it's hard to escape the feeling that someone from an alien species reading it and considering the world we live in would not immediately start laughing from the utter satire it is.

and after laughing enough they would just release a similar "specicide" gene mutation into human population to clean the space for the next attempt at intelligent species as this round has clearly been failing.

> New York itself can't bear the thought of having nature among it, so they put cars into central park.

This seems like an extremely cynical, not to mention pretty dubious explanation for why there are (occasionally) cars in Central Park.

Somehow I expect that releasing such a death gene would just breed a race of mosquitos that is immune to the death gene...

Well, yes - it would be the other existing species of mosquitoes. But that would be mission-accomplished if those other species don't happen to be malarial vectors. Carrying malaria is not a necessary thing for mosquitoes to do in Africa, they don't need to spread malaria to humans in order to survive and reproduce.

I wasn't clear enough. I meant a race of the malaria-carrying species.

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