I hear all those Hide buttons clicking, yes I do. - Micah from Bookmarklet

"Man invents fire. What could go wrong?" "Let's ban it!" - Amit Patel

If fire could self replicate, mutate, leap borders, infect people, and expand at an exponential rate, then yah, you might consider banning it. - Todd Hoff

Amit, check your local area park signage. There are fire bans variously. :) - Micah

Don't they already do this in other parts of the world to combat malaria? I haven't heard any reports of catastrophic mutations yet, but you never know…. But usually what happens is that the mutant never takes off (I mean, it is a lethal gene, right?) or they just end up reverting to wild type. That whole "life finds a way" thing. - Victor Ganata

ACK - lris

Note that we owe the Africanized bee migration to Brazil, too... :) - Spidra Webster

Well, hopefully they'll figure something out. If global temperatures keep rising, avoiding malaria and dengue won't just be an academic exercise for us in the U.S. - Victor Ganata

Very true. Coincidentally, just after reading this I saw an email petition in my inbox to stop some corp named Oxitec from releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida... - Spidra Webster

The result will be giant GM mosquitoes after few years. This is natural selection which human can not control it. - Mahdi E

I predict it won't do much of anything at all. Maybe it will reduce incidence of mosquito-borne illnesses marginally, but it might not even do that. - Victor Ganata

Fire does self replicate, leap borders, infect(burn) people, and expand at an exponential rate. ;) There are fire bans in some places but not most. - Amit Patel

Fire ain't got nothing on life, as far as destructiveness is concerned ;) - Victor Ganata

Fire is limited by fuel Amit, and you can run away from fire, and we have a lot of experience with dealing with fire, and fire won't become a nuclear infection bomb. Big differences. - Todd Hoff

Fire and life are the same sort of process. Combine fuel with oxygen to release energy. Life just runs the process slowly. That allows it to sustain itself longer, outcompeting fire. - Amit Patel

Biology has the kicker of chaotic emergent behavior, while it's true at one level of abstraction they are similar, that's not the important facet to be considering here. - Todd Hoff

I don't think fire spreads exponentially. I'm pretty sure it's always polynomial, and almost always quadratic. - Bruce Lewis

True, both fire and life generally involve combusting some form of carbon (the fire of life!), but it seems it's a lot easier to avoid the reaction conditions favorable to fire than it is to avoid the reactions conditions favorable to life. - Victor Ganata