Expedition To Explore an Alaska-Sized Plastic "Island" 325
Peace Corps Online writes "An expedition called Project Kaisei has departed bound for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a huge 'island' of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean estimated to be the size of Alaska (some estimates place it at ten times that size). The expedition will study the impact of the waste on marine life, and research methods to clean up the vast human-created mess in the Pacific. The BBC quotes Ryan Yerkey, the project's chief of operations: 'Every piece of trash that is left on a beach or ends up in our rivers or estuaries and washes out to the sea is an addition to the problem, so we need people to be the solution.' The garbage patch occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre, a remote area commonly referred to as the horse latitudes. The rotational pattern created by the North Pacific Gyre draws in waste material from across the North Pacific Ocean, including the coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region. 'You are talking about quite a bit of marine debris but it's not a solid mass,' says Yerkey. 'Twenty years from now we can't be harvesting the ocean for trash. We need to get it out but we need to also have people make those changes in their lives to stop the problem from growing and hopefully reverse the course.'"
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
Send in Bruce Willis (Score:0, Insightful)
Send in Bruce Willis with a tanker full of gasoline. He'll douse the island, set it on fire and get rid of the pollution in our oceans! Everyone wins!
Re:Its mostly invisible to human eye (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
Up to 10 times the size of Alaska?? (Score:4, Insightful)
10 times the size of Alaska would make this thing about 1/10th the size of the Pacific. That is pretty huge.. and a little unbelievable.
Good name (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Wikipedia: "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex..."
Pacific Trash Vortex would be a good name for a band.
Re:The size of Alaska or bigger and no images? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely. "[M]odern Western society" is the problem. Fortunately we have those other societies that will take care of this for us.
What? No? So then why single out "modern Western society?"
Oh, because "modern Western society" is the only polluter. Yeah, that's it.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
Nature is not exclusively 'red in tooth and claw.' Cooperation is at least as much a part of ecology as competition. Cooperators are simply more likely to survive than pure competitors. Every creature on Earth evolved from the same thing, and uses the same building blocks. Like cells in your body, nothing can live on its own. Everywhere you look you will see altruism and cooperation in nature, as well as violent competition. However, all this is beside the point.
Your argument boils down to a classic naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is a certain way does not mean that is how it should be, or how it must be. We have brains. We aren't simple animals. We can predict the consequences of our actions and adjust our actions accordingly. Another point to consider is that we are not desperate. We are not being chased by a lion. We have enough resources to give everyone on the planet a decent standard of living. When you look at history, resource depletion is one of the primary factors in culture collapse. Some cultures have learned from this and developed sustainable ways of living. Ultimately, those are the cultures with the best long term chance of survival.
Finally, we can punish non-cooperation, making it less profitable than cooperation. Pollution is only potentially profitable to you if your neighbors won't come over and put a stop to your activities. We can change the risk/reward ratio for any activity individuals or groups engage in, whether they like it or not.
In closing, let me just add that I'm glad I don't live in your mental world. It sounds like a lonely and frightening place.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that the Chinese and Indians have adoped Euro-American lifestyle - about 1.5 billion of them are chucking waste into rivers (which eventually lead into the ocean). So this is a now a worldwide problem.
We could fix this problem quite easily if the world just stopped using plastics and other non-degradable packaging. At my local store some of the packing peanuts are made from corn starch. When they get wet they literally dissolve into a puddle of goo, which within a few days gets eaten by bacteria or fungus, and then disappears.
We need more of this biodegradable packaging, and it has to be degradable within a year, not like the plastic bottles my milk comes in that claims to be biodegradable, but takes 1000 years to do it.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's where you're fundamentally wrong. We, a bigbrain species, actually can rise above our nature. It's what almost every belief teaches, and what growing up to be an adult is all about. Our societies are built for this specific reason: control your urges so that we can all get along. We exterminated smallpox a few decades ago. We've been to the moon. We have cameras in orbit around Saturns moons. We do all sorts of thing that do not benefit us in the shortterm, but somehow have come to be through hard and long labour (people have fought and died for beliefs and facts put forward by periods like the Renaissance). We know for a fact with our current level of knowledge this trash is a problem. With our level of population density we are in fact gardeners of this planet. The choice is once agian: sit there and grab what you can, or put our minds together and do something about it. It's always attractive to be cynical, because you get to sit on the bench, and maybe be even the first one who grabs. We can tackle this problem, we just need to put our minds to it. That may take years, or hundreds of years. The Western level of personal freedom took thousands of years as well. It starts with believing "we can" and telling everyone you know this is a problem and we should do something about it.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted.
