I've always sort of thought that, given the amount of plastics that's in our oceans, together with a bunch of hungry microorganisms, odds are eventually one will evolve that eats plastics and it will flourish. Prima facie this may even sound like a good development.
Except now you're faced with a world where plastics rot, not just the plastics we want to go away, but the plastics we want to stay around. We use plastics in a lot of places where this would be a Bad Thing, such as electrical insulators.
> Michael Crichton would have a better legacy if he had not turned to global climate disruption denialism in his final years.
Wait. I read his stuff and he carefully didn't deny it, just pointed out that it's super important to have way more data than pop cultural opinions were being echo-chamber based on.
He didn't outright deny it, but he was not acting in good faith when rallying against the mainstream perspective. I remember seeing an example where he specifically made an argument using a projection model that wasn't accurate, conveniently ignoring the fact that that model was only 1 of 3 and another one of the 3 was almost spot on.
That was his line. But (a) he was wrong, and (b) had the oncoming catastrophe been smaller than predicted, stalling action would still have been wrong.
The massive build-out of wind and solar power generation has made energy radically cheaper than it has ever been. Had we started sooner, we would not only have a much smaller crisis now, but we would have spent overwhelmingly less on coal and oil, and polluted correspondingly less. Even without the looming crisis, we would be much better off, and Saudi Arabia and Russia would not now command nearly so much influence in the world.
Exactly to the degree that Crichton personally stalled action, blood is on his hands.
"The massive build-out of wind and solar power generation has made energy radically cheaper than it has ever been."
As far as i know nuclear power and to some extent hydro power made the energy cheaper. Solar is expensive and it is not clear what its benefits are. Wind ...
Solar is by far the cheapest source of energy ever fielded, followed closely by wind. Nukes are among the most expensive still in common use.
If you are hearing that nuke power is cheap, you are being lied to. Just now, nukes are about even with solar and wind backed with natural gas if, but only if, you ignore their capital cost. But solar and wind costs are still falling.
Once renewables have been built out enough to be able to displace other energy sources, they will need to be supplemented with storage. (Before, there is no point: charging storage from fossil fuels would be counterproductive.) Storage cost is on the same exponential free-fall we saw for solar and wind, so that when time comes to start building out storage, renewables + storage will be cheaper than solar alone, today.
Depolymerization was only an incidental side effect in The Andromeda Strain. I'd say Pedler & Davis's near-contemporary publication Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters would be the seminal work in the field.
Of course I read it, back when. But people don't read books anymore, do they?
Favorite recent book lately is by Don Eyles, "Sunburst and Luminary", about developing the Apollo lunar landing software. I bought it off the website below, which delivered quickly without fuss.
I take the opportunity to remember Hal Laning (d. 2012), the person who programmed the executive task management "OS" on the Apollo Guidance Computer, that saved Apollo 11. He gets too little recognition. He created, too, credibly the first compiler ever.
How? Plastic trash takes a miniscule area on the world map - even if a rainforest would pop up on every trash place, it would not offset the emissions from the bacteria that eat it.
Also, the optimistic scenario would be that such bacteria would release co2. If instead they released methane, we would be doomed.
There was a Judge Dredd comic where a bacteria that eats "plasteen" is accidentally released and collapses buildings, and also eats a man's artificial heart.
it's not a given that this will happen on a human timescale. The carboniferous period lasted 60M years before bacteria evolved the ability to break down cellulose.
I think the big difference now from then is that we have a lot of bacteria that already are in the ballpark of doing the right thing, they just need some help with the polymer structure. That's perhaps a smaller gap to bridge.
Hmm, having paid quite a lot to replace my lead water pipe with HDPE I hope it doesn't eat that too. the durability of plastic is a benefit under many circumstances.
Works at 50°C - now I was about to write the AI made a mistake and wanted it to work at 50°F instead, but then this is also no healthy body temperature :)
Part of the world has already started hitting 50°C because of global warming. I guess world getting warmer would means higher chances of such bacteria evolving naturally. India and Pakistan have high population cities with huge waste dumps/land fills so this enzyme or similar evolving naturally is a possibility.
