The difficulty is while we are well aware of this law, we don't know if it will apply. Did the world miss polio when it was gone? Or the bubonic plague?
There are always consequences of everything- hell, it's one of Newton's laws. But it's entirely possible there are no terrible awful consequences.
Well, we've mostly eradicated very human-specific diseases. Some do also infect other animals, but we've generally targeted very specific strains and species that are pathogenic to humans. We haven't completely eradicated an entire family of bacteria, or large class of viruses, which seems like it would be more comparable to eradicating all mosquitoes of every genus and species. It doesn't seem that hard to imagine unintended consequences if we eradicated not only the plague bacterium (probably Yersinia pestis), but the entire family Enterobacteriaceae, for example.
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beware the law of unintended consequences. This warning will not be repeated
With so many species out there on planet earth, what's not to say that at least a few of them will go extinct?
Life on earth doesn't stay still. Some will evolve, and some will go out extinct, and there will be a few mass extinction event there and there.
The difficulty is while we are well aware of this law, we don't know if it will apply. Did the world miss polio when it was gone? Or the bubonic plague?
There are always consequences of everything- hell, it's one of Newton's laws. But it's entirely possible there are no terrible awful consequences.
Well, we've mostly eradicated very human-specific diseases. Some do also infect other animals, but we've generally targeted very specific strains and species that are pathogenic to humans. We haven't completely eradicated an entire family of bacteria, or large class of viruses, which seems like it would be more comparable to eradicating all mosquitoes of every genus and species. It doesn't seem that hard to imagine unintended consequences if we eradicated not only the plague bacterium (probably Yersinia pestis), but the entire family Enterobacteriaceae, for example.