Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: moot on February 29, 2008, 07:54:14 PM
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Or any other fuel, apparently... : (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080228/ts_afp/scienceusitgenetics)
"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."
How about that?
Since I learned about oil reserves' limits, I've always been worried more about not having any gasoline left to run big roadsters later in my life (and all the downstream products like plastics etc) than about global warming by car exhausts, but if this works well enough, neither'll be a problem.
It should make for some change of plans for the global warming chicken-littles and all those that have a stake in alcohol and algae as the next fuel. It doesn't look like those'll be better alternatives.. Not if this solves both the fuel supply problem and the CO2 excess problem at the same time.
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Linky no worky.
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Should be fixed.
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Its just another biofuel. That guy seems like an ego-maniac to me. They haven't even done anything and already they are running into problems (extracting enough CO2 from the air).
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Oh hello Mr I am Legend.
I've never worried about cloning or growing organs in labs etc. They're big and complex organisms that we can shoot and kill if necessary. However these geneticists that want to create something microscopic and simple to help us frightens me. I don't want my internal organs turned into liquid fuel.
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Biofuel yes, but the algae and alcohol and all others I've heard of so far don't seem to have this sort of efficiency. They aren't designed at the genetic level to actualy produce the fuel. And it seems much more efficient to have the bugs excrete the fuel rather than burning the algae.. I'm not sure how algae works but I don't think it would be as efficient a process, from aenergy in/energy out ratio.
The existing biofuel processes don't (as far as I recall) feed on a noxious compound either... This solution is outside the box compared to the classic biofuels. It does seem like it deserver the "4th gen" tag.
It probably does have its problems to be worked out, but so do algae and alcohol, hyrdrogen and all the others. They're on equal footing in that respect.
Ego-maniac or not, Venter's done a crap load of stuff for genomics. We're talking about this being ready in 2 years. At this rate the CO2 extraction problem will be fixed, if it can be, within a decade at most. This sets a precedent for any other bug-based solution for waste management and/or resource production; "anything we can imagine" as he says.
I don't see what being an ego-maniac has to do with any of that.
Re: the grey-goo risk, someone in the spotlight as he is couldn't get away with it. His track record doesn't support it either.. Like you say, you're frightened.. It doesn't sound like you actualy know enough facts to actualy say what the risks are in this specific case.
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Nope I don't, but considering humanity's track record for screwing up science projects and killing people my worries are well founded.
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Yeah but not specificaly for this case. You're talking about a statistic that includes every other project, and saying this one will be in the smaller portion that does go wrong.. How do you know that for sure?
This isn't like geneticaly altered foods, or cell phone radiation. It's bacteria that will be entirely coded to do specific things, including self-destructing if it steps out of bounds, and most likely made to only interact with very specific compounds in very specific conditions.
I don't think it'll be any riskier than most of the things we live with today. It'll get the same sort of quarantine as sensitive nuclear materials, if it has to. It's not like viruses and other pathogens which are hard to contain and stop from spreading. This thing'll be made to die if it's anywhere it's not supposed to be, right down at the genetic level.
Of course, if you drink a gallon of it, or something like that..
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It's a bacteria. Antrax is a bacteria. If this was a nuclear project I wouldn't worry. That could only become a very localized problem (unless it was really really big, like say a Ukrainian nuclear power plant). However when your science project has the potential, no matter how farfetched, to become a pandemic killer bug...
Standard consequence based fear-factor.
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Yeah and those are bacteria in your gut and all over your skin, etc. Don't those have potential (even far-fetched) to become pandemic killer bugs? Not by any reasonable stretch, and that's because they aren't programmed for it.
This CO2 bug will be programmed for its job. That means the only way for it to go bad is for the code to have unexpected secondary effects (which I don't think are likely given how small and simple the bugs are) or to change, which in the case of bacteria would mean mutation.. I'm pretty sure they'll have some sort of redundancy check in a few different ways the same way software has checksum etc.
There's a lot of bacteria that's naturaly weak and can't survive out of their petri dish, or even outside of pretty narrow food and environment conditions inside the petri dish. I don't see how this one which is programmed by us should be any more dangerous than that.
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It's all interesting. I just don't see the need to run around like chicken little..
No one knows what we will have available to us in 10 years much less 50 or 100..
the scare about running out of buffalo hides by the year 1900 to keep us warm in our horse drawn wagons.. well.. that was a tad overblown. the buggy whip crisis was averted also..
lazs
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Originally posted by Lumpy
Antrax is a bacteria.
No, it's a disease. And a band. The disease is caused by a bacterium but what's that got to do with anything?
We've been using bacteria for thousands of years. Wine, cheese, yogurt, insulin all are made with bacteria. Making champagne didn't lead to a killer pandemic.
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"Making champagne didn't lead to a killer pandemic."
and what do you call the French? C'mon man THINK.
;)
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Bio-algae has a proposed efficiency of 100,000 gallons of oil per acre. Right now they are getting 5,000 to 15,000 gallons of oil per acre.
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I still do not understand what is the energy source. To turn CO2 into methane you need to invest energy. This is somewhat similar to what plants do and there the enrgy source is solar.
