On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 06:13:24PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > > > Is it different with people, do you know the impact removing 725,000 people > from the realm of the living every year will have? If not and their impacts > are > equally unknown then I think you should give the benefit of the doubt to the > human not the mosquito.
Yes it is different. According to the first hit on Google, the economic cost of malaria runs to $12 billion per annum. (https://www.malariafreefuture.org/malaria). It is not equally unknown. I can't vouch for the validity of the above figure, but offer it to demonstrate that obviously the impact has been studied, and the result known with reasonable certainty. > > > >I expect that 5 years moratorium might be enough, 10 years on the > outside. > > > That's very easy for you to say but by making that decision you are killing > about 3.6 million people, 7.25 million tops, depending on the breaks. > > I don't believe in 5 years or 10 years or a thousand years any conceivable > scientific study would convince Greenpeace to say "you were right, the dangers > in using Gene Drive are less than the dangers of not using it". It's not going > to happen because some people, like Greenpeace and Trump voters, are just > immune from rational argument. > You don't need to convince Greenpeace. You need to convince the regulatory authorities, or you need to convince scientists to break their funding contracts with those authorities. I would prefer it if you did the former way, of course. It may well be that in order to convince the regulatory authorities, you also need to convince the voting public. That may well involve doing exactly the sort of small-scale studies I'm proposing, but it also may involve the same sort of media campaigns that Greenpeace does. You'd think that with 12 billion at stake, this shouldn't be hard to do - the problem is that malaria mostly affects the poorer countries that don't have that sort of cash lying around. It's a good thing Bill Gates is in that corner. If the ecosystem was a house of > cards and as fragile as conservation groups like to say during their fund > drives life couldn't have survived for 3.8 billion years. You are preaching to the choir here, however it is also true (as Telmo pointed out) that ecosystems are complex systems, and small changes can have outsized effects. I can and do insist we study and try to understand what these effects are. Even doing nothing has an outsized effect - given humanity's huge footprint on the biosphere. See https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
