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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.

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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.

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?

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