Hacker News Reader

Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention what the bacteria produce as a byproduct of digestion. Do they excrete C02? That would acidify and carbonate ocean water. Do they consume 02 as part of their digestive process? That'd suck oxygen out of the water.... Yes-- I would agree with - be vary wary indeed.

View on HN

If they are carbonating the ocean water, then that'll go just fine with all of the "mountains" of sea grass sugars from the recent post on the subject. We're well on our way to making the oceans into soda water. Yet another example of the prophecies Idiocracy foretold.

How will we add the caramel color?

Oil spills.

Boil the ocean. Then the mountains of sugar will turn to caramel naturally, providing the desired color.

I thought vaporizing oceans was only when trying to communicate with whales from space.

That's what the floating teapot is for. Every whale loves a cup of Earl Grey.

But notably, not every bowl of petunias. “Oh no, not again.”

And, you know, for better or worse, we really rely on plastic for, well, pretty much everything. If we can no longer trust it to do things like safely transport medicine, we’re gonna be in real trouble.

Medicine, and food of all kinds, but especially shelf-stable foods, the sort that are really handy after a natural disaster.

First of all, anything that is reasonably dry usually stays reasonably safe against bacteria. Unless the bacteria learns to combine oxygen with the hydrogen from the hydrocarbons to form their source of humidity, I think these should be relatively stable, still.

And we still have the option to store things in metal containers, like cans if we need that extra durability.

But under humid conditions, if bacteria become able to consume plastic the way they can consume organic matter, I would be even more concerned about regular grocery wrapping. Not only could the wrapping break, one could also get half-digested toxic materials into the food itself.

How about good ol' recyclable and washable and sterilizable glasswares?

Sure. These are, 10-100x more expensive per use? Making the medicine available only to top 1% of population sounds like a good deal.

Here in Europe water costs a couple cents more in a glass bottle than in a plastic bottle. Is packaging really a major cost driver for medicine?

I'd be willing to bet that glass bottle still has some plastic. Like the seal for the top, or the top itself.

But that's still reduces the plastic use to what, 1% of a plastic bottle? 99% savings sounds pretty good to me.

Agreed, but that 1% is very important to the integrity of the bottle. Without it, the bottle might as well be unsealed completely.

If plastic didn't exist, there would be much more demand for glass and in return a much higher price.

They are also heavier, less robust, more rigid, harder to seal tightly (without plastic), and completely impractical for large-ish items like some food items. Plastic-wrapped bananas are craziness, but a huge lot of our amazing level of food safety depends on plastics, so we can expect getting sick from food a lot more in a post-plastic world, like we used to before the advent of almost-free plastic wrappers.

I don't remember getting sick from food because it was wrapped in paper. And we still don't really know what all the hormone-like substances and microplastics leaching into our food do as a whole.

10-100x more expensive is still cents. When I lived in a third world country plenty of medications were sold in glass.

What is the CO2 impact of producing glass vs plastic? Of collecting and recycling?

Glass has a lot of good properties but it takes a lot of energy to melt the sand and mold into shape.

There is not enough plastic in the ocean to cause any significant effect on oxygen levels if it all combusted.

It almost certainly consumes O2 and excretes CO2, which might actually be worse than just letting the carbon be trapped in plastic in a landfill.

Indeed. And humanity is not even benefiting from the energy released, as is the case in an incinerator generating electricity or heat.

You are exactly mentioning it, and the concern is ridiculous as almost every non-plant thing excretes CO2 and breathes oxygen.

Well, local unfettered growth can definitely cause local environmental problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication

Yeah. Although I didn't explicitly state it, this is what I was implying. For example, could plastic-eating-bacteria "super bloom" in a plastic rich localized area of the ocean - suck up all the oxygen with it's bloom and kill off competing species of fish, plankton, etc... causing food chain disruptions? Could a localized super bloom acidify a localized coral reef with the C02 byproduct?

I'm no ecologist or scientist, so I am not saying that it necessarily would happen, but we should think through these things as a matter of due-diligence before proposing that we toss this stuff in the ocean at scale.

What makes you think that the researchers would not also be investigating for unexpected and potentially dangerous side effects before "toss[ing] this stuff in the ocean at scale"?

CO2 would probably be one of the better byproducts

#justMakeAnotherOrganismThatEatsTheByproducts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com