Noah’s (trailer p)ark. The belief grew slowly over several decades, and then it was everywhere at once, inescapable, foundational, beyond question: we’re not supposed to change the world. Nature is perfect just the way it is, and the greatest gift a man can give this blue green jewel suspended in the heavens is to live a quiet, uneventful life that doesn’t use it very much. Then — after no more than 75 years exactly — die.

There are a lot of problems with FernGully leftism. Chief among them, FernGully is a cartoon, and the sentient Mother Nature of your average TikTok teen’s imagination isn’t real. The only possible moral use of natural resources must be in service of the only moral creatures on this planet, which is to say us (well, most of us). But even in keeping with the tenets of primitive nature worship, the static Earth position falls apart when one considers how much of our planet we’ve already changed. Concerning climate, for example, is our goal to simply stop global warming, or might we consider repairing the ‘existential’ damage human beings have already, apparently done? Because cooling the planet will require significant acts of geoengineering, which is to say dramatic, man-made change. In terms of something more concrete, however, there are few examples of our need to change this world so illustrative as the invasive species, an enduring fascination of mine, and the topic of this piece. Here, my suggestion is simple: I think we should genetically modify Burmese pythons to self-destruct (in a sense), release the modified pythons into the untamed wilds of Noah’s trailer park (Florida), and delete the invading species from our planet.

A gene drive is a relatively new tool capable of hacking the laws of Mendelian genetics. While there are countless potential uses for the technology, it has most famously been explored in the context of malaria-carrying mosquitos, with the notion we could drive the few mosquito sub species responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people a year to extinction (incredibly, some people find this controversial). In its most basic sense, that plan looks something like this: we genetically modify malaria-carrying mosquitoes to only produce males, breed them in batches, and release them into the wild. This should naturally produce an overabundance of males carrying the extinction gene, rapidly crowd unmodified males out of the mosquito sexcapades, and spread the gene throughout the native population. A handful of generations later, just after saturation, the females will pretty much vanish, and the sub species’ population will crash to zero. Congratulations, you cured malaria.

Synthetic biologists have been working on this for about a decade now, and several contained experiments have worked. But on a recent, tourist trap airboat trip through the Everglades, I got to thinking… might this have a different application in the swamps?

A few years back, following a rare cold snap in Palm Beach Florida, locals woke to a biblical rain of iguanas, with frozen lizard popsicles in roads and yards and parking lots throughout the area. 1999’s Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo featured a fancy home aquarium, and an exotic, $800 fish only a prostitute could afford. In reality, that spiky little horror was a venomous, carnivorous lionfish, not only now ubiquitous along America’s southern coast, and threatening hundreds of native species in the Gulf of Mexico, but growing in size. There is however no invasive species more obviously devastating — or captivating to the wild-eyed Florida Man — than the Burmese python. Just three decades after its appearance in the Everglades, across a land mass roughly twice the size of New Jersey, raccoon, bobcat, deer, and opossum populations have crashed by between 90 and 99%. Marsh rabbits, cottontail rabbits, and foxes have been completely eradicated. The python even eats the region’s most famous apex predator, the alligator (though, to their credit, the alligators appear to eat them back). Today, the snake has expanded as far north as Tampa Bay, and threatens to overtake the entire American southeast.

In keeping with the state’s stereotype, it is of course legal to kill and eat as many of these things — iguana, lionfish, or giant deadly snake — as you can catch in Florida. But open season has done nothing to correct any of the invasive species populations. In terms of the python specifically, hunting has failed, trapping has failed, and bounties have failed. Mostly this failure is due to the sheer enormity of the Everglades, and the snake’s incredible camouflage. In the New World’s uncharted Jurassic Park, a python strapped with a location-tracking collar is often impossible to see, even while a researcher stands just feet away. It’s a bleak, some would say insurmountable problem. This year, the US Geological Survey went so far as to conclude eradication of the species is probably impossible. But is that true, or might we consider something a little more thoughtful than a neverending backwater barbecue?

Burmese python | Getty Images News / Joe Raedle

I understood the gene drive was a longshot. While a Burmese python’s gestation period is only 60-90 days, it doesn’t reach sexual maturity for 4-5 years. In comparison, male mosquitoes are good to bang just a few days after hatching. Still, I wondered if the drive might be capable of slowing down the creature’s spread, and maybe there was some other solution to the problem in synthetic biology I hadn’t considered. So I reached out to Dr. Kevin Esvelt, widely credited as the first person to think through the CRISPR mosquito apocalypse. My request was simple: sir, please help me kill these goddamn snakes.

