We don't have millions of people dying every year in the US from mosquitoes and this is only about US policy. Millions die every year globally, but this decision will only impact a minuscule portion of those deaths.

Eliminating an insect that has been here for millions of years, part of the food chain, helping thousands of micro-organism to mix DNA and be exposed to various conditions, thus helping evolution... That won't cause a major issue ? Sure ? 100% Safe ? You swear ? No backies in case of totally destroying our environment like we always do ?

We are such an arrogant specie.

I've had dengue and zika, and I don't care how arrogant it is, I'm all for extincting those fuckers.

I HAVE malaria. Right now.

I'm not.

You have malaria, money, and first-world medical support. Very different thing. Kill the fuckers.

So the problem is the state of the third world. No mosquitoes. Let's fix that instead of killing things. Especially since we are mostly responsible.

If you know of a proposal for solving the third world that's as cheap, fast, effective, reliable, and safe as - that has comparable expected value to - killing human-biting malaria-carrying mosquitoes, that's great! Please, PLEASE share it and work toward its execution!

Me, I say kill the mosquitoes.

(Although, honestly, even if you did have such a plan, I'd still say kill the mosquitoes in addition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15665373)

> cheap, fast, effective, reliable, and safe

You can only maybe guaranty fast.

And the unknown is huge on this one. Just like the potential horrible consequences.

The way you talk scares me a lot. I feel like I'm in front of the stereotypical american gun owner in tv shows.

Why should we eradicate malaria? Or small pox? Surely they've had just as much impact on the world's ecosystem as mosquitoes.

We don't eradicate them. We just prevent us from being sick, it's a local action. We are not actively mass killing it.

If you can't see the difference between defence and offence, local area of effect and genocide...

>We are not actively killing it.

What do you think a person's immune system does to smallpox when they have been inoculated against smallpox and they are exposed to it?

We're not actively killing mosquitoes just preventing them from breeding.

You're taking a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach, but the reality is that it is broken. Mosquitos kill millions.

Several Hacker News items regarding massive overall insect decline in general, and as far as I can tell, the general consensus has been that this is not a good thing. [1] [2] I think this is sort of where the concern is coming from.

The mosquito is a special case considering how it carries lethal diseases, of course. So to me, control is certainly acceptable (mass extinction, I'm not so sure either).

My guess is at any rate that this won't be a mass solution even if it 100% works -- applied at too much scale and a likely result is mosquitoes will develop resistance to Wolbachia (just as they have with chemicals when we tried massive control with pesticides). As a localized solution, this is intriguing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074

Could be a natural selection/control process tho.

Yeah but to be fair, I don't want to be selected for death.

If natural selection was at play, I should have died when I was 12 without my appendectomy.

Human are all about saying not today to the God of death. For them self.

So I just wish we continued this "not today" things, but with a broader perspective including not sawing the tree branch we are sitting on. Like destroying the entire ecosystem with our brilliant ideas.

No, I'm saying killing all the bugs is as good as a solution as cutting your arm because your have arthritis in your hand.

Plus, there is a lot of BS with this "killing millions" arguments. As I lived in Mali, and worked in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya, I can tell you that:

- people there consider it like a big flu. It only kills the very weak, others just have it like you have a running nose in the winter. And those people are weak because we destroyed their countries, we still leach them, so they have poor infrastructures and poor access to major resources, including food, clean water and decent hygiene.

- We have had a cure to most forms of malaria for several years now. Not something experimental or mysterious. I just went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris for that. You have protocols based on Malarone (surprise, it's not the preventive-only drug they tell you it is, it can cure as well). But besides tropical disease expert doctors, nobody will let you know that. And Malians don't have the money to buy it anyway. See previous point.

So mosquitoes are not the problem. The problem is that our system are killing millions.

Should we solve that problem by a collective suicide ? Apparently death of the mass is the popular solution to people dying.

This technology can't eliminate mosquitoes. It's literally just birth control. Some mosquitoes still mate with otherwise normal males and continue to produce offspring.

That kinda makes me feel better to know that.

If it has existed without biting humans why is removing disease causing bacteria from two out of hundreds of mosquito species equivalent to eliminating mosquitos?

Is the selective pressure that strong that an animal family that generally doesn't bite humans and ouf of the tiny percentage that does there is an even smaller percentage that carries a bacteria that can kill humans is required for the entire families survival?

No insect is killed. The only change is that the mosquito doesn't carry a bacteria. Yet you equate that to the destruction of an entire species.

