[ExI] Pythons and rabbits

[Tomaz Kristan]

I think, if you want to eradicate for example snakes from an island, you'll
do nothing with some poison. Unless you are ready to cover the whole island
a meter or so deep with that poison. Which you are NOT going to do.

With just some a little poisoned rabbits, you will at most evolve a new
kind of snakes, which won't eat rabbits but birds or will be adapted to eat
some poison or whatever.

Biology against biology hardly ever works in a desired way.

What you have to do, is to launch enough drones or ground robots which will
spot and kill with a gun or a laser or with a large scissors every snake
they will meet.

This is a step too high for snakes to adapt. Provided that your
drones/Boston dogs are good enough, of course.

But no poison will do.

As I heard, the large population of wild hogs in the US is now being
poisoned with the sodium nitrite. You will soon have the sodium nitrite
eating swines. That's what you'll have.








On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Then there are the recent paper in Science about CRISPR-based gene drives
> for spreading genes into wild populations and the discussion about it:
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/03/18/science.aaa5945
> http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/crispr/
> When George Church says your research is going too far, then we are really
> talking about something.
>
> But we could insert interesting suicide genes in the snake population, let
> them loose, and then have the entire population crash when exposed to
> something like an artificial pheromone that activates them. Or insert the
> pheromone gene in wild populations we want to protect to make them
> snake-poisonous. What could possibly go wrong? ;-)
>
>
> Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford
> University
>
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