5 ms·
Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction. On the subject of laser safety, can you make one weak enough that a human will n
by mLuby 5y ago
Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction.
On the subject of laser safety, can you make one weak enough that a human will naturally blink or look away without getting blinded but powerful enough that it'll overheat the mosquito its trained on for a few seconds? If the Joules are spread out linearly over a few second, I expect it'd exponentially decrease the risk of chance reflections blinding unprotected eyeballs.
As for the mm accuracy and IFF detection, a low power laser-as-microphone has been shown capable of differentiating the distinctive whine of female mosquitoes (the only bloodsuckers) from everything else. See a previous discussion will a link to my notes on demo here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016210.
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoYou shoot a nuke down a bug hole, you got a lot of dead bugs. — Ace Levy
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- titzer 5y ago> Wipe them out, all of them. The ecosystem will survive mosquitoes' extinction. Reminds me of the Chinese's brutally misguided attempts to stave off the famines during the Cultural Revolution. One of their worst ideas was to eradicate sparrows, thinking that sparrows were eating crops. No, sparrows were eating insects that were eating crops. So with sparrows gone, the insect population exploded, resulting in even worse destruction. Just a reminder that when it comes to ecosystems, we really don't know what the fuck we are doing. There are hundreds of similar stories, e.g. destruction of wolves, bison, pigeons, and other organisms we consider "pests". It's a wonder that the worldwide ecosystem doesn't consider us the pests.
- kragen 5y agoThat was the Great Leap Forward, eight years before the Cultural Revolution. Agreed about the complexities of ecological engineering.
- underwater 5y agoGenerally removing a species completely has downstream effects, but as far as I'm aware mosquitos aren't occupying any unique role as either food, pollinator, or keeping other insects at bay. And mosquitos indirectly lead to many deaths, around a million people each year. Mosquitos kill more people each day than sharks have killed in the last century.
- mLuby 5y agoI regret that flippant first line because the second paragraph is what I was hoping to hear from HN about.