I don't think novelty is the problem here. Humans have a genuinely terrible track record of ecosystem engineering. Unintended consequences are pretty common.
Unintended consequences are the norm. Most discoveries were a product of them. We're just good at hiding the fact and convincing ourselves that it was all planned in advance as part of our genius. But it's all chaos.
On the other hand, these are males whose female offspring are designed to die. If they were regular male mosquitoes their female offspring would have the same survival rate as males.
So the bad scenario is the female offspring survive as normal. The super bad scenario is they only beget female mosquitoes I guess. Yes that would be worse.
Mosquitoes are buggers though.
lol, I like your framing of that. I can just picture the headlines:
HUMANITY TO BE ERADICATED!!!!!
Also, condom sales fall
Or what about this: they go extinct/away and it turns out there was some predator that now doesn't get food anymore and is decimated while their competition gets now out of hand? Next pest please.
...which is obviously a very sensible approach.
Denominator blindness leads to people assessing risk solely based on how vividly they can recall failures. Which in turn leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors.
I'd be more worried with nanomachines trained to consume carbon molecules to clean up oil from the ocean which started to eat all organic matter because of a Friday deploy bug.
When you jump out of a plane, you don’t just say “99.999% of people survived this before, so I’ll probably be fine”, you carefully triple-check your gear, and you abort if you get a gut feeling something isn’t right.
Poverty is real, and people fear being poor for good reasons. Losing millions each year because an idiot released a toad, a rabbit, a starling or a snail is a real fear in the real world. People can choose not to see it or to laugh about it, but they will still must to pay, as their grandpas did, and their grandsons will do.
Messing with mammals is a thing. Messing with insects, bacteria or virus is a totally new level.