Mississippi Delta oil spill cleanup

[nachtjaeger]

Okay, gang. Time for us to step up as a community and volunteer en masse. The Mississippi Delta, where the great river meets the Gulf of Mexico, is a wilderness of swamps, tidal marshes, sandbars, and of course quicksand. Add in crude oil, and the quicksand gets either slippery and less dense or tar-pit sticky, depending on the degraded state of the oil. Who better to defend this threatened but vital ecosystem than us? Think of it, gang- an army of coed volunteers, slogging on the silt flats that mark the dividing line between the warm Gulf waters and the trackless delta swamps.

Just a suggestion.

[Mynock]

BP's been spraying some VERY toxic disperants on the slick to try and break it up, so bathing in it might not be a good idea. If you have time to donate I'm sure there's groups you can volunteer with though.

[nachtjaeger]

Sounds like the cure is worse than the disease, like using hot water and detergent to clean Alaska beaches after the Exxon Valdez. Turns out the technology to separate crude oil from seawater has been around since 1993, but nobody was interested. Check this link

BP's been spraying some VERY toxic disperants on the slick to try and break it up, so bathing in it might not be a good idea. If you have time to donate I'm sure there's groups you can volunteer with though.

[Mynock]

Sounds like the cure is worse than the disease.....

Pretty much. Apparently as long as the water looks clean they consider it a job well done.

[Zoe Mal Doran]

If I'd seen this thread, I would've posted my protest pic as a reply rather than split the attention.

And the mildly-amusing thing is that I said to someone on deviantart that there had to be technology to scoop up the oiled water and separate it into water and oil... and I was right.

[undergrain1]

Someone in an out-of-town small town paper sent in an anonymous jibe at BP & government - he or she said, since we can land a man on the moon or Mars, why can't we control the oil spill?

Last time I checked, we've never been able to send a man to Mars (at least, not and keep him alive to arrive).

Also, last time I checked, we lost our ability to send a man to the moon sometime in the 1970s when the designs for the Saturn V were torn up.

That must be why we can't control the oil spill.

[nachtjaeger]

Some folks say that accidents like this are evidence that we need to expand to the moon, mars, etc. in case we mess up the biosphere so bad that humans can't survive. Other folks say that we shouldn't go anywhere else- we'd just trash those places also.

Someone in an out-of-town small town paper sent in an anonymous jibe at BP & government - he or she said, since we can land a man on the moon or Mars, why can't we control the oil spill?

Last time I checked, we've never been able to send a man to Mars (at least, not and keep him alive to arrive).

Also, last time I checked, we lost our ability to send a man to the moon sometime in the 1970s when the designs for the Saturn V were torn up.

That must be why we can't control the oil spill.

[Mynock]

Some folks say that accidents like this are evidence that we need to expand to the moon, mars, etc. in case we mess up the biosphere so bad that humans can't survive.

I don't think we've even come close to that yet, and given the technological advancements we've made/are making in 'green' tech, I don't think we ever will. The spill is bad, yea, but it's very, very far from a world ending disaster. Even if we plastered the entire planet with every nuke in existance, something would survive and in a few billion years life would be flourishing again.
That being said, it would be nice to see us expand beyond our own planet and set up residence on the moon or mars. At the risk of sounding like an idiot, we went to the moon 40 years ago, what's so hard about going there again and putting up a hut or two?

[nachtjaeger]

I've got a spot all picked out near the lunar south pole. It's got near- continuous sunlight for solar power, there are ice deposits nearby for water, and Ilmenite ore. Will start out prospecting for ice. Once I have some solar power set up, I can start turning the Ilmenite (FeTiO3) into titanium, iron and oxygen. Will supply raw materials to the colony cheaper than lifting them from 'dirtside'. Eventually the empty mine tunnels will get sold off as real estate.

Some folks say that accidents like this are evidence that we need to expand to the moon, mars, etc. in case we mess up the biosphere so bad that humans can't survive.

I don't think we've even come close to that yet, and given the technological advancements we've made/are making in 'green' tech, I don't think we ever will. The spill is bad, yea, but it's very, very far from a world ending disaster. Even if we plastered the entire planet with every nuke in existance, something would survive and in a few billion years life would be flourishing again.
That being said, it would be nice to see us expand beyond our own planet and set up residence on the moon or mars. At the risk of sounding like an idiot, we went to the moon 40 years ago, what's so hard about going there again and putting up a hut or two?