The metaphorical “what if we killed Hitler before he became Hitler”
In studying history, we are restricted by practicality to study only such things that concretely happened. Surely this leads to something like survivorship bias, so we could be placing undue scientific emphasis on things which were unlikely given material conditions, yet occurred nonetheless.
Therefore some level of speculation is necessary I think, in order to learn from the things which went right due to the non-occurrence of events. Like the eternal dilemma of system admins, the proof of their usefulness is nothing happening, things not breaking, which in turn appears as proof that they were unnecessary in the first place.
Best I can come up with is the handful of averted nuclear deployments during the Cold War, but those are fairly well known.
Wish they would do the same for mosquitos
Yeah. Mosquitoe control is iffy bc it mostly involves draining swamps and spraying vast amounts of insecticide. Both are good for humans no dying of malaria and dengue and stuff, but very bad for the environment on every level.
There have been some goofy attempts at things like breeding huge numbers of sterile male mosquitoes to try to cause population collapse when the mosquitoes breed and don't produce viable offspring. On a smaller level you can sometimes buy pucks of some kind of nematode or bacteria that devour mosquitoe eggs and larva if you've got a pond or something. There have been some fairly silly attempts to make little lasers that spot mosquitoes and burn their wings off.
the wee crustaceans in new york public water are meant to do that as well
There was that Gates Foundation program in South America that attempted those genetic modifications and all of a sudden you had Zika exploding around the same regions. Coincidence? Maaaybe.
bats are good though