Can we do this systematic?
First massive reduction, to test wether the Eco-System can handle it short term.
If yes, eradication until the diseases have vannished.
Measurement if the ecosystem handles it. Reintroduction if needed.
Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
401–410 of 441 posts
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#402We've done this lots[1] of[2] times[3] when it threatens agriculture, but when it threatens the lives of poor people in third world countries, suddenly we're worried about the ecosystem? There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem,…
You're comparing individual species with an entire family. Countless animals rely on mosquitoes as a valuable food source. And before someone brings up the tired "mosquito predators all eat things besides mosquitoes" argument, people eat food besides grains. It doesn't mean we wouldn't still be 100% fucked if rice and wheat went extinct overnight.
>You're comparing individual species with an entire family.
The GP may well have done so, but most extreme proposals are to eliminate parts of the genuses Aedes, Anopholes, and Culex - together about 2% of the genetic diversity of the family Culicidae.
>Countless animals rely on mosquitoes as a valuable food source.
I'd be interested in seeing some concrete evidence that this is true; I've looked unsuccessfully. Seems to me that there are a few hyperspecialized predators, but generally mosquito population dynamics are too unpredictable for this to arise.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#403Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#404This article doesn't seem to know what the impact will be and doesn't seem to care. Mosquitos are food for birds and bats. I think that talking to bird and bat biologists would be the best idea.
Came here to say this and surprised HN isn't outraged over this obvious oversight.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2060: "Oh yeah, everyone used to carry around little electromagnetic devices and put them next to their brain, but we know better now". This one is easy to debunk: look at the spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum UV and everything in that direction: dangerous. Infrared and everything in that direction: not dangerous. The Sun emits on both sides, and we really know very good which side we…
You're missing the entire point. You think it's safe by 2016 standards, in the same way we thought lead in gas, or agent orange was safe by the standards of those years. In 50 years we'll know a lot more than we do now, and hindsight will be a magical thing. By 2060 standards, we're downright uneducated. Think about how little we knew in the late 1960's, and the stupid stuff that was done based on "we know what we're…
Part of the problem with this idea is that your cell phone exposes your brain to trivial quantities of EM radiation in both absolute and relative terms. If EM in that spectrum had any kind of effect, we'd have seen it long since in people that live near radio masts, people that work with radar units and radio transmitters (military, mostly), people that sleep next to their wifi modems, people working in electrical generator rooms and physics labs, and people with old microwave ovens. Ever had a house where the WiFi would cut out when someone nuked a pizza? Standing near that is way worse than your cell phone. You can't even claim long-term effects, because we've been working with radios and microwaves of this strength in these frequencies for 70+ years. There's nothing there. Please stop with the fear mongering, or at least pick something more likely to be a problem. Maybe the effect of switching from memorization to Google assisted indexization, or long-term psychological effects of social networks in relation to Dunbar's number, or sugar substitutes and gut flora. All of those are reasonable "whoops" sites. Cell phones giving you cancer isn't a potential whoops.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a long list of things about our technological civilization that would have benefited from applying the precautionary principle a little more. We're in damage control mode right now for a large number of environmental catastrophes, our agricultural techniques of the last half-century or so have depleted and desertified a large amount of prime arable land, we're rapidly shooting ourselves in the foot by abusin…
I see where you'd coming from, but it's easy to see the costs now that we're so utterly used to the benefits. Use of filthy, polluting energy sources was a necessary stepping stone for the industrial revolution. There was no way to go directly from Newcomen's engine to ITER. Sure, the process left us with some problems to solve, but compared to the alternative, they're good problems to have. If we'd applied the preca…
(upvoted) It's hard to predict the alternate present from a notional past. I agree that the things we did were necessary stepping stones on the path to technology that likely could not have been avoided. We might have done it more slowly and with more limited scale and still made it to where we are now (over a longer time span), and I have no idea if that would have had better results or not. The real question for me is, now that we do have this perspective, can we make our future decisions better than our past decisions? We're now at a point where the global system has far less excess capacity to absorb our blunders. In resilience speak[1], it seems to me like we're in the late conservation phase, which typically precedes rapid release (collapse) and reorganization. We have evidence of this in the critical slowing down[2] of adaptive responses from a variety of present-day systems ranging from corals to economies. From my perspective, provoking a system in that condition feels a lot like playing with a doomsday footgun.
I don't think that killing off mosquitoes will be the final insult that causes cataclysmic ecosystem collapse; that seems pretty far-fetched. However, I don't know that, and I do think we should strive to have strong evidence for the costs and benefits of any irreversible change we make to our world at this point.
1. http://www.resalliance.org/adaptive-cycle
2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151117-natures-critical-war...
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely agree with the idea that it should be sold in the first world to get economies of scale. How much would these things cost, like 300$ a pop?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser it would cost $50. They deliberately built it using already available parts (the laser is the same as used for bluray for example) to keep cost down. The problem seems to be (as parent pointed out) reliable electricity.
If I'm remembering the conversation correctly, the most expensive component was the kill laser (it uses a lower-power laser to track flying things & match the mosquito size / wing frequency and then fired up one strong enough to fry an insect) but that hopefully has been going down since those figures were calculated years ago.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing the entire point. You think it's safe by 2016 standards, in the same way we thought lead in gas, or agent orange was safe by the standards of those years. In 50 years we'll know a lot more than we do now, and hindsight will be a magical thing. By 2060 standards, we're downright uneducated. Think about how little we knew in the late 1960's, and the stupid stuff that was done based on "we know what we're…
Part of the problem with this idea is that your cell phone exposes your brain to trivial quantities of EM radiation in both absolute and relative terms. If EM in that spectrum had any kind of effect, we'd have seen it long since in people that live near radio masts, people that work with radar units and radio transmitters (military, mostly), people that sleep next to their wifi modems, people working in electrical ge…
Again, you miss the point.
The certainty with which you make these statements is the exact same certainty that scientists 50 or 100 years ago used to justify doing all kinds of shit we now know caused unforeseen harm.
Don't focus on the one example I gave, focus on that fact that we continually mess with stuff we don't understand, with consequences we can't comprehend. Then 50 years later we just say "we know better now" and proceed to mess it all up in different ways. Repeat.
Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#409Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay. Then lets let some disease carrying mosquitoes into all countries - including Western Europe and the US. We wouldnt want those ecosystems to be imbalanced.
>>lets let some disease carrying mosquitoes into all countries Why bother when you can count on tourism to do it for you? http://www.cdc.gov/zika/geo/united-states.html
Looked at your comment history and its clear you are either a xenophobe, or clueless.