There's nobody watching from above. If a rogue coment sterilized the surface of the earth tomorrow, nobody would care. ( there would be nobody on earth to care, and likely no aliens around to witness it ). Should a comet hit the earth tomorrow? From my point of view no, but my opinion is irrelevant, one either will or won't. Should I kill and eat a deer? From my point of view, yes, they are yummy, from the deer's pov, no. For me morals depend entirely on your point of view. Sometimes people find common cause and cooperate, but to act as if there is common cause when there is none is asking for a disaster.
If you are in a crowded venue which happens to be on fire and notice that everyone is rushing to the only exit, and realize that most will not get out alive this way even though an orderly exit would mean no deaths are you going to stop rushing to the exit? It won't help you get out alive, even though you have a brain and know the consequences of everyone rushing at the door, you will still rush at the door. If you are nice you'll try not to step on anyone's face on the way. If you try to convince people to stop rushing, they won't hear you above the din, and if you don't rush to the exit your chance of survival goes form ten percent to zero.
Every day is a matter of life and death though mostly disguised subtly. People have many ways of purposefully forgetting that. Most everyone ( including me ) chooses not to take themselves as seriously as things are. If you didn't relax, you'd certainly choke and fail.
Who is WE? We aren't in charge - nobody is. Central Air Conditioning.
Central Air Conditioning. Some form of this may occur with a We making sure They cooperate. 'They' won't harm OUR environment,and there may not be many of 'Us' so OUR piggish ways won't be too hard on Mother Earth.
I'd be far more lonely and frightened if I didn't have a realistic conception of other people and so were unable to relate to them, or an unrealistic conception of the world so as to be liable to be surprised in unfortunate ways by it. I'm actually pretty comfortable with things.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
Deer don't have a 'point of view.' They do not conceptualize. They can not think ahead and imagine what it would be like to be killed and eaten. After the deer is dead, there is no deer to have a point of view, as stated in your first point, so: they can not think about it ahead of time, and afterwords they are dead. Your point is moo, it is like a cow's opinion. It's a moo point. :)
If I am in a survival situation, I will do whatever it takes to get myself and my loved ones to safety. After I and my loved ones are safe, I will help others escape the situation.
Let me rephrase my next point: the planet has the carrying capacity to give everyone a decent standard of living. If the majority of people act selfishly, we will fail, if we (the majority, that is) act cooperatively, we can create a future where no one has to fear the desperate actions of starving individuals.
Yes, we the majority need to make sure the selfish minority do not take what is not theirs, and shit where they are not supposed to. You need to read up on modern experiments in game theory. Humans are not primarily self interested. Most people will voluntarily harm themselves to punish selfishness in others. When a society has degraded to the point it is primarily selfish, people will act selfishly out of necessity, but when cooperation is rewarded and selfishness punished, everyone is happier, has more freedom, and a greater chance of survival and satisfaction.
This science has been peer reviewed and stands up to scrutiny. Only sociopaths act selfishly all the time, and we (the non sociopaths) do not need to take their desires into account. It is perfectly fine to kill someone who would kill you and everyone you love without any qualms. Heck, we'd be doing society a favor if we wiped out all the sociopathic non-cooperators rather than letting them take advantage of our good nature.
Except, sociopathy comes from a spectrum of genetic influences, and if we killed off all the sociopaths, we'd also be removing many of the genes responsible for leadership and survival instincts, probably not a good idea, so we need a system that takes the existence of a small number of sociopaths into account.
Your world view is a self fulfilling prophecy. It seems realistic to you because it creates the conditions it purports to protect you from. It also points to a serious case of confirmation bias. You easily ignore data that does not support your worldview, rather than changing your worldview to incorporate the new data into a cohesive framework, but don't feel bad, the majority of people sem to live that way.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
Selfishness presupposes the existence of a self, and the primacy of said self in controlling the organism. This is a flawed assumption. Your genes do not care what you like or dislike. They care about the survival of the human genome. You value love and cooperation not because you have arrived at the conclusion they are valuable through any logical means, but because it enhances the chance of the human race surviving.
The idea of death springs entirely from the misapprehension of a separate existence. What is not separate from the whole can not die. Death is an idea, not a reality, it is a concept that springs into existence because of the concept of life. All ideas are formed in duality, which is not reality but imagination. Everyone has equal access to reality, but most choose to live in their heads, chasing and fleeing from phantoms.
