[extropy-chat] LUDDITES: No GloFish for the U.S.

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

Harvey comments on my suggestion for a protest involving releasing a
non-indiginous species into the wild.

> Sheesh, can't we ever learn from history?  This is such a bad idea!

Ok Harvey, I understand your point.  I'm familiar with the Kudzu
vine problem though not other examples you cite.  The example that
came to mind on reading your post was Zebra mussels in the midwest.

But this goes back to Anders point about what kind of Nature we want.

It tends to come down to leaking a species into an environment
where it does more harm than good.  That doesn't apply implicitly
to all GMO (glow in the dark fish would seem to reduce survival
probabilities not increase them).  Releasing a tropical fish into
non tropical waters in the summer seems likely to do nothing more
than increase food resources in the local environment for a brief
period.

But it raises the idea that it would be a good idea for all GMO
to have engineered into them one or more self-destruct sequences
in case we fail to anticipate possible consequences.  Of course
this gets pretty iffy if one wants to engineer post-humans
to include self-destruct sequences.  Why bother with the messy
business of terrorism?  Just simply spray around the self-destruct
triggers to eliminate the species pollution of PostHums.

Somewhat tongue in cheek (because it raises some interesting issues).
Robert