[ExI] how to tame hurricanes

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2013 11:19 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] how to tame hurricanes

>...The problem with the garbage patch idea as it has been promulgated in
the public consciousness is indeed that it makes people think it is a
floating garbage dump. This leads to all sorts of well-meaning and stupid
projects like http://www.recycledisland.com/oceansofplastic.html
http://www.filtersfast.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/the-plastiki-boat-a-new-ki
nd-of-bottle-plastic-recycling/
(which I criticized roundly at
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2010/07/unethical_design.html )
Filtering out the plastic will also filter out all the local life...
--
Anders Sandberg
_______________________________________________

Anders, thanks this is exactly what I was looking for, some more reasonable
explanation of this floating plastic garbage dump.  We know how dust bunnies
form under a bed: particles can more easily stick to a big fuzzy glob of
dust than they can escape from it.  We have all seen the suspended
particulate in a bright beam of light coming in a window, and don't tell me
your house is so clean you have never seen that.  Those particles stick
together.  In that sense, dust bunnies clean the air.  So quit taking them
away.

I had been given a description of that mid-Pacific garbage dump as the
plastic equivalent of a huge dust bunny.  One source claimed it was in
places 90 ft thick.  Then I started wondering why I we don't have any actual
pictures of it out there.  Now I know: that version of the garbage in the
gyre is fiction.  Environmentalists harm their own cause when the promulgate
this sort of thing.  If such a huge concentrated glob of plastic debris
existed, it would be worth salvaging.  At 5 kg per square km of sea, no way.


I have no doubt the sea surface is covered with bobbing plastic bottles, and
recall that all this came along in just the past 40 yrs or so.  I recall not
so long ago, soda came in glass bottles.  In my own misspent youth, when
soda came in goatskins.  You had to be careful to not put new soda in old
goatskins, for it would burst.  

It does seem to me we should be able to invent a digestible form of plastic,
even if it reduces the theoretical shelf life of the soda.

spike