Hacker News Reader

Comment by k_ | Hacker News Reader

It would be awesome if we could unleash something like this in our oceans without doing harm to the ecosystem (would be hard to do more harm that what we are already doing with plastic, but still).

View on HN

About 20 years ago, I did a one week internship as a teenager in some lab that worked exactly on this. They were trying to grow and select enzymes that could process different types of oil that frequently occurred in spills.

The tricky part was to make sure they only targeted what was in the ocean. You didn't want them to start propagating into the oil tanks in boats, or start processing all the random plastics that make up boats or various infrastructure.

I remember on my last day, they had some really good results with some samples that processed some oil really well and were quite excited. I then left, and have no idea if they managed to reproduce the results or not.

This reminds me of a fun bit of soft sci-fi that I liked in the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld: the “Rusties” (pre-apocalyptic) society was taken down in part by a bacterium that digested gasoline and other petroleum products into some unspecified volatile substance that would then explode and destroy vehicles, also spreading the organism further.

Meh, make them eat all the oil. Civilization could use the kick in the ass to switch to electrics.

When they eat the oil, how do they metabolize it? If they end up producing CO2 like ICEs do, that would not be a productive measure against climate change at all.

Given it was going to be burned, that's six of one and half a dozen of the other, except that if the bugs eat it, the humans have to change their behaviour.

Plastic pollution has tons of drawbacks but at least it doesn't contribute to global warming since it effectively stores carbon. Having all the plastic in the world start rotting away and releasing carbon into the atmosphere might to a lot of harm. Especially if other petrol byproducts like the bitumen of our roads are concerned.

You're right however that if these products start becoming effectively unusable (or less usable) because they now rot it would make alternative solutions a lot more attractive, but we already have so much petrol byproducts in the wild that the transition would be pretty nasty.

This I agree with and it's unfortunate. But I'd rather it was gotten rid of because the alternative is that it just sits there getting pulverized ever smaller and bioaccumulating.

We want humans to change their behavior because their behavior is releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere.

If microbes proceeed to do it unconditionally, how is that better? Shall we then get them to change THEIR behavior?

The most they will release is what we've already dug up and turned into plastic litter, fuel, roads, etc. And by changing the viability of behaviour, they would prevent us continuing with status quo behaviour and replenishing the supply of litter.

If the environmental damage is simply stipulated to occur, then why would humans have to change their behavior? If it's either bacteria or us putting the carbon into the atmosphere, it might as well be us.

I think you're losing sight of the forest for the cynical trees here. At least nominally, "changing human behavior" is not the end goal in and of itself; it is supposed to be serving a purpose. If simply changing human behavior is your goal because you find it personally distasteful that people are living their lives a certain way, and that's it, you have no other environmental reason (because you stipulated it away), it's merely your opinion now, and a rather anti-social or misanthropic one not particularly deserving of praise or recognition as being especially moral or anything like that.

"why would humans have to change their behavior?"

Because the oil fed the bugs not the machine.

So the machine didn't work.

That is not the sense of the question I asked. The question is, if the pollution is stipulated either way, why do you desire the outcome?

You are hypothesizing a choice between a world in which pollution is 134 units (done by the human machines) and humans have machinery, and one in which pollution is 134 units (done by bacteria) and humans do not. You do not seem to have any non-misanthropic or non-Puritan reason to prefer the latter.

I'm a little surprised it isn't obvious. No, they aren't equivalent when iterated. Because the humans stop trying to use machines that use oil, so the oil stays in the ground.

I had the same exciting thought before it dawned on me that we usually choose plastics for a reason. Imagine water bottles breaking down in the store. Imagine protective coatings of ships breaking down. While I'd be happy for the mess we created in the oceans, I'm unsure if this would just trigger another arms race for more indestructible materials — that would clog the oceans once again.

Manufacturers don't really choose plastic for longevity, they choose it because it's cheap and easy to work with (ie plastic [adjective]).

There are already biodegradable alternatives for almost everything but they add a few pence to the cost of a happy meal, say, and aren't a strong enough differentiator at the point of sale for profit-driven companies to care about it. The alternatives don't instantaneously degrade, they usually need proper composting to quickly degrade (high temperatures, aerobic).

We've used compostable nappies that when properly composted can degrade fully in a year - they're similar in use (save not releasing "gel balls"), don't appear to have a significantly depleted shelf-life. I don't know why such things aren't mandated TBH.

The main reason is not having to account for externalities. As long as someone else has to pay for cleaning up, why bother thinking about it when you can keep the short-term profits?

