All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune | Hacker News Reader

All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune

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108 pointstoomuchtodo53 comments

Frank Herbert was inspired to write Dune after hearing about the sand dunes on the coast of Oregon, which were growing out of control until their spread was controlled by the introduction of European beachgrass

https://www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-culture/2015/07/how-the-...

I thought a notable omission was discussion of releasing iron or other minerals into the ocean to stimulate algal growth. It mimics natural processes such as wind blowing sand from desserts. Its been tried by a rogue effort that didn't seek permission but saw some success and had the effect of restoring fish numbers in the area.

I've gone back and forth on whether the potential for unintended consequences is too risky. Lately I've been in favor of slow, carefully controlled efforts. We've already geoengineered the oceans into a bad situation and are about to take things to a whole new level with ocean mining. Mineral release could be considered analogous to tree planting restoration work.

One thing I think we need to do is intentionally trigger algae or jellyfish blooms in low biodiversity ocean deserts. Usually they're thought of as a bad thing but they could be done in the right way to be significantly carbon negative.

A bloom sucks a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere to make biomass which then dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean as marine snow and then gets buried fixing the carbon under natural sedimentation. Finding places we can make this happen with minimal biome impact and minimal leverage needed to trigger (some missing nutrient which is cheap and readily available)

That's how you get the dead zone off the shore of Louisiana. The algae doesn't get to the bottom before it starts decomposing, and during calm periods (especially the summer months) the deep waters don't get mixed and replenished with oxygen faster than the bacteria decompose the algae.

You'd need lots of careful planning to avoid causing more harm than good.

The point is to do this in the marine deserts where it is already mostly a dead zone

There are multiple kinds of dead zones. The Gulf dead zones are caused by a lack of oxygen. Iron fertilization, afaik, works in a dead zone that lacks nutrients. A hypothesis for why the dead zones exist is whaling. What poop fertilized the ocean waters, boosting plankton populations, which made whale food. This observed cycle leads to the conjecture that iron is a necessary core nutrient, but you need other nutrients found in whale poop, leading to the creation of synthetic whale poop.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/scientists-are-dumping-fake-...

We do have evidence of iron fertilization boosting algae growth from the Australian fires' iron-rich smoke.

https://nicholas.duke.edu/news/australian-wildfires-triggere...

The big but is whether the iron-based fertilization will grow the right algae or not. Whatever works, we need boatloads of this stuff stat

If you liked this article, I recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. She's a professional plant scientist and researcher, and her books are both informative and a delightful read.

I hated that book. It's science filtered through a double dose of woo mixing unsubstantiated nonsense with plant science.

I on the other hand, loved it. She strikes, in my view, a perfect balance between plant science and folk wisdom. A very refreshing view bridging two worlds, and overall an optimistic one at that.

This is a disagreement I understand at least. I don't think it accomplishes that goal well but to each their own.

This summer I helped for a few hours to build Beaver Dam Analogues (BDAs) at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. I am really looking forward seeing the positive ecological impact when my future grand children trek Philmont. Building BDAs is good fun. You should try it.

Interesting, tell us more! Do the beavers use/upkeep them, or are they purely to create pools where there are no beavers to do so? If the former, is it needed because there aren't enough beavers or not enough wood/vegetation for them to build?

Do the beavers "adopt" the structures? Or are they too dissimilar to their constructions? I imagine the main goal is actually less about the beavers than it is restoring habitat that beavers otherwise create. Do you ever build them in places where there never were beavers?

I have this funny picture of beavers refusing to enjoy the dams because they didn't build them. No "pride of ownership".

Beavers were hunted so intensely that they completely disappeared decades ago in the area. Without the beavers building dams and thus slowing down the flow of creeks, more and more erosion took place and area that used to be wetlands dried out. With the gradual drying the willow tree disappeared, which is one of the major food sources for beavers. So while beavers are starting to repopulate, they don't move in where there is no food available.

So Philmont is building BDAs in order to slow down the creeks, providing suitable habitat for willows - and once this food source is once again established, the beavers should return and take over maintenance of the BDAs.

Not related to the article, but related to Frank Herbert's Dune:

The Dune ecosystem is much less thought out than it appears to be. Herbert drops bits and pieces about the Dune ecology here and there so getting an overall picture is difficult, so we don't realize how silly it is.

* We don't know where sand plankton comes from.

* Sand plankton lives in the top layers of desert sand, eats spice.

* Some of the tiny sand plankton individuals grow larger, migrate deeper down, and become sand trout.

