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Perhaps Professor Cocking should have read James Lovelock's "Gaia: A new look at life on earth" first. "The day came for the tropical trial at the field statio
by smackay 13y ago
Perhaps Professor Cocking should have read James Lovelock's "Gaia: A new look at life on earth" first.
"The day came for the tropical trial at the field station in Northern Queensland. A culture of P. eegarii was without ceremony sprayed in diluted form upon a small patch of experimental rice paddy. But here the bacterium forsook its contrived marriage with the cereal plants {40} and formed a more exciting but adulterous union with a tough and self-sufficient blue-green alga growing on the water surface of the paddy field. They grew happily together, doubling in numbers every twenty minutes in the warm tropical environment, the air and soil providing all they needed. Small predatory organisms would normally have ensured a check on such a development, but this combination was not to be stopped. Its capacity to gather phosphorus rendered the environment barren for everything else.
Within hours, the rice paddy and those around it took on the appearance of a ripe duck pond covered with lurid iridescent green scum. It was realized that something had gone badly wrong and the scientists soon uncovered the association of P. eegarii and the alga. Foreseeing the dangers with rare promptness, they arranged that the entire paddy area and the water channels leading from it be treated with a biocide and the growth destroyed.
That night, Dr Eeger and his Australian colleagues went late to bed, tired and worried. The dawn fulfilled their worst fears. The new bloom, like some living verdigris, covered the surface of a small stream a mile away from the paddies and only a few miles from the sea. Again, every agent of destruction was applied wherever the new organism might have travelled. The director of the Queensland station tried desperately but in vain to persuade the government to evacuate the area at once and use a hydrogen bomb to sterilize it before the spread was beyond all possibility of control.
In two days the algal bloom had started to spread into the coastal waters, and by then it was too late. Within a week the green stain was clearly visible to airline passengers flying six miles above the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within six months more than half of the ocean and most of the land surfaces were covered with a thick green slime which fed voraciously on the dead trees and animal life decaying beneath it."
EDIT: Added full title of the book.
- Blahah 13y agoFirstly, it's extremely likely that Cocking has read Lovelock's Gaia. Secondly, Lovelock made that story up: there is no Dr Eeger nor a P. eegarii. It's a fantastical situation unmatched by anything ever recorded in nature (except cancer, which is exactly what it was supposed to be a metaphor for). Thirdly, the technology is being extensively tested, and will be more so before it gets regulatory approval.
- vanderZwan 13y ago> except cancer, which is exactly what it was supposed to be a metaphor for To add to that: cancer works by tricking the body into continously feeding it. It's not an appropriate analogy to what these bacteria add to the process.
- VLM 13y agoUsing blue-green algae was a bad decision in the fictional design. Its really old. There seems to be something of a "law" that if its technically possible, evolution, given enough time, will evolve it. Since it hasn't happened naturally in billions of years, its not going to work artificially because it surely already happened at least a couple times and didn't work in the long run. Now pick a species thats "new" like humans, and give us something weird like direct atmospheric nitrogen fixing for our proteins, or photosynthesis, now that could have some interesting consequences. Or instead of us, horses, or mules, or domestic dogs or something.
- Blahah 13y agoThere are good reasons why evolution will never converge on many types of solutions to problems in many lineages in planetary lifetime timescales. Essentially, it's because future evolution is constrained by past evolution, and many complex solutions require diverse pre-adaptations that are precluded by accident. These are places where engineering beats evolution, and there's scope for us to make improvements on what nature has achieved. Surface area to volume ratio of humans and other animals is way too small to allow anything interesting to come of us photosynthesising (e.g. see [1] for crude calculations). Although a healthy green glow would be nice. [1] - http://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosyntheti-people/ http://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosynthe...
- VLM 13y agoThe writeup is pretty good, but I read an much older writeup which diverged in some ways: 1) The assumptions from the article I read long ago were you'd ideally have a topical UV sunscreen that magically gradually "infected" the skin, which wipes out both the UV problem and the application problem, and it would be cheap enough to distribute to war refugees, starving famine farmers, hurricane areas, that kind of thing. Temporary emergency rather than lifetime green glow. So depending on your math, laying around in the sun would only generate a couple apples worth of energy for a person. Not impressive for a hungry dude in Wisconsin in 2013, but a handful of apples is actually a pretty good day for someone in (insert every war torn drought famine area throughout the ages) 2) The article I read a long time ago was of a vintage where the jokes would revolve around Federation Starship Captain Kirk's paradise would be nude beach of skinny green skinned Orion women rather than Bruce Banner jokes. 3) There would be interesting sociological issues where if this was solely applied to poor people, their verdant green skin would be a nearly 100% effective way to discriminate for socioeconomic class based on skin color.
- gadders 13y agoYeah, or he could, you know, study some more science.
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoThe thing with this type of scenarios is that they assume a fundamental instability - the existence of a hidden self-reinforcing feedback loop, or "positive" feedback (as opposed to "negative", or self-reducing) in the environment. Once you release an agent capable of exploiting that pathway, there's no stopping it. But in the billions of years past, if such a feedback loop existed, it would have been exploited already. Perhaps the Great Oxygenation Event was one such loop being exploited. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event Would the release of the first hydrogen bomb trigger a mass fusion through the entire atmosphere and hydrosphere? You could calculate the physics, as you should, but you could also notice that this requires a positive feedback loop, so it's extremely unlikely. The examples could continue.
- vanderZwan 13y agoAbout that oxygen... that triggered mass extinctions for hundreds of millions of years until life found a use for it. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-of-iron/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-o... Let's hope we'll figure out something useful to do with all this excess carbon we've released into the atmosphere in a slightly shorter time period.