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Dr_Manhattan comments on Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is probably a good idea. My take is that most of resistance I'm culturally aware of would come from people concerned about an irreversible change to the ecosystem, whether or not this concern is warranted. Potentially worth investigating/getting some experts on your side/proposing a contained preservation of a mosquito population (the way we preserve rare diseases)
Well yes, I am very concerned, because you're talking about convincing people that it won't collapse ecosystems, and not about figuring out whether it'll actually collapse ecosystems in the real world that doesn't care how persuasive you sound.
I agree figuring out whether this might collapse ecosystems is important, (and what this collapse would entail, it would probably go beyond mosquitos and lead to some species rebalancing, but pretty darn sure not "destroy everything" either)
There are mosquito populations that you shouldn't try to exterminate, because they are important to their ecosystem. If you get rid of them a bunch of birds have no food and so they are gone too etc. But they are up here in the arctic. Getting rid of all the tropical mosquitoes is good for everyone and does not have any great effects on any ecosystem. Everyone that eats mosquitoes there also has other insects that they prefer to eat.
There's about 3200 species of mosquito. < 200 bite humans and perhaps a dozen are major disease vectors for humans.
We extinct about 150 species per day without really trying. Increasing the number of species we push to extinction by 10% for a single day would save half a million lives per year.
These are important comparisons.
Yes, you want to keep a viable population because they may be a gene modification delivery system. In warm countries, it is the cheapest and broadest way to "infect" a population. If you do find a way to do RNA insertions from injectables, this would be an ideal system.
Perhaps that is why we have them. My friends had a similar discussion on HIV a long time ago, that it may turn out to be the ultimate cellular insertion tool we ever come across. As i recall, if you have HIVb, you body doesn't develop AIDS, so a de-weaponized HIV virus may become a tool down the line. The same may be said about malaria and the other apicomplexans. They have little organs at the front of the parasite that allow them to easily slide into cells, videos make em look like they just swim up to a cell, and nose into it. Pretty amazing biology
So another reason to exterminate "wild" mosquitoes is that otherwise they are a convenient vector for bio-terrorism.