* Sand trout excrement combines with water pockets deep below, is biologically active, grows, releases gases and explodes, transporting it back to surface, becomes spice.

* We don't know what sand trout eats, but it should eat something in order to produce excrement.

* Some sand trouts grow larger, become sand worms.

* Sand worms eat sand plankton.

So the thole ecosystem consists only one species, with 3 life stages: (1) sand plankton, (2) sand trout, (3) sand worm. And stage 1 lives by eating the excrement of stage 2, and stage 3 lives by eating stage 1.

Ecologically and energetically this is silly. The species just eats itself and its own excrement, and there appears to be no energy input to the system.

it may indeed be silly, but as far as energy input to the system goes, all you need to do is postulate that one stage can photosynthesise sunlight.

Yeah, it's been many years, but my impression was that things could be explained as an invasive and engineered all-in-one species that terraforms (arrakiforms?) the environment, partly as a way to eliminate competition.

One phase photosynthesizes, one phase sequesters excess water, and one phase... Stirs the lithosphere and eliminates large animals or trespassers?

In the last Herbert Dune book, Chapterhouse, Arrakis is destroyed to eliminate the source of spice, but at least one worm is transported to another planet to begin to turn that into desert, thus ensuring a continued supply.

there are also many species on the ocean floor that do not get their energy from the sun, but from vents of heat from the earth. maybe they dont photosynthesise, they use heat instead

He says that spice causes psychic activation in humans. That's more than enough woowoo to imply they get their energy from another dimension entirely.

The spice allows creatures to fold spacetime... yet here we are arguing about the finer details of the ecosystem.

The spice that allows a fetus to tap into the consciousness of all its ancestors and communicate with its mother while in the womb.

> The spice allows creatures to fold spacetime...

Doesn't seems so fantastical now, does it?

I dunno, "tapping into consciousness of all its ancestors" could be a metaphor for a form of DNA memory.

Folding spacetime requires incredible amounts of energy. I still think that's the bigger deal.

>Folding spacetime requires incredible amounts of energy

That's unclear. It could easily release incredible amounts of energy, but require very little.

iirc folding spacetime was a separate (and unexplained) piece of magic; what the spice did was to let you navigate a ship through folded space, which unenhanced human perception could not do.

but specifics apart, the main point is just because readers accept hyperspace and extrasensory perception as part of your fictional universe, doesn't mean they will not expect the laws of thermodynamics, or planetary ecology, or other related fields, to also be suspended.

Where did you find this? I don't remember reading about it - could it be in his son's books?

Pretty sure this is from either Children of Dune or God Emperor of Dune, both by Frank Herbert.

> Where did you find this?

I put together the pieces mentioned in various places in the first Dune book. Every step sounds good and plausibly science(-fiction)-esque when presented separately, like the book does. Only when you put all the steps together, the picture starts to look like an M.C. Escher drawing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_%28M._C._Escher%29

Frank himself, you can get a clear picture of the ecosystem as outlined here by the end of Children of Dune.

One (possible) omission here - the sand trout traps water underground by linking and forming dams around water pockets - that’s the cause of Arrakis’ ultra arid environment, but maybe it’s also the source of nutrition?

Anyway, it is a bit silly indeed but in the novel’s context it feels grounded.

There is a lot of silly stuff in Dune, you just have to roll with it. A still suit would kill you from heat because your sweat is never evaporating.

If the environment temperature is lower than body temperature and the suit has air cooling with fins or something, it could work.

That seems unlikely to be the case on Arrakis.

there is a lot of silly stuff in Dune, but my understanding is that the still suit recycles the body's water. It's not just that you pee in a tube, it absorbs the sweat and recycles that too

Sweating works by phase change. Water going from liquid to gas takes lot of energy. Thus removing it from body. On other hand if you then collect that steam and make it liquid again well you have to dump that energy back to the body. Or conduct or radiate it away... But those are inefficient thus we sweat.

You'd suffocate inside Holtzman shield too as air molecules whizz at ~500m/s.

What is precluding it from having a small heat exchanger in there? Similar to a mini-split but integrated?

I think it would be pretty hard to power it.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-BTUs-would-you-need-to-cool-j...

>So we have to pump 150 + 22 = 172 watts of heat up a thermal gradient of 10C — more if it's hotter. If I assume a slightly pessimistic factor of 2 for the heat pump, that's an electrical input of about 85 watts to the heat pump, plus some to run fans and coolant pumps in the suit — my guess is that you need a minimum of around 250 watts to power the suit.

