This should at least have 2013 appended to the title.
But that supposes that 14-month-old news of a temporary response to customer complaints over a mediocre video game (which have been covered ad nauseam) should be on Hacker News in May 2014. I may be wrong, however. It received at least 3 upvotes in its first 5 minutes.
It would likely be deployed only near human settlements, which cover a relatively small portion of Earth's land surface area. Mosquitos would still be able to breed unabated in, say, protected land in the United States and Canada.
Not that it takes away from your concern, which is valid. It is possible that ubiquitous deployment of this device could select for more resilient phenotypes on human-observable timelines (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution)
I wonder if an advanced aquatic species could/would make use of hydrothermal vents to harness the some of the transformative properties of fire. Hydrothermal vents lack the property of mobility, yet have the properties of persistence and predictability.
If one thinks of fire as a common evolutionary ancestor of all human technology; I wonder if there is, in the same sense of fire on land, a branching point of technological evolution in an aquatic society; a branching point that humans do not comprehend, acknowledge, or notice.
Wow, this book seems cool. I plan on checking it out. However, I couldn't help but think that this book presumes a certain amount of knowledge that I think would likely be absent by the time the book is recovered.
I'm probably missing the point and taking this too literally, but I think a few primers should be written for this book: "A self referential guide on learning to read (bootstrap your English!)" and "A contextual dictionary for out of vouge 21st century terminology."
It seems as if you were to do this as an explicit "restart guide" for society (and not an otherwise cool book on human technological development), you would need to account for the fact that a person born a generation or two after the collapse would likely have little access to education, the English language (or at least the ability to read), and context for understanding phrasing, terminology, and grammar like: "Yet beyond drunken party snapshots...", "Photographic emulsions are also sensitive to X-rays... allow you to create medical images...", "We often hear about the Industrial Revolution and ... mechanical contraptions ... transforming eighteenth-century society", [... and other concepts that likely require the context of a basic, first world, 21st century education...].
As a thought exercise, I think it would be really cool to figure out how to create primers that build on top of this book, ones that help bootstrap collective knowledge from all the way down to the core concepts and fundamentals; perhaps starting with the concept of language itself.
alantutorial is an alternate reality "game" starring a fictional character named "alan", made by Alan Resnick[1]. It seems all those videos are narrating a story!!! Now, I need to see them all :)
> In some environments, I could see it being much more useful
It is very useful in laboratories. On demand printing of labware with custom geometry is wonderful. Also, it enables certain geometries and properties that would be very difficult (for an unskilled operator) or impossible to produce via subtractive means, like CNC mills. For example: custom reaction chambers with complex internal geometry. Iterative, "in-lab" design cycles are also pretty nice.
This book isn't directly related to all of OP's comment, but it addresses emergent, meta-properties of systems---which seems to me to be an important component of OP's (outstanding) comment. The book is an exploration of complex behaviours and properties that arise from seemingly simple actors, actions, and individual characteristics taken in aggregate; essentially, the dynamics and structures of meta-properties/behaviours in systems.
More directly, the book also addresses examples of swarm dynamics and intelligence.
> The approach may work a while. But then I am sure some mutant gene will eventually emerge in the wild-type populations that will inhibit the synthetic kill gene.
> That's how Nature works.
More accurately, "That's how Nature works, sometimes."
The statement "...some mutant gene will eventually emerge ... that will inhibit [another gene]" describes one subset of the set of all possible causes of future genetic expression branching from this point. There is no law (that we are yet aware of) that allows us to say conclusively that a certain genetic trait will be selected for or against with any meaningful certainty. Furthermore, we have no scientific footing on which to say 'we are sure that a specific mutation will arise that will inhibit this other mutation' as decreed by Nature. In order for the claim to always be true in all arbitrary subsets of Nature, we would need to at least know: whether or not the gene will be selected against, specifically how the gene will be selected against, and nearly all nth order organism-local and population-global effects of a specific mutation or selection event. (We can play Nature in the lab and make approximations of the claim, though! Sort of.)
We can make statements like "If the oxygen content of that atmosphere or environment increases, it is possible that many anaerobic organisms will be selected against." Or, "If low hemoglobin production becomes advantageous, at some point after that, conditions x, y, and ... will likely exhibit reciprocal selective pressures."
Of course, we can also say things like, "All species are statistically likely to go extinct." (That's not very interesting.)
Essentially, we can make broad guesses about future states of genetic expression (and implied warranties and effects) under certain specific contexts. But we cannot say that a specific genetic cause and effect will occur as derived from an inherent property of Nature and a specific sub-state of the universe. As far as we know, genetics, mutation, evolution, and selection are just functions in a mostly random, iterated chaotic system that we are just beginning to comprehend.
We cannot say that 'a particular gene will be selected against, because it is inevitable that specific genes are invariably inhibited or selected against by subsequent shifts in population genetics.' In a sense, that's partially accurate. All species, and by extension, each gene and all genomes, are likely to be selected against. But not always via mutation. It's about the same as saying that species go extinct because of x; it's not certain to be true and may not yield any new information.
There is no law (that we know of) that allows us to make deterministic statements like 'X% of the genome will be inhibited because of the emergence of another mutation'.
For all we know, a rogue asteroid might hit Earth on Tuesday during rush hour in Hong Kong. Or, that particular gene may end up surviving until the closest possible moment before the heat death of the universe. On a more fundamental level, we'd need laws that allow us to predict specific future events (with interesting and meaningful degrees of certainty). We would need to be able to identify and map the exquisitely threaded chaos woven throughout Nature before we can be reasonably certain that 'a mutation will eventually arise to inhibit this other mutation.'
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563
Edited to steal more screenspace/add context:
Authors:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74...
http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto
You may also be interested in this paper:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantu...
Also, http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory