Hacker News Reader

Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

Cleaning up the significant amount of plastic that is on the surface still seems like a step in the right direction, even if there is other micropastic further down. The impact on ocean life is not well understood, but we do know that plastic is already having a devastating impact on such life, and I have a hard time imagining this would be worse. The engineering challenges are significant, as they are clearly discovering, but they are at least trying. Are there other more promising projects to clean up existing plastic from the ocean you are aware of?

View on HN

I don't mean to sound condescending, but I truly don't understand this line of thinking, as I've seen it crop up every so often.

The notion that "at least they're doing something" isn't a valid justification in my mind. There are plenty of reasons to believe that this wouldn't work, and adding more garbage certainly does make matters worse (even if by a miniscule amount, relatively speaking).

As for more promising projects, we'd be better off doing research to find those projects than throwing away people's money on a pipe dream. Pretty much any project at this point would be better- engineering bacteria to eat it, Dyson funnels to very slowly separate it out, whatever. I'm not a marine or materials scientist. I'm a person with limited funds to contribute towards things, and I don't like being sold snake oil, especially when the response to criticism is "well at least they're doing something!"

There was similar responses to the ‘solar roads’ projects. There were so many practical problems, and at the end of the day, it was just throwing away 30-50% efficiency putting them flat in the road, compared to just putting panels on structures next to the road, or on building roofs, or in solar farms.

So it was always going to be way more expensive per-kWh generated and per unit area of solar panels, meaning that it was both a waste of money and resources. But so many people were willing to ignore it, because “at least they’re doing something”.

Instead, better to do the calculations to see if these kind of things are feasible, and if not, to look for an idea that is more feasible rather than wasting time, money and resources on things we know won’t really help!

I thought the point of solar roads wasn't that they were more efficient than, "just putting them on buildings or the sides of roads" it was more of a way to utilize otherwise "wasted space". As in, when you're laying down a new road why not add some solar generating capacity as just another thing you lay into the pavement just like those little reflectors or paint.

Because it's cheaper and easier to maintain to put the solar generating capacity next to the road instead of "on the road". You get twice as much solar capacity when you put it beside the road for the same money (installation + maintainance) -> better.

This is a really weird viewpoint to see in a site which celebrates throwing billions of dollars at startups which will probably fail while mostly solving problems that are pretty much inconsequential or nonexistent at best.

Plenty of reasons to believe that this wouldn't work !== worth trying

Why? "Hmm, why don't I cook this piece of meat for twice as long as the recipe says. There's plenty of reasons to believe that this wouldn't work, but it's still worth trying because... because...?"

Because Science!

Seriously though, you may discover that the meat cooked for twice as long is better (quite probable if the recipe prescribed low-temperature cooking). Or at least different. Life is not Minecraft, recipes don't constrain reality.

Even more seriously, while it's not good to double down on things that can be shown to not work, let's not get too critical about the concept of "testing by doing" in case of ecological projects, on a site that embraces startup economy - which is entirely based around doing gradient descent on the market, starting from random nonsense and hoping to converge on something that sells.

How does one prioritize from among the jillion things that might be tested? One way is to deprioritize the ones where there are many reasons why it's unlikely to work.

If you really believe we should start from random nonsense, then let's schedule 1200 GMT on New Year's Day for the world day of meditation to cure the planet. If enough people meditate, then the power of our brainwaves will heal the planet.

> How does one prioritize from among the jillion things that might be tested?

Importance. Polluting the oceans is a fairly important problem, and we have the capacity as a species to attempt to address more than one issue at a time.

> One way is to deprioritize the ones where there are many reasons why it's unlikely to work.

When Kennedy announced he wanted a man on the Moon within 10 years, the USA had only barely put a man into orbit around the Earth and certainly hadn't managed to break orbit. There were many reasons that goal was unlikely to work too.

Almost all of the Pioneer and Ranger programs that preceded Apollo failed in one way or another, but they learned enough each time to take the next step. The early launches were just intended to fly at the Moon, and later to try to smash into it to figure out how to.

I guess my point is that when the goal is important you don't necessarily need to start out with all the answers already in your pocket.

> If you really believe we should start from random nonsense, then let's schedule 1200 GMT on New Year's Day for the world day of meditation to cure the planet. If enough people meditate, then the power of our brainwaves will heal the planet.

I don't think this part of your comment should be on HN. You probably realise that already, right?

Importance is how we decide which things to address. My question concerned how to prioritize the billions of ways which might done to address those problems.

The goal of putting someone on the Moon was primarily an engineering challenge. An expensive engineering challenge, but the outlines were already worked out through in-house and three external feasibility studies which ended a week before Kennedy made the announcement.

We don't have comparable successful feasibility studies for how to remove plastic from the seas. Or, if we do - where are they?