>Sounds distinctly unpleasant to wear.

>Edit:: and if the cooling stops, get out of the suit quickly, before you roast.

I dunno, they have interstellar spaceships. Sun on earth is 1kW/m^2 at equator, not sure what it would be on Dune, but doesn't seem that unreasonable that they could have it powered by some advanced solar cells integrated in the suit.

And what happens to the dead trouts and worms? There's got to be a lot of that.

One of the points in the first book is that after several hundred years, they still don't understand how the ecology of Dune works.

There are hints that Dune was once a thriving jungle world, before the sand trout encapsulated all the water deep below the surface. So there's plenty of organic matter, and water, and sunlight, to support the sandworm lifecycle.

Could it be that they go deep enough to get heat from a hot core?

I never thought about it like this, but it is a little strange that such an eco-centric author/book had a relatively shallow description of one of the main components of the ecosystem. Then again, the mystery may have been intentional. After all, we still don't understand perfectly well how many ecosystems functions, especially in the since of having a causal model sufficient to to predict responses to perturbations. I imagine at the time of writing ecosystems at large seemed even more indiscernible, so it wasn't a stretch to have some part of the many cycles involved that didn't make sense. But overall I lean toward it being kind of silly, as you say.

With regard to the sections about beavers, I went to an event this year where a beaver scientist mentioned that many European settlers in North America showed up after beavers had been nearly extirpated by trappers. So they would come across open flat areas with a stream flowing through which had likely been dammed by beavers in the past. This caused problems with flooding and water damage, and problems as beavers have been reestablished in much of the US (and Canada?)

At least on the part about the Nootka lupine (Lupinus nootkatensis), seems they're edible in seed and root form [1][2][3] as long as they're leeched properly beforehand to get rid of bitter (possibly toxic) alkaloids. Grizzly bears apparently also relish the roots. Some butterflies feed off the lupine. Medicinally, with less references, used for digestive disorders, skin conditions, and infections.[4]

Can probably just farm them, or harvest the fields that exist, and then store the seeds / roots or make flour out of them. Seems like a possible farm crop personally. Go out with a harvester designed for beans / peas. There's not that much that grows in Iceland anyways.

[1] USDA, https://plants.usda.gov/DocumentLibrary/plantguide/pdf/pg_lu...

[2] Sierra Club, https://sierraclub.bc.ca/ecomap/nootka-lupine/

[3] Plants for a Future, https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Lupinus+nootkaten...

[4] Wild Flower Web, http://www.wildflowerweb.co.uk/plant/2579/nootka-lupin#:~:te...

Annual lupin (L. angustifolius and L. albus) have been bred for better yields and low alkaloids. There are some existing commercial varieties. Australia is a large producer.

From an economic perspective, the yields on perennial lupin are just too low. Something that plant breeding could hopefully address long term.

Apparently the Land Institute already investigated it (https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/legumes/) and decided on sainfoin instead of lupin. I reached out some time back to ask why, because I was curious if their research found yield or alkaloid content too difficult to control for. Never got a reply.

In terms of commercial farming, it's probably desirable to have the better varieties. Maybe get some of those seeds from Australia then for Iceland. Have variety.

Mostly just a suggestion for the issue of "lots of a plants, that we don't especially want." At least it's edible. According to a quick search, it cost apparently $30 to $40 dollars per acre to harvest an existing field (Purdue custom rates survey for combines, obviously no input costs considered, Iceland's maybe different).[1] Maybe add a bit further for cutting, raking, windrowing, and threshing parts.

Either way, with an existing field you just want to get rid of, hiring a combine and running it over the field is not that expensive (based on the available prices). Throw it all in a pond, pool, or barrel and let it soak until they're safe to eat. Not horribly expensive.

On the sainfoin thing, probably just easier and less work for their objectives. WP says sainfoin's already "highly nutritious plants" used for a long time for forage and nectar production.

Frankly, they seem like a trade-off personally, since Lupin varieties grow rapidly in horrible climates and terrain. Sainfoin is apparently finicky. "difficult to establish as pasture, not persistent in grassland, do not recover well from overgrazing." Lupin is probably a better choice for anything in the artic, sub-arctic, tundra, and taiga biomes (which is most of Iceland).

[1] https://www.farmprogress.com/harvest/custom-harvesting-could...

This is one of the substacks I'm increasingly paying attention to

Recommend The One-Straw Revolution An Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka, it's a mind blower of botanical re-engineering.

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