Algae is the New Everything

Pond Scum! Woo!

So, I never knew algae was so cool!

In fact, I never knew it as anything but pond scum.

But that is only one type of algae, and the right types can do some crazy things.

There is a big rush right now to convert algae into biofuel. Algae is fabulous for this because it  eats carbon dioxide and farts oxygen, so it can help reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. (Which I am ALL FOR on this deathly hot day.) Okay, yes, the grass in your lawn (and ALL plants) do this. But there's a lot more algae in the world than there is grass. (Algae lives in some crazy places.) And it takes light and makes it into food better than other plants.  We can even genetically alter then to make them produce exactly the fuels we want. If we can use it to fuel our crazy, wasteful, material-