In 2009, a Taiwanese high-school student (Tseng I-ching) discovered bacteria that decomposes polystyrene [0]. I think she deserves credit for starting this field of research.
What are the long term effects of the enzyme itself as the environmental toxin? Plastics are not a problem at all since they decompose naturally if you give them enough time. There will barely be any plastic left 500 years after we stop producing new plastic.
Why not just bury the stuff? That's a ton of carbon that isn't going into the atmosphere. They are kind of going the wrong way. If you depolymerize the junk it's going to degrade to CO2 eventually.
In fact, plastics are an excellent carbon sink if we ever need a durable method of sequestering carbon. Plastics wouldn't be nearly as terrible if we weren't making them from oil. Sequestering atmospheric CO2 and polymerizing it using enzymes would mean that we are taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the ground where it belongs.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 97.1 ms ] threadExcept now you're faced with a world where plastics rot, not just the plastics we want to go away, but the plastics we want to stay around. We use plastics in a lot of places where this would be a Bad Thing, such as electrical insulators.
Michael Crichton would have a better legacy if he had not turned to global climate disruption denialism in his final years.
The problem with microorganisms eating all the waste plastic is that then the carbon in it is no longer sequestered.
Wait. I read his stuff and he carefully didn't deny it, just pointed out that it's super important to have way more data than pop cultural opinions were being echo-chamber based on.
The massive build-out of wind and solar power generation has made energy radically cheaper than it has ever been. Had we started sooner, we would not only have a much smaller crisis now, but we would have spent overwhelmingly less on coal and oil, and polluted correspondingly less. Even without the looming crisis, we would be much better off, and Saudi Arabia and Russia would not now command nearly so much influence in the world.
Exactly to the degree that Crichton personally stalled action, blood is on his hands.
As far as i know nuclear power and to some extent hydro power made the energy cheaper. Solar is expensive and it is not clear what its benefits are. Wind ...
If you are hearing that nuke power is cheap, you are being lied to. Just now, nukes are about even with solar and wind backed with natural gas if, but only if, you ignore their capital cost. But solar and wind costs are still falling.
Once renewables have been built out enough to be able to displace other energy sources, they will need to be supplemented with storage. (Before, there is no point: charging storage from fossil fuels would be counterproductive.) Storage cost is on the same exponential free-fall we saw for solar and wind, so that when time comes to start building out storage, renewables + storage will be cheaper than solar alone, today.
Favorite recent book lately is by Don Eyles, "Sunburst and Luminary", about developing the Apollo lunar landing software. I bought it off the website below, which delivered quickly without fuss.
http://sunburstandluminary.com/
I take the opportunity to remember Hal Laning (d. 2012), the person who programmed the executive task management "OS" on the Apollo Guidance Computer, that saved Apollo 11. He gets too little recognition. He created, too, credibly the first compiler ever.
It's out on Kindle.
This ignores secondary effects like the fact that less plastics might allow more life which does sequester carbon.
Also, the optimistic scenario would be that such bacteria would release co2. If instead they released methane, we would be doomed.
https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare
It's mostly about climate change, though.
I'm guessing that the writer read that poem.
I think the big difference now from then is that we have a lot of bacteria that already are in the ballpark of doing the right thing, they just need some help with the polymer structure. That's perhaps a smaller gap to bridge.
I'd worry much more about the medical sector.
Does the type of process in the reaction and it’s byproducts do damage to us? Is AI actually out to get us lol
Part of the world has already started hitting 50°C because of global warming. I guess world getting warmer would means higher chances of such bacteria evolving naturally. India and Pakistan have high population cities with huge waste dumps/land fills so this enzyme or similar evolving naturally is a possibility.
[0] https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15307
In fact, plastics are an excellent carbon sink if we ever need a durable method of sequestering carbon. Plastics wouldn't be nearly as terrible if we weren't making them from oil. Sequestering atmospheric CO2 and polymerizing it using enzymes would mean that we are taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the ground where it belongs.