We chose plastics because it was cheaper. Yes, there are other benefits. Unfortunately, no one asked, "If this stuff doesn't decompose, then what?" to assess that risk vs the benefits.

Without that answer the use of plastics should have been mitigated a la nuclear fission. Instead, micro bits of plastics are everywhere; the oceans and their ecoayatem are compromised. Etc.

For what? Convenience and a few cents?

I ask myself the same question about our current techno-commercial landscape.

My favourite what if: What if we engineer such bacteria to survive in our gut?

The best way to unleash it in our system without doing harm to the ecosystem is to be patient. There is energy content in the plastic and over 100-200 million years the chance is extremely high Earth’s ecosystem will adapt to the abundance of plastic.

The issue has never been whether the ecosystem will adapt. It has been how well we will.

If plastic in the ocean kills/renders toxic all the fish, that will be an issue for us. The ecosystem? It will be fine.

The idea that ecosystems are self balacning and always bounce back is discredited science. It’s still a popular idea in mainstream discussion, though.

Is it really discredited? What are your sources? I tend to believe (with no actual evidence, since there is none), that the ecosystem will adapt to whatever damage we do to it using the tried-and-tested method of natural selection.

Most mainstream conversations about this are entirely anthropocentric and assume we have to be part of that equation. They always assume we're the top of the food chain. But whereas most of us will never be eaten by a tiger, pretty much all of us will be eaten by bacteria one day. Microbial life has been around for far longer, and is far more abundant than we can ever hope to be. I don't think much we can do will fundamentally alter that balance.

We tend to imagine that the ecosystem that will bounce back is the current one, or something much like the current one.

Of course it's possible that the current ecosystem could be completely destabilized and die off, to be replaced by something radically different. It's happened many times in Earth's history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

I would generally consider the current ecosphere being replaced by something totally different as a variant of "The ecosphere recovering" as long as the successor has as much complexity as the predecessor - and exactly what the GP is talking about.

But of course there are far worse things than that sort of disaster. Earth turned into a snowball several times but geologic processes producing CO2 managed to fix the problem. The Sun is continuously getting brighter so that wouldn't be a problem nowadays. But eventually, in a billion years, the increasing brightness of the sun will cause the oceans to evaporate and complex life on Earth will probably never recover.

It's a hyperbolic example, but I doubt life on Earth would adapt to being engulfed by the sun, for one

Sure, but that's not the debate.

Is there a term to distinguish this idea of damage to human habitat vs damage to actual ecosystem? Also how could we know whether something was going to be damaging to the ecosystem in a fundamental/longterm way as opposed to simply changing the balance within it?

> The ecosystem? It will be fine.

It will be greatly impoverished, so not really 'fine'. Its possible that in several 10s of million of years the sheer level of diversity of the ecosystem may have rebounded. But not a given

The preference for diversity is just a human bias. Nature doesn't care.

This is just old fashioned nihilism. The Earth could be vaporized tomorrow and "nature" wouldn't "care", but I think we can all agree that it would be bad by any standard meaningful to us. 'Human bias' is the only way we have of judging anything as good or bad.

And the word "fine" is a human word. If you're saying an ecosystem containing one kind of alga is in any way as fine as an ecosystem comprising billions of organisms and interdependencies, then what can I say.

You're right, 'nature' doesn't care if life on Earth ends. Most humans do.

Exactly... And nature itself is a construct of humans. We're certainly anthropocentric in our ways, but that is only problematic if we view ourselves as separate from our environment somehow.

Unfortunately, many do.

> And nature itself is a construct of humans.

What does this even mean?

> over 100-200 million years

Wow that is patient!

It would be awesome if we ourselves could interact with the ocean without doing harm to the ecosystem.

Yes, yes it would. Systems thinking is hard. (Eco)Systems thinking is nearly maddening. Even if one could account for many variables (for an acceptable value of many), one would still have to deal with everything else, which often includes stupidity, irrationality, politics, emotion, villains... Nature makes many errors, but at least it isn't stupid; those errors result in the adaptations that make the world work. This process involves a lot of death, but it works. Or, it did. I am somewhat familiar with ecosystems and environmental restoration, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from positive thinking; in this case, however, I really think people need to try to comprehend the mechanisms before experimenting.

I reiterate: systems thinking is hard.

The organisms would probably need micronutrients as well, such as iron or copper.

Advantage: We can control their spread—target them at the Garbage Patches

Disadvantage: More expensive to deploy, since you have to also sprinkle fertilizer for the cleanup to be effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com