This sounds almost like a Creationist argument, like there is some greater purpose behind the existence of all species, or that each species is some kind of keystone keeping the whole spectrum of life together. I happen to believe that nature is not necessarily intelligent or benevolent. Not everything that is produced by natural selection is by definition good for the planet (or necessarily bad either).

No it's just that we are part of a delicately tuned system that balanced itself over millions of years. And we have the tendency to try poorly thought short term solutions that destroy everything. It's not like we don't have an entire history of screw ups to teach us. We should know better by now.

> We understand stuff pretty deeply now.

Case in point... this is the mindset that worries us.

How many planets do we have? By my count it's one.

What's our track record on changing ecosystems to fix problems without creating worse problems? Zero out of how many?

I hate mosquito too, and they are probably useless, but no good engineer makes changes without a backup and a tested rollback strategy, where's our backup?

Not zero. Here are some changes we've made that affected the living things around us, but they were worth the risk 1 Indoor plumbing 2 elimination of wolves and other predators around us 3 elimination of lice and rats from our bodies and homes 4 vaccination

Eliminating wolves contributed to higher deer populations and an increase in the number of deer ticks that spread Lyme disease to humans. Intensive forestry operations also help to increase deer populations as they like the more open spaces that result from clear-cuts.

It's a bit different in that this isn't a permanent change. This won't wipe out mosquitos everywhere just yet. The infected males will mate with females, and their eggs will be nonviable.

Then the males will die, and wild males and females will continue to mate and produce viable offspring unless the process is repeated. There's plenty of room for finding errors and fixing them --up until all mosquitos are eradicated.

When’s the last time anyone died of smallpox? As a species, we seem demonstrably better off for having arrogantly removed it from the planet.

I wasn't trying to come across as an anti vaccination person. I realize just about everything is related to ecosystem, but what I meant by "changing ecosystems" was specifically related to introducing species and modifying species, not taking medicine.

Rabbits in australia are a pretty famous example, but I can't walk out my door without seeing numerous fails related to introducing plant species.

Smallpox was made extinct (aside from samples in labs) and as far a I know there haven't been any problems from that.

Sure, but the only possible side affect of eliminating smallpox was increased population growth. Different than introducing an organism who's evolution we don't control into the wild.

These mosquitoes have undergone induced sterilization. By definition their evolution is completely controlled.

What's the margin of error?

On what basis do you claim that this is the only possible side effect?

I think "zero" is being a bit uncharitable. What about plant and animal reintroduction programmes? What about culling invasive species? Use of firebreaks? Eradicating disease? Did you have any incidents in mind when saying active management results in worse problems?

What are you talking about? We change the environment all the time. Mostly there are minimal side effects. People are scared of the exceptions, because that is what gets the most attention. Its all just conformation bias and fear mongering.

Thank you. Every time we are so sure of something being totally safe, it's just the sign we don't know enough about it.

Honestly I sometimes wonder how we still haven't killed ourself already. We are very lucky bastards.

We have a rollback mechanism. This system requires the continuous introduction of new infected males.

If we find that eliminating this particular mosquito species is harmful. We can just reintroduce them from somewhere else.

I'm excited to see what this does to the food chain. Will it collapse? Will it kill billions? Find out on the next episode of humans trying to manipulate everything.

The problem with this argument is that it's throwing out some big numbers and bad outcomes, without making any attempt to quantify the likelihood of those outcomes.

Without quantification, this position is basically unfalsifiable. Plus, there's a trivial contrapositive that is just as valid: "what if allowing mosquitoes to live causes an outbreak of a new disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and kills billions?". Sure, that could also happen. As with total food-chain collapse from reduction of population of a non-keystone species, it seems very unlikely. Contrast that against the almost-certain probability that 0.5m will die next year (0.1 Holocausts per year, or one Holocaust per decade) from malaria.

If we don't attach a probability to these outcomes there's no way of having any sort of meaningful conversation about them.

The last episode, where the honeybee population collapsed, left me on the edge of my seat. I can't wait to see what happens next.

edit: Seriously, wouldn't it be best to solve existing problems with direct threat to food production than to go off tinkering with new ideas and unknown side-effects?

Note that honeybees are livestock.

Their presence in the US is itself an example of manipulating the environment to our own ends.

Wouldn't having millions of people not dying every year cause problems of its own?

Yes, absolutely.

May we be so lucky as to have those problems instead of _millions of people dying every year._

This is very easy to say when you have a very near 0% chance of being one of the millions.