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To preempt the discussions that happen every single time this project comes up: * Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing

• ebikelaw 8y ago
  Can you provide some supporting statements for your point 1(a)?
  • saudioger 8y ago
    It's no substitution for actual data, but there is a basic logic to it. If you're bleeding now it's more important to stanch the wound than it is to worry about avoiding future wounds (they're also not mutually exclusive conditions).
    • disconcision 8y ago
      Not sure analogies are strictly helpful here. Like, alternatively: Say there's a knife being pulled through your guts. Should you prioritise stopping the bleeding or trying to arrest the progress of the knife? The analysis here needs to be more quantitative: what are the returns on various mitigation and cleanup methods, and what do the respective rates of change imply in terms of comparative environmental impact over a fixed period of time?
  • parabx 8y ago
    50 > years of pollution that will maybe take millenia to clean up by themselves?
  • daveFNbuck 8y ago
    If your goal is to not have a mess, you can get there by cleaning up all your messes. You can't get there by not adding to the existing mess.
    • ebikelaw 8y ago
      There are messes that cannot be cleaned up. We have the leverage to destroy everything. Therefore it is better to focus on preventing the mess, than in futilely pretending we can clean it.
      • daveFNbuck 8y ago
        Obviously it doesn't make sense to clean up messes that can't be cleaned. There are also messes that can be cleaned, and it can make sense to do so.
• korethr 8y ago
  > Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive. I disagree with the first clause of this point. I think it's better to prevent environmental messes to begin with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not denigrating cleaning up messes, that's important too. We'd be fucked it we couldn't clean up after ourselves. But from my perspective, a moderate amount of effort in the present can spare having to spend a greater amount of effort in the future. That said, I'm glad work is being done to clean plastics from the ocean, hope it continues, and hope it is successful.
  • Mizza 8y ago
    I think this actually overlaps almost identically with the philosophy of Aubrey DeGrey and the longevity/SENS movement. Human activity is our planet's metabolism, and pollution is our accumulated cellular damage (age). To grow old, we must figure out how to repair damage, as it is impossible to entirely prevent aging, it is a natural and unavoidable consequence of our metabolism. So, we must learn to repair it.
• Jtsummers 8y ago
  > * Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future, and they are not mutually exclusive. I want to discuss this point. I think some people are reading this as "clean up >>>>> prevention", which I don't think is your point. Rather, your point is more along the lines of the Agile Manifesto (we value X over Y, doesn't mean we don't value Y). Clean up is more important now because we've created a mess and can't simply discard it. In quality control (for companies) it is more important to improve quality (reduce messes, by analogy) because that reduces the amount of time spent in later rework (cleanup, in this analogy). However, companies have the option of discarding (deletion if it's digital, recycling or trashing if it's physical) their inventory. Deletion and recycling waste nothing but the time initially spent on it. Trashing, however, is an option for a company because they're not in a closed system. It may be expensive, but it is an option. They can close a poorly functioning facility, or a contaminated plot of land, and go down the street. From an environmental standpoint, the planet is effectively a closed system. We can't ignore the messes that exist and just move down the street like a business might. We all need healthy oceans, healthy rivers, healthy lands. And we will run out of those things if we don't clean up the messes that presently exist. Obviously, we still need to prevent more of them from happening. But clean up ought to be a higher priority (as a percentage of global effort) with reduction in waste and environmental impact happening simultaneously.
• mreome 8y ago
  Being able to clean up environmental messes is more important than preventing them in the future This is the most short sited perspective imaginable, yes cleanup is important, but we're adding to this disaster at an increasing rate. Additionally, new materials are more dangerous to the ecosystem then those already there, the existing materials have already leached their coatings and additives into the water and started to decompose, adding new plastics adds more chemicals and restarts the clock on the process of decomposition. Reducing the incoming plastics by some amount is more important then removing that same amount, and doesn't have the same risk of adding to the waste, which this project seriously does. The quality of the recovered plastic is zero. It will be an unsortable mix of unusably degraded and potentially contaminated plastics, other buoyant waste matter and various organic material. This will not be something that anyone can use, it will need to be disposed of, which is a huge cost this project is ignoring. Environmentalists and experts on the marine ecosystem have been trumpeting this problem for longer than Slat has been alive. The "research published by this same group" ignores the huge amount of previous research that has been conducted, and ignored the existing studies that showed the depth of the plastics reaches as far as 100m, putting any numbers they suggest into question.