They kill mosquites with FRICKIN LASER BEAMSº

Oh exploitable. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!

Seriously now, how practical would this be?

I did a summer internship for that company. It was pretty awesome. Neal Stephenson works there, although I don't think he was working on the mosquito lasers.

Exterminate?

edited 20th Oct '10 12:02:29 PM by Yej

the laser detects the flutter of a female's wings as it approaches a victim, it's apparently unique, I read about it about a year ago.

Didn't you read the article? It was a test to see how accurate and responsive they could get a laser to be. This was all part of the anti ballistic missiles program. Probably For the Lulz as well.

And people call the SDI "failed" I roll my eyes. We have planes that can shoot down ICB Ms and cut through tanks. And now we have ANTI MOSQUITO LASERS.

Please. PLEASE. Kill all mosquito on Earth. This is one species that should go extinct.

Responding to questions about any potential harm the laser could pose to the eco-system, Kare said: "There is no such thing as a good mosquito, there's nothing that feeds exclusively on them. No one would miss mosquitoes," he said.

This is very misleading, and a very dangerous line of thinking. Just because nothing feeds exclusively on them doesn't mean that they're not important to the ecosystem. Disease transmitting parasites play a very important role in herbivore population regulation by keeping enough specimens weak and sickly enough to be easy game for predators.

Millions of humans dead + millions more sick + billions more annoyed vs some animals that get sick enough to be killed by other animals.

Yeah, get rid of mosquitos. Plain and simple.

Frankly, if there were species of predator that depended on animals being sick to hunt them down. They'd have been extinct themselves a long time ago.

Only if animals didn't reliably get sick, which they do. This kind of comment bespeaks a serious ignorance of the interdependence of organisms in an ecosystem. You think it's weird, or indicative of a non viable species, to rely on the actions of insects to make available an adequate food supply? We do it too. Without insects to germinate them, many of humans' staple crops would be extinct.

We're not talking about a trivial alteration to fauna populations here, this is the kind of thing that can lead to major extinction events, and it's very probable that humans would suffer as a result. Whether they would suffer more than they already do from malaria is hard to predict, but it's never wise to underestimate the potential for harm that comes from screwing around with ecosystem you don't adequately understand. Methods of protection from malaria which defend people from mosquitoes without exterminating them en masse are much safer.

edited 20th Oct '10 4:59:03 PM by Desertopa

Commando Dude he's right, there's nothing simple when it goes to interspecial interactions. There's ALWAYS nonobvious consequences that don't show up immediately.

edited 20th Oct '10 4:55:45 PM by Lanceleoghauni

Millions of species have become extinct. The ecosystem has always reached an equilibrium, it can do it again, especially with such a useless species.

No need to be one of those "Environmentalists"

The ecosystem has always reached an equilibrium, but sometimes it takes millions of years and a majority of earth's lifeforms die out in the process. There is no guarantee that any of those species won't be ones that are critical to our own civilization, and make no mistake, there are quite a lot of those, not all of which are protected by domestication.

It's not that I think millions of wild animals are worth more than millions of humans, but I think that if it's a choice between a method of fighting malaria that may cause untold ecosystem damage that will never recover on a human timescale and waiting for one that definitely won't, then given the rate of technological innovation, I say wait for one that won't. You're still gambling with lives either way, but one stands to do much longer lasting harm.

edited 20th Oct '10 5:26:56 PM by Desertopa

What is this turning into some The Andromeda Strain Green Aesop?

Doubtful we need mosquitos. Frankly I weigh the lives of humans more highly then some insects or some animal we've never heard of that's dependent on them.

• Mosquitos are fking annoying and it will never be too soon to get rid of them.

And what if down the line the animals that turn out to be dependent on them include us?

Just because a species is annoying to us doesn't mean that they aren't important to our survival. Human civilization would be extremely hard pressed to deal with the loss of bees, for instance.

Do mosquito pollinate flowers? Produce honey? Do anything? No.

Humans are zilch dependent on mosquito. To say so is frankly...nothing short of hippy talk.

Let's illustrate one example of what Desertopia's talking about.

So we kill all the mosquitos. The decline in food source proves the be too much of a strain on dragonflies, and their numbers are severely reduced. This die-off in turns impacts fish and frogs, and I think you get the idea...

The real point is, we don't know what would happen.We simply don't have a good enough understanding to predict with any accuracy what could happen if we kill all the mosquitoes. You're right, the ecosystem might adjust with no significant decline. On the other hand, it could just as well cause a chain reaction that comes back to destroy us. But why would you take that risk?

I'm not saying it wouldn't recover, I'm saying that it'd do crazy things to compensate, possibly, and there's no real way for use to accurately track what would happen. simply removing a species unilaterally would be bringing tons of variables into play. without all the mosquito spawn there to munch on, many other things might become endangered and die out, leading to what is called a "Trophic Cascade" which in laymans terms is translated into "Oh Fuck, The Food Web Just Imploded"

Species go extinct all the time. Has the human race ever been close to extinction because of it? No. It's just that this time humans try to cause a species to go extinct that people think for some reason we'll go extinct.

There are plenty of other bugs that can replace the mosquito.

OHHHHhhhh

You're one of THOSE. "It has no direct, dire consequences on us, so lets do it"

yeahhhhh.

edited 20th Oct '10 7:34:53 PM by Lanceleoghauni

^^Humans haven't hardly been around for a significant amount of time on the timescale of the ecosystem, and recorded history represents a minuscule fraction of that. We haven't seen/recorded the effects of any extinctions of something as ubiquitous as the mosquito. So really, there's no basis/evidence for what you're saying.

edited 20th Oct '10 7:36:24 PM by deathjavu

Also, with a few exceptions, Species that DO go extinct go extinct over extended periods of decline, where the ecosystem doesn't suddenly get a link blown out of it by a laser beam. the only instances of Fast extinction that comes to mind that isn't a bad example would be Mass extinctions. and even then they tend to take hundreds of years for the effects to ripple outwards.

10 species extinct in decades

Is the human race done for?

Now I'm not one to say that this was a good thing those species went extinct, and I think we should've done something.

But mosquito? Pffft. Yeah, loosing those is really going to screw over the ecosystem. If anything, it will simply give more space for other bugs to produce more of and fill the food gap.

^None of those animals were nearly as widespread as the mosquito, and most of them died out before we properly understood the effects it might have on the ecosystem. We might still be suffering the consequences and not know it.

why do you keep saying that I'm trying to say that the human race is OMGDOOMED. I'm not, I'm saying we have no idea what will happen.

It's true, mosquitoes knew about this laser business and so have throughout the years made the ecosystem heavily depend on them in order to discourage us from exterminating them, they're blackmailing us.