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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

> This part of the Bay is primarily industrial salt ponds.

For the record, the industrial salt ponds are actually very beautiful. The fact that they are salt ponds is not actually a refutation to the 'but you're destroying beauty' argument.

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No, but it is an argument against that part of the bay being, say, a valuable fishery, or valuable marshland for birds, or anything else people might think they’re protecting. Industrial salt ponds aren’t “nature” in the same sense you’d expect a water body to represent. They’re essentially already a sterile, man-made structure.

They're not sterile; their brilliant colors are produced by halophile archaea and in some cases bacteria and algae that flourish in environments that would kill anything else.

If a piece of industrial environment is so fucked that only extremophile bacteria can live there than it is sterile for all societal purposes.

I don't know what you mean by "sterile for all societal purposes". A salt pond is not a good place to carry out a surgery, even though the archaea (more common than extremophile bacteria, and also more extremophilic) aren't pathogenic. It isn't poisonous, just dry and salty.

If you're interested in reading more about the value of studying halophilic achaeons: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/extreme-microbes

No it's not, the article addresses environmental concerns in a separate paragraph right above that. Whether or not you or I were convinced by the preceeding environmental argument is irrelevant, the quoted excerpt about salt ponds was specifically addressing the issue of percieved beauty (not environmental concerns).

I don't know much about these, but doesn't it mean that if we remove these salt ponds we'll have to relocate the industry or at least the salt ponds somewhere else?

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