Cochise wrote:valis wrote:...How do you know these new things might not also destroy the environment?...
Maybe I've seen too many catastrophist movies, but isn't it easy to fear things like those which often happen when non-endemic species are released in different habitat?
I'm not into biological nor organic chemistry things, so I don't know how much this things are similar to viruses, but viruses have mutations... every biological entity has mutations, of course... Afaik biological evolution is anyway related to mutations...
While this is true, "natural" mutations are not something that we bear the burden of responsibility for in the same way, and also tend to have certain 'patterns' in the way things mutate such that a tetse fly is rarely cross bred with a plant for a specific trait (like, I'm pretty sure that NEVER happens.) Ie, I don't feel guilty for creating earthquakes and hurricanes but I might feel bad when I fail to prepare for one that was easy to see coming, and my family suffers as a result.
As for 'catastrophe' movies, when I was younger I was very much into physics & biology. Enough to go beyond 'layman' texts like those from Michio Kaku and like "The Dancing Wu Li Masterings" into some of the mathematical treatises, experimenting with liquid nitrogen for school projects and such. While that was 2 decades ago, I can recall *numerous* examples from my readings of things we did in the past as men that had effects far removed from what would happen in the natural world. Much of it was presumably entirely out of ignorance, like sending a documentation team to ground zero after hiroshima & nagasaki. While it revealed the dangers of radiation poisoning to even those not directly exposed to the blast, one would hope that it wasn't intended specifically for that reason. However following that up by having a battalion of soldiers get the 'privilege' of watching H-bomb explosions later on with 'special goggles to protect' them from immediate effects on their retinas..but nothing for the longterm ills suffered... Arguments for the greater good "just in case" it ever happens on a larger scale we will now know the effects...
A more relevant example would be a simple bacterium that had a very minor but unnatural change a few years ago by a research group, and then was purposefully released into the wild. When tracked by the group's peers it was found that the bacterium had spread across the entire globe within a few years. The same thing is seen to occur in GMO's (genetic markers is even suggested to 'drift' into nearby stock that isn't directly genetically related.) Unfortunately a cursory google for this example didn't turn up what I expected, but if I have time later tonight I can dig for it a bit more.
It's not all fear mongering, just that reason divorced from ethics (or combined with unusual ethics) has been known to have repercussions across our history before...also it's worth considering that once something becomes an industry plans can be very short sighted and immediate and especially financial concerns can often override longterm planning/foresight.
So another modern example might be wondering what the effects of the 'dispersants' currently being deployed in the Gulf of Mexico on massive levels will be some years down the line (an alchemical admixture of bacterium and chemicals to 'bind' and 'disperse' at the same time...) And a reminder that in that particular case the oil rigs DID have a 'failsafe' that is commonly used elsewhere in the world (in the Baltic Sea with the exact same rigs) but in this case it was deemed an 'unnecessary cost', just as BP has decided to use massive amounts of their dispersant to try to keep the true magnitude of the 'oil leak' in the gulf 'under water' so to speak.
