[ExI] how to tame hurricanes

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-12-16 16:56, spike wrote:
> I had been given a description of that mid-Pacific garbage dump as the
> plastic equivalent of a huge dust bunny.

Indeed. Of course, it is also helped by the circulating gyre. It is very 
similar to a recurrent dust bunny found in the hallway-like entrance to 
my bedroom two meters from the door, ten centimeters from the wall: 
every time I pass I produce a micro-tornado that brings more dust past, 
but the bunny remains in the invariant location and slowly grows. Until 
I notice it, marvel a bit at fluid dynamics, and remove it (temporarily).

In the case of the garbage it is not an integrated structure (unlike a 
proper dust bunny, where hairs and fibers act as a matrix). But in a 
gyre there is no need for it.

> 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.

Biodegradable plastic seems to be widely used, although not for bottles 
(PET seems to be the favorite there). I suspect that they generally do 
not handle water well.

Maybe what we really should look for is something that likes to bind to 
plastic fragments, binding them together into larger and larger clumps. 
Eventually they will either sink, drift out of the gyre or just become 
micro-islands. It is not clear to me that large composites of plastic 
are bad per se: they might be useful surfaces for a lot of organisms to 
grow on.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University