Imagine an advanced (possibly alien) civilization, with technology far beyond ours. Do you imagine its members being pestered by bloodsucking parasites?
Maybe not, but that says little about what path they take to avoid that. Maybe they simply have perfect repellents, or live inside extremely well-controlled habitats, or have gene-engineered themselves to not be tasty (some of us aren’t! I hardly ever get stung, my wife gets stung all the time). I feel like if you’re advanced enough, the safest and most efficient path tends to be that of fine control and minimum disruption rather than steamrolling your way through the world. Consider how surgery evolved for example from crude near-butchery to using optic fibers and tiny robotic probes to perform operations with a light touch in a lot of cases—and surely you could imagine your advanced civilization doing even better, with no need to cut any flesh at all in most cases. And there is an order to things—you would not want to (nor would benefit from) start producing hydrofluoric acid before you have plastic vessels to contain it in. My impression is that anyone willing to do something as crude and destructive as driving an entire family of animals to extinction just to avoid some itchy stings probably doesn’t have the knowledge to do so safely, and anyone who would have that knowledge would probably know a thousand better ways to do the same thing.
Maybe not, but that says little about what path they take to avoid that. Maybe they simply have perfect repellents, or live inside extremely well-controlled habitats, or have gene-engineered themselves to not be tasty (some of us aren’t! I hardly ever get stung, my wife gets stung all the time). I feel like if you’re advanced enough, the safest and most efficient path tends to be that of fine control and minimum disruption rather than steamrolling your way through the world. Consider how surgery evolved for example from crude near-butchery to using optic fibers and tiny robotic probes to perform operations with a light touch in a lot of cases—and surely you could imagine your advanced civilization doing even better, with no need to cut any flesh at all in most cases. And there is an order to things—you would not want to (nor would benefit from) start producing hydrofluoric acid before you have plastic vessels to contain it in. My impression is that anyone willing to do something as crude and destructive as driving an entire family of animals to extinction just to avoid some itchy stings probably doesn’t have the knowledge to do so safely, and anyone who would have that knowledge would probably know a thousand better ways to do the same thing.