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Wastewater treatment plants already utilize methane forming bacteria in their big anaerobic digesters. I believe those bacteria utilize organic acids to produce the methane.
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Many bacteria contain photopigments.
e.g. Cyanobacteria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria)
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Originally posted by Lumpy
Nope I don't, but considering humanity's track record for screwing up science projects and killing people my worries are well founded.
Another throw away line. Man has advanced medicine and science at a pace unpredicted, and unprecedented. The mistakes are few, and the loss of life has been minimal from error. To those that die, and their loved ones, it's a disaster. For the rest of humanity, it's a god send.
Luddites - make me smile.
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Originally posted by AquaShrimp
Bio-algae has a proposed efficiency of 100,000 gallons of oil per acre. Right now they are getting 5,000 to 15,000 gallons of oil per acre.
Yeah so what I'd be curious to see is a detailed in/out quantification. How much expense is it to raise those crops vs. how much energy and waste product do they yield. And the same for these bacteria.
At this point I don't think the latter info will be available on the net yet. But I think it'll be more efficient if only because of the reduced scale of manufacture. Burning algae just seems pretty inefficient to me, the same way steam or internal combustion engines are compared to fusion or fission, or solar cells.
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digesters at wastewater treatment plants mimic the intestines of men. They are heated even. They, like us, produce methane. it is very dirty methane tho. it destroys internal combustion engines but is good for boilers and such. The expense of scrubbing it is hardly worth it at this point.
lazs
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Originally posted by AquaShrimp
Bio-algae has a proposed efficiency of 100,000 gallons of oil per acre. Right now they are getting 5,000 to 15,000 gallons of oil per acre.
I am not sure to what kind of "growing" you are referring to, nor the time and other input in question, but that quantity for the square with the gravity of oil would be a layer of almost 4 inches of oil all over the acre.
Care to bring more on this?
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Bio-reactors. The algae are grown in special bags so that they don't have to compete with other organisms.
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Lumpy, i wouldn't lose any sleep over the likelyhood of the microorganisms becoming pathogenic. It just doesn't work like that. It's as likely as a yeast used for brewing acquiring pathogenicity- becoming pathogenic provides no advantage for survival in the environment they're in.
By all means stop drinking beer if you're still worried.;)
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Heh, none of the bacteria you guys are mentioning are genetically engineered lifeforms. The bacteria in the yeast are naturally occurring and doing what evolution has thought them to do over a course of millions of years. Considering how many bugs (no pun intended ;)) there are in the software we humans write I have to believe that these little critters he's trying to make will have a rather buggy genetic code. If that only results in the occasional "blue screen of death" then there's no problem. Otoh if it does not...
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Originally posted by thrila
It's as likely as a yeast used for brewing acquiring pathogenicity- becoming pathogenic
Brewers yeast has been known to cause liver damage.
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Lumpy you mean like the bugs in software comparable to these bacteria, like space shuttle and satellites or Formula 1 software?
Mass-produced software shipped out in a hurry like Windows isn't a good comparison.
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"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."
Seems like these guys ARE in a hurry. And we have satellites falling out of the sky and advanced fighter jets crashing to the ground or shutting down their computers when crossing the international date line etc.
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Nah.
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Well well well.. He answers those two exact questions (synthetic bacterial CO2 production efficiency and grey goo-ish/weaponisation risks) in person, in a pretty layman-clear presentation:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/227
And it looks like I guessed right, almost exactly.. I didn't expect to, considering i've always slept thru organic chemistry and never paid anywhere as much attention to botanics and animal/micro biology as much as engineering and neural sim/application oriented classes...
And btw, he doesn't look like an ego maniac at all. Even if he were... Fritz Zwicky certainly was more of one (calling people he thought stood in his way limp wristed eggheads or something like that) and that didn't stop him from making some very significant advances for astronomy. Do you remember his egomania?
But you do remember what his work discovered.
We now, from our discoveries from around the world, have about 20 million genes. And I'd like to think of these as the design components of the future. The electronics industry only had about a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that.
We're limited, here, primarily by biological reality and our imagination.
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Lumpy you mean like the bugs in software comparable to these bacteria, like space shuttle and satellites or Formula 1 software?
Mass-produced software shipped out in a hurry like Windows isn't a good comparison.
Umm the space shuttle DID go down due to a $2 sealing with a design time error.
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Ok.. and the relative correct/incorrect design elements proportion in the Shuttle's case is? Cumulatively for all the things the Shuttle's done/been put through? It's probably one of the most complex machines ever made.
The point I was making was that it's a design project that's pretty much on the front of humanity's present technological progress.. It's not a backyard amateur project with little QC, or a product whose makers consciously skimp on QC for profit (like Windows). It's also a project that's not as complex or put through as extreme conditions as the Shuttle, so that the risk is much lesser.
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Haven't read the whole thread to see if this was brought up yet, but...if we suck all the CO2 out of the air to power our billions of cars, where are we gonna get the CO2 for the plants to breathe? It's like inverting the current problem. :D Unless this fuel creates Oxygen when consumed, there's a problem here...