[frankzander]

Best approach: Use no poison. An alien may say: This humans seem to be bit insane - they put a lot of poison on their fields where they grow their food in order to protect their weak breeded plants against pets while they do everything that this pests have a easy run. Maybe we should search for another planet where the creatures seem to be more sane.

[ferongr]

An "alien" watching us would understand the nuance of the situation instead of thinking like a children's book caricature.

[beachy]

Well perhaps an alien child would assess us like that.

[j_m_b]

> while they do everything that this pests have a easy run

Which is exactly why we can produce so much food / acre. Land use would need to go up significantly, and thus the price of food, in order to be able to use "natural" methods of pest control. This would affect developing countries the most.

[tankenmate]

The article addresses this issue, it says that for soya bean there is no difference between treated seeds and non treated seeds. For corn there is a 2% difference but this was within statistical error for this study. The biggest way to boost crop yield is good quality fertiliser (organic or mineral).

[schoen]

The aliens might be equally surprised that many of our medicines are also poisonous to us. Yet (as someone put it to me when describing anti-worm medicine that his dog was taking) they're more poisonous to our pathogens or parasites than they are to us. For example, ivermectin, which that dog was probably taking, is poisonous to mammals but much more poisonous to their parasites, while terbinafine is poisonous to humans but much more poisonous to fungi that infect us.

For all of our medicines, we or our doctors have to make a judgment about whether the side effects are worth it for the therapeutic value that we get. If we said that we would never deliberately use any poisonous substances, we might have to throw away most of our pharmacopoeia.

You can try to make an argument against pesticides on the basis that their side effects aren't worth it (and I prefer organics myself), but I think the fact that pesticides are "poison" doesn't get you there by itself.

[criddell]

Assuming aliens treat newly discovered populations the same way humans have over the past 200,000 years, that may be a good thing.

[backtoyoujim]

or sell them more poison.