Do I take it that you disagree (as I do) with TeMPOraL's suggestion that we start from 'random nonsense'? Because if TeMPOraL's statement is correct, then suggesting global mediation as a solution is an appropriate comment for HN. Which was my point.

Innovation has always been trowing money in pipes dream, because by definition everything that does not exist is an idea, a dream.

Most ideas fail. The people that spend their lives doing something are the people that create worthy things in the end, because they learn from failures.

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." - Niels Bohr

There is this delusion coming from academics education that successful people are those that never fail. This is true in Academics, where all the knowledge is already known. But for a researcher or innovator you need to fail.

Even when most projects fail, those who do not gives enormous rewards.

You wrote: "This is true in Academics, where all the knowledge is already known."

I don't understand that. What academic believes that all knowledge is already known?

Wasn't Bohr an academic? He was President of the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, he won a gold medal competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

That really sounds like an academic researcher, which you seem to suggest is impossible.

BTW, your Bohr quote appears to be from Teller (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/004316... ), who attributed it to Bohr (https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/28983/McG... )

I prefer:

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them” - Werner Karl Heisenberg (1971) Physics and beyond: Encounters and conversations

and:

"you must learn from the mistakes of others—you will never live long enough to make them all yourself" - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/09/18/live-long/

It’s not true in academia, even though it might be true for undergrad students.

Don't you think the microplastics are also coming from the floating garbage that is getting broken down? If we start removing all the larger pieces floating at the top, that's bound to reduce the amount of microplastics entering the water.

> As for more promising projects, we'd be better off doing research to find those projects than throwing away people's money on a pipe dream.

What "pipe dream" are we talking about here? Preventing this planet from becoming a complete toxic dump?

Solving our pollution problem doesn't just stop at reducing new pollution, it should also involve cleaning up what's already there, that's the only sustainable approach.

Trying any solution at all, even when it is very likely it will not work, may not be a sustainable approach at all. I agree something should be done to clean up, but that does not mean we should try any crazy idea (I do not have the expertise to say how crazy this idea is, but from the little I know, it seems like it is reasonable to have serious doubts).

Some users have commented that 20m is not so much money, and it is true, but we should also consider that, if this project fails, it will be infinitely more difficult to fund the working project that is still to come.

Well, I helped crowdfunding this project. Apparently I'm not as smart as you, but could people like you at least please publish your reasoning when these projects are announced, instead of way afterwards like now? I did look for criticism, but found nothing that refuted it in clear, succinct terms.

It's not a significant amount. It's important to grasp just how huge the ocean is. This would clean up a pointlessly small fraction of the garbage patch. Not only that, but it would be destroyed in a storm quite quickly, generating even more marine debris.

> Not only that, but it would be destroyed in a storm quite quickly, generating even more marine debris.

This was mentioned multiple times, but it's even more daring in your comment. How can it be so insignificant and pointless, but at the same time cause of worry for more marine debris?

Well, it's not a significant amount of new plastic on a global scale. However, why does it make sense to spend gobs of money on something that at best won't help and at worst will make things slightly worse? Why not invest in proven strategys, like bag bans or trash collection around populated rivers and bays? An example of this is the Baltimore trash wheel cleaning up the bay. It's cheap and effective, because it cleans up garbage when it is:

a) Not broken down to be microscopic. b) Concentrated.

I should also point out that they claim they can finance a big part of this by recycling the degraded ocean plastic. I shouldn't have to tell you that that is absolutely whackadoo.

>The impact on ocean life is not well understood, but we do know that plastic is already having a devastating impact on such life, and I have a hard time imagining this would be worse.

I can't tell whether this is satire or not. This seems to be the textbook example of "We've got to do something about it! At least they're doing something! What could possibly go wrong?"

I've come to be accustomed to much more technically astute posts at HN, and am pretty surprised by the kinds of comments I'm seeing in this thread. I guess the high quality technical discussion usually occurs when talking about software or theoretical fields.

Per their technology explanation video, marine life would swim under or away from the boom.

The impact is indeed not well understood. They are closely observing the first boom with the intention of iterating and improving. It doesn't appear to be destructive like an ocean trawler - the ill effects of which are very well understood and yet people continue to eat harmfully procured fish.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EAeNdTFHU

There is only so much money and energy in the world. Wasting resources on doomed projects doesn't help. It only takes away resources from far more efficient projects. Most ocean plastic comes form a limited number of sources, a handful of large rivers. Cleanup should begin at those rivers. This project is like someone cleaning the coal ash off the forest rather than prevent it from getting there in the first place.

This argument reminds me of the EEV vlog on solar raods. :D

Edit: https://www.eevblog.com/2014/06/20/eevblog-632-solar-roadway...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com