Kevin is a synthetic biologist, and a professor at MIT. There, he runs the Sculpting Evolution group, a team focused on studying, and shaping, ecosystems. These days he’s mostly animated on the subject of new human viruses, and spends his time thinking through ways to protect our population from the next HIV, which — a horrifying thought, and a good topic for another day — could already exist. But his career first flourished here, in this fertile topic of extinction as a service.

Out of the gate, Kevin drove our conversation straight beyond the realm of “is this possible” to “what are the potential pitfalls here, and how do we mitigate risk?” There are many obvious potential negative externalities in controlling, or attempting to control, the population of a species. Rats, for example, aren’t really ‘invasive’ to anywhere at this point. They’re everywhere. This means a rat modified with a gene drive could conceivably spread a trait throughout the world. But the Burmese python is (relatively (for now)) contained. Kevin and I segued into gestation periods, and I suddenly realized he wasn’t telling me that this was crazy.

“It could work,” he said, “but it would take many, many decades. It’d be more than a century before you really got rid of them.”

He paused, and sort of disappeared for a moment as he quickly and quietly ran the math, working through the strangeness of the python problem in a field he more or less imagined all himself.

“But it depends on how many you’re willing to introduce into the existing population, right?”

The gene drive never more than doubles a trait every generation, so this really all comes down to how many genetically-modified snakes you’re willing to introduce into the Everglades. If we really committed ourselves — and why wouldn’t we in the face of literal giant man-eating snakes — we could probably get the tech together in about five years.

“Then you’d have to argue about regulation for probably another five years,” Kevin continued, “and you’d get it moving probably no earlier than 10 years from now. But while you’re waiting for regulation, you can breed the population. If it works well, females lay what? A clutch of 100 eggs, something like that? 80 to 100 eggs? It’s really high. You can breed a lot of pythons fast. So maybe it wouldn’t be a hundred years, maybe more like fifty years. It’d be a little bit hard to imagine it being much less, but I guess it depends on how big of a breeding program you have.”

Florida Everglades | Shutterstock

While there are many complicating variables here, the USGS is wrong. Eradicating the invasive python is very much possible. But a strategy of swampland bounties is not going to solve the problem. Our answer begins in a lab. Now, are there negative externalities worthy of consideration? I mean, always. Welcome to the world of paradigm altering technology. But most of our fears are, frankly, incredibly stupid.

The first thing people tend to worry about is a gene drive applied to the problem of eradicating malaria-carrying mosquitoes, for example, or evil giant Hell snakes, will somehow spread to a separate, important native species, or even humans. You idiot, you actual morons, you thought you were killing snakes, but you killed — *fading, faraway voice* — “ussssss.” Fortunately, this is not how sex works. Even if you wanted to breed with a snake (and wtf, by the way) you couldn’t (though, again, literally wtf). But back to that question of spread.

It’s worth considering the narrow danger of some crazy asshole capturing a modified python from the Everglades, bringing it back to its native habitat, and deleting — or coming close to deleting — the species from our world completely. I raised the question, and Kevin introduced me to a variation of the gene called the Daisy Drive, which limits spreading to a fixed number of generations. If thoughtfully designed, the risk of malevolent intent following the release of a modified species can be mitigated. The real trick, though, is guarding against malevolent intent in the lab.

Not every creature on this planet matters. In fact, the vast majority do not. New species have gone extinct, and appeared, more or less constantly from the moment of life’s improbable gunshot start on this planet. A plague-infested mosquito? Just a Thanos snap away from gone for good, and the world would be better for it vanishing. But if the honey bee died out, we might be looking at mass starvation, and gene drives aren’t that difficult to design. Could a rogue terrorist or government target a keystone species, and purposely, rather than inadvertently, wreak havoc on our world? The risk inherent of synthetic biology also extends beyond vanishing species. What about creating them? I’ve never spoken with a biologist worried about a race of superintelligent giant snakes, like some kind of way more horrifying Planet of the Apes. But after Covid, who isn’t worried about another virus?

A national commitment to synthetic biology, in terms of everything from resources and curriculum to awareness, is our only real defense against these potential dangers. A child’s fear of science, and the FernGully leftist belief that we should rather fuel and heal ourselves with the power of the sun will end in disaster. We aren’t rabbits, we’re men. Our purpose is not to live a quiet life and disappear, we are stewards, and guardians. Our purpose is dominion over the natural world.

If I were president, I’d show you infrastructure. A trillion dollars and no plan to gene-drive the Burmese pythons out of North America for good? I figured it would probably be a while before we got to de-extincted megafauna, and bringing Chocobos to life. But at the moment there are actual monsters on the board, and they’re spawning. Come on guys, the learned helplessness is getting ridiculous.

Let’s go kill some snakes.

-SOLANA