You missed my caveat and responded to my last statement as if I had not negated it, congratulations, you fail reading comprehension 101, but never fear, there is always the remedial class.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't mate with a starfish, only with other humans. If all other humans died out, your genes would perish. Look at eusocial creatures like ants and bees. Yes, I know we aren't ants or bees, but I'm illustrating a genetic point: many ants and bees never breed. Their genes only give them the power to support the breeders, and those breeders also create the next generation of non-breeders. If genes were totally selfish to the individual, and not to the species, how could species that include non-breeders ever evolve?
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
You know there's a line of human cancer cells that can live outside the human body? They've been around for nearly fifty years, taken from one woman, and they are so successful that labs need to take precautions that their experiments are not infested with these cells, skewing the results. (searches diligently on wiki for the half-remembered article: aha! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa [wikipedia.org])
Freaky stuff. There are single celled humans out there, living in the wild.
So how big is it? (Score:1, Insightful)
TFS says (unsourced)
estimated to be the size of Alaska (some estimates place it at ten times that size)
BBC says (unsourced)
estimated to be larger than the State of Texas
Wikipedia says (source: Mauitimes [mauitime.com]
estimated to be twice the size of Texas
larger than Texas: > 678 000 km^2
2x Texas: 1 356 000 km^2
Alaska: 1 480 000 km^2
10x Alaska: 14 800 000 km^2
(Pacific Ocean: 155 600 000 km^2)
Project Kaisei says:
No one really knows how big this area is, and this is one reason for further testing and analysis by Project Kaiseiâ(TM)s science team.
Re:Wouldn't this make a good source of fossil fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
Take for example, any tribe or country. When faced with merciless invaders, there have to be a few members who are more concerned with protecting the majority, even by sacrificing their own life. A few have to sacrifice their lives to ensure the survival of the majority. Such behavior is desirable and encouraged, and that is why such people are called "brave", while people like you are disapproved of and labeled as "gutless cowards".
In your example, you forgot that the crew on a sinking ship indeed helps the majority passengers get off first, even by risking their own life. The firefighters save lives even at risk of their own. Your "realistic conception" of other people is a misconception based on the assumption that everyone is like you, and such soldiers/firefighters are stupid and aberrations.
Since you are selfish, you assume automatically that your way of life is correct and your selfishness is justified just because you can get away with it. The purpose of life is to continue living. To survive. If a comet wipes us out, what of it? But if a car was about to crush you, will you jump out of the way if you can see it coming? or will you think "oh let me die now, since a comet may kill me anyways and my life is meaningless"?
Your apathy is rooted only in the fact that you selfishly assume that you will not have to pay yourself for your actions. And as much justifications you might throw to defend it, the fact remains that individuals such as you are undesirable for survival of the society and are useless for the community's long term survival.
Laws are framed and enforced to support and extend the survival of the community. Individuals such as you, who work against the interest of the community have to be either kicked out or punished, in order to protect the interest of the community. The community has an equal right to be selfish too. Probably more so, since it is basically more people than you. Only reason everyone is not overly-concerned by the environment damage is because they are unaware of the problem, and plus people like you actively work towards keeping them misinformed. If more people are correctly informed as to exactly how dire the problem is, they would choose to decide based on long-term view rather than short-term.
Even better analogy, one that is a near parallel. Assume that your doctor has told you that you have merely 6 months to live, if you continue smoking. You can take the short term, depressed view that since you will die anyways after 30-50 years, you might just enjoy smoking and die within 6 months, since you will die in either case. *Or* you can take the long term view and lead a more healthy life and extend your lifespan. You may still die in a car crash, but what of it? If you bother to be careful and watch both sides of the road when crossing it, and jump to avoid a car, you should accept that you are not really all that cynical and suicidal.
Everyone knows that smoking is harmful for them, but they smoke assuming that the risk is low. When the doctor actually informs them that they will die shortly, if they do not stop, the majority is non-suicidal enough to act appropriately on the warning. *You* are the equivalent of a shill of the tobacco manufacturers who are spreading misinformation regards how the risk from smoking is not really so great, and the doctor is mistaken to tell you that you have only 6 months left, just so they can make a profit.
Your indifference to others and lack of altruism is fine and natural, from your own survival point of view. But you are useless to the community's survival. And following your own selfishness principal, if you are not interested in the survival of community, there is no reason why community should provide its benefits to people such as you. A law that locks up or punishes selfish behaviour such as yours, is perfectly fine too from the selfish pov of the majority/community.