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I don't really care it does disrupt an ecosystem, because the total disruption will be reduced.

Humans suffering from horrible diseases disrupt much. Disease is one of several things that keep people in poverty. People dying is expensive and causes a reduction in skill and investment in trying to save those suffering. Then there is the emotional cost of death by disease. People in poverty do shortsighted things like clearcut jungles to grow food.

That previous argument totally ignores any value judgment. Values judgments like how I value humans more than ecosystems so shitty as to be disruptable by removing 1 parasitic species. Malaria is one of the single most dangerous things to humanity, ever. Killing mosquitoes deal with the problem. The amount of innovation, art and good works lost because of people who died to malaria is staggering. At modern rates it kill more than a million people per year. With that amount of lost effort not lost we could build hundreds of ecosystems.




> With that amount of lost effort not lost we could build hundreds of ecosystems.

That's...not really how ecosystems work.

I agree that the benefit to humanity is probably worth the consequences, especially if they're minor, as seems likely. We still need to learn as much about those consequences as possible, if only so we can prepare for them in advance. We aren't currently capable of wiping out all mosquitoes, so it's not like we're holding back a sure-fire treatment.

And it's pretty silly to assume that only unimportant ecosystems are vulnerable to the loss of a single family. You know how screwed we'd be if bees vanished? Mosquitoes are pollinators too. As it happens, they're not primary pollinators, so it's probably okay, but that's the kind of thing we need to know about.


You are aware that, like, humans are part of the ecosystems, right? That we depend on these ecosystems to keep working if we want to survive? We don't preserve bees (being the classic example) not "because ecosystems", but because without bees, far less pollination, without pollination no food, without food we starve to death.


In some ways we are, but unlike every other animal we can choose to destroy or create a new ecosystem. For an extreme example, how much do astronauts participate in any natural ecosystem, and what is the ecosystem of thousands of square miles of farmland.

With the effort of millions of people not dying and struggling we develop new farming tools and tech, produce more food on less land (as has been the trend for the past 50 years) and could plant 10s of millions of trees and reclaim lost jungles lost to subsistence farming.


> For an extreme example, how much do astronauts participate in any natural ecosystem

Well, what do you think how long astronauts on the ISS will survive if we stop all flights to the ISS?

> and what is the ecosystem of thousands of square miles of farmland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_biology ?

Overall, I don't really understand what you are trying to say?! That there is no damage we could possibly be doing to ecosystems that couldn't trivially be undone? That we don't really need any ecosystems, but could just trivially transition to completely artificial food production? That planting 10s of millions of trees will bring back extinct life forms that had yet-undiscovered secrets in them that we could have used to derive new materials or drugs?




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