Hacker News Reader

Comment by Orphis | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com