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This is not a widespread campaign, this is a test. This is, in fact, the second test. Even if the ecosystem is too complex for us to understand now, that's no

This is not a widespread campaign, this is a test. This is, in fact, the second test. Even if the ecosystem is too complex for us to understand now, that's not to say it's to complex to ever understand, and if we're ever to understand it, how should we go about that? Tests. The human body was once considered too complex to understand. We may not know everything about the body, but we do know quite a bit, to the benefit of everyone alive today. Caution is beneficial. Immediately discarding avenues of research and testing benefits because of incautious approaches of the past is not. This is not a case of people ignoring history repeating it, this is a case of people trying to learn from history and do it better next time, which is really the story of the human race. Might this end badly? It's possible. None can say it isn't. Even if it does, I'm not sure that means this approach should be abandoned. The eventual benefit of what they are attempting, even if limiting it purely to what we might get from controlling some breeds of disease spreading mosquitos, is massive.

poilcn 6y ago
If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. One can't even predict how it could end up. Low gains, gigantic risks for everyone and everything living nearby. This is an act of eco-terrorism done by corporations. It shouldn't be treated better than oil spilling.
- jjk166 6y ago
  > If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. This is an absurd line of thinking. You can always make up some infinitesimally unlikely outcome for any action. The fact is mosquito-transmitted diseases are a real problem, the risks you are talking about are not.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. There are many different ways and degrees of "badly". What you you thinking of when "ending badly" is mentioned? How accurate and likely is that an outcome? Is it based on knowledge of possible outcomes based on the science, and extrapolations, or on popular science and/or cultural depictions, or something else? For many possible outcomes, we have real data. We have many cases of a species being removed from an ecosystem, and of a subspecies being removed. Some of those are because of humans causing extinctions (or near extinctions), some of it is from humans causing the removal of a species from an area, and some of it is from natural change in ecosystems that is not the cause of humans (the world is not static, species evolve, evolutions and natural phenomena such as weather patterns allow species to spread to new areas).

poilcn 6y ago

If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. One can't even predict how it could end up. Low gains, gigantic risks for everyone and everything living nearby. This is an act of eco-terrorism done by corporations. It shouldn't be treated better than oil spilling.

jjk166 6y ago
> If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. This is an absurd line of thinking. You can always make up some infinitesimally unlikely outcome for any action. The fact is mosquito-transmitted diseases are a real problem, the risks you are talking about are not.
kbenson 6y ago
> If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. There are many different ways and degrees of "badly". What you you thinking of when "ending badly" is mentioned? How accurate and likely is that an outcome? Is it based on knowledge of possible outcomes based on the science, and extrapolations, or on popular science and/or cultural depictions, or something else? For many possible outcomes, we have real data. We have many cases of a species being removed from an ecosystem, and of a subspecies being removed. Some of those are because of humans causing extinctions (or near extinctions), some of it is from humans causing the removal of a species from an area, and some of it is from natural change in ecosystems that is not the cause of humans (the world is not static, species evolve, evolutions and natural phenomena such as weather patterns allow species to spread to new areas).