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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

This seems a spectacularly foolish idea. Believing that we understand the emergent complexity of any ecosystem to the point that we can predictably alter it is a fallacy we've repeatedly disproven, and yet this is talking about altering the ecosystem of the entire planet.

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We wipe species off the planet all the time by accident. Sure, there would be some collateral damage, but you would save millions of _human_ lives a year.

"you would save millions of _human_ lives a year"

...and that fact, in itself, has long-term implications that we can't possibly understand.

Everything we do, or decline to do, has implications we can't understand. Second guessing ourselves into paralysis is silly and pointless. The best we can do is act on the implications that we do understand.

When the benefit is 1M lives/year saved and there do not appear to be any drawbacks, it's damn well full steam ahead.

Overpopulation is a drawback, and a pretty major one.

Overpopulation is already a major problem in many places. Does human life in those places have negative value? Should we cull the population like deer? How is that any different from withholding the cure to a deadly disease?

Malaria is a serious economic drain on endemic countries. It's likely that without this disease burden, living conditions would improve, and the birth rate would go down in these places.

Also, I've had dengue fever, a relatively mild case that laid me up for a week and left my digestive system complaining for months. If I get it again, odds are it will be worse. I say that this is an experiment worth trying; it's not like mosquitoes can't be re-introduced into the wild if somehow necessary.

I also used to assume that getting rid of a disease like malaria would cause populations to sky rocket in developing nations.

Fortunately, this line of thinking is wrong. There is a great TED talk by Hans Rosling on global population growth that shows increased child survival rates result in smaller families and more prosperous nations.

See http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...

That's a good point. Eliminating the need for resources to fight one issue would allow for overpopulation to be mitigated (more education, and more resources poured into increasing available food and standards of living). Reducing the amount of time wasted being sick would also allow for people to improve their own standard of living (as I assume that you didn't get as much done, and were less happy, while you were sick, and during the recovery period).

I disagree. Overpopulation would effectively force humanity to create novel solutions. Perhaps we build up higher, or perhaps we move off of the planet, maybe we'll create giant artificial islands (or continents). We'd be forced to tackle farming in new and interesting ways. All in all, I think being faced with overpopulation would force us to solve a lot of interesting problems.

Either that, or massive amounts of war and extinction. Then again, we run that risk with everything we do.

Precipitating crises as a way to spur innovation? Could work; it certainly has in the past. However, you're phrasing overpopulation as something for the future; it's already here. The world's population is nearing 7 billion, and, according to wikipedia, in 2006 the world's population was using 40% more than the Earth can support[1]. It also gives the median estimated supportable world population as 10 billion, but more conservative estimates are as low as 4 billion.

We haven't quite hit, on a world-wide scale, the point where we have to start seriously considering how we're going to survive as a species (without sterilizing massive portions of the population, or requiring child licenses, neither of which would be good things), but we're nearing it, and we're too tied up in money for many of the really good solutions to work.

All that considered, though, it will spur a lot more innovation than bringing the population down to a stable, normal point and keeping everything constant to maximize how long the resources we have will last.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Carrying_capacit...

Heck, if that's your argument lets stop medicinal research. In fact lets do away with medicine as a profession altogether.

And while you're at it, do away with yourself, seen as you're directly contributing to the "overpopulation" problem. What gives you the right to exist and deny it to other who are less fortunate than you?

Here's one drawback: migratory bird populations collapse, leading to an insect they previously ate having a population explosion, leading to swarms of insects that destroy crops, thus marginally raising food prices and leading to 2M deaths from malnourishment. This isn't even a particularly implausible outcome.

Humans are not necessarily more important than anything else. It's a common delusion that, because one is human, humans are the most important species. Basically a more grown-up form of the common belief of children that they are the center of the universe.

The problem with "collateral damage" is that we don't know what it includes. It could include humans, for instance, or it could bring the world closer to humans becoming collateral damage - and we're bringing the world in that direction quickly enough.

EDIT: Instead of downvoting me, please refute my claims. I love being shown how I'm wrong, and take mere downvoting as an acknowledgement that I'm right (as I don't think that I'm trolling - I'm just trying to get interesting conversations going, and to make people think). Focus on the second paragraph, if you would like, it's easier to refute or argue against.

You're probably being downvoted because you're stating an uncommon opinion (humans are no more morally relevant than other species) as fact, and your only support is an argument from similarity to child-like selfishness.

I'd argue that humans are more morally relevant because humans have richer mental lives (evidenced by language, culture, etc.), so we have a higher capacity for suffering and caring about our future lives, and suffering/caring are the two factors I find to be intuitively "morally relevant".

How would you convince me that humans are not more important than anything else? Do you have an argument?

Yes, that was why I thought I was being downvoted, and as a comparison it could have been better - no one likes being insulted.

So, an individual human is more mentally unique than an individual, say, mouse, and that makes us more valuable than mice? Makes sense. Using that logic, since mice are easy to make more of, and are all essentially the same (birds might be better here, because their minds are even simpler, at least pigeons), they're not so valuable. Which also makes sense, and is basically a restating of the original claim.

No, I don't have an argument to prove that humans aren't inherently more morally relevant; but, before this, neither did I have an argument for why humans are more morally relevant, instead perceiving it as being because we're very self-centered. But now I do have an argument as to why we are, which is an improvement and allows me to take all of the assertions of us being more valuable as somewhat valid, instead of an unproven a priori assumption. So thank you for that.

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