Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes
Most of the &quot;whoops&quot; tales are people that didn&#x27;t listen to their scientists telling them not to, didn&#x27;t have scientists at all, or were from long enough ago that we can discard their stories as irrelevant in the same way that we&#x27;d discard things like &quot;spaceflight is impossible&quot; and &quot;nukes will end war&quot;. We&#x27;ve now traced the food chain around malaria mosquitoes out to three or four degrees of separation, including things like the diseases they carry. Their entire ecological niche is trivially replaced by close relatives that don&#x27;t carry malaria. They&#x27;re not even <i>common</i> enough to have major food-chain or crowding effects like you&#x27;d see with ants, rabbits, kudzu, or sparrows. Everything that we can find says that the damage from eradication would be zero. Not &quot;small&quot;, or &quot;manageable&quot;. None. They&#x27;re small enough and unimportant enough that we should be thinking of them as disease organisms rather than insects. And I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re <i>perfectly</i> happy with the eradication of bot flies, polio, and smallpox. Reevaluate your beliefs.<p>Granted, we can never be certain about it. We&#x27;re not deities, we&#x27;re still limited by information theory and epistemology. But we&#x27;re pretty damn sure. Way more than we need to be to go save half a million people a year.