• Reddfugee42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    9 hours ago

    This is as sad as watching the Terminator try to kill people with a broken gun. Alexa, play “in the arms of the angels”

  • bad_alloc@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    30·
    15 hours ago

    We have suffered for millions of years under mosquitos are they are likely the biggest killer of humans in history. Maybe us evolving big brains and developing genetic engineering is an evolutionary necessity?

    Or as Harbinger said: “We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.”

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
      12·
      13 hours ago

      Great. First science was making the frogs gay. Now it’s turning the mosquitos trans.

      What’s next? Lesbian amoebas? Pansexual algae? Non-binary seahorses?

      Has science gone too far?

  • nednobbins@lemm.eeEnglish
    21·
    17 hours ago

    I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

    There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

    At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

    The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

  • sweetpotato@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    15 hours ago

    I’d like to see any scientific study that reassures at least a little that this won’t have terrible ramifications for ecosystems and the food chain.

    We know too little, we are shortsighted and we have a bad record of intervening with nature.

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      It’s a pretty ineffective strategy, but I’m just going off this one photo.

      If it’s genetic, and the females can’t get a blood meal, then they won’t lay any eggs to pass on those genetics and just die.

      Then the ones without that gene will lay all their eggs and the next generation will be unchanged and they have to spend all that money again to do whatever they did which had no effect.

      • general_kitten@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        10 hours ago

        Knowing a bit about crispr my understanding is that crispr is the technology that can be used to circumvent that scenario by making the effects kind of like an genetic time bomb

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayEnglish
    82·
    18 hours ago

    I get the caution about unintended consequences but damnit of all the crazy planetary issues we’re dealing with right now, I’d rank

    “oops, got rid of West Nile and Malaria as well as annoying little red bumps from wandering too far from big cities”

    As a win, the consequences of which we can probably figure out how to deal with when we come to it.

    I know it doesn’t work that way but I’d trade all the world’s mosquitoes to keep the polar bears or pangolins or something any day.

    • Hadriscus@lemm.eeEnglish
      81·
      16 hours ago

      Mosquitoes are the bottom of the food chain. There’s reason to be worried about this getting out of hand

  • CptEnder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    562·
    1 day ago

    Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude. This could be argued as a form of evolution. We simply engineered them out as a threat. GG get gud scrub, see you in 3 million years when you have your own AI generated bioengineering.

    • exasperation@lemm.eeEnglish
      61·
      20 hours ago

      Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude

      Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?

      • nyctre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        17 hours ago

        According to google, yeah. Mosquito-borne diseases are responsible for 52 billion deaths. I was extremely surprised myself.

        • exasperation@lemm.eeEnglish
          21·
          18 hours ago

          Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

          One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

          For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

          But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

          And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

          So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.