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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Hmmmm African killer bees...

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.

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We can make a better disaster film script than that. How about some rare second generation females survive then turn out to be far more potent disease carriers and rebuild a population of super mosquitoes in their place.

Mosquitoes are buggers though.

Or what about this experiment actually working, this specific species going extinct (or at least driven out), and that 4% nice that's now empty gets taken over by another type of mosquitoes or other type of insect that has the bad properties you describe? Not too unlikely as we tend to have no clue what will happen when we eco-engineer something away. And if we think we have a clue, it tends to be wrong.

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.

I liked the part where the infertility genes somehow manage to contaminate the human DNA and both humans and condom market collapse at the same time, yep...

>both humans and condom market collapse at the same time

lol, I like your framing of that. I can just picture the headlines:

HUMANITY TO BE ERADICATED!!!!!

Also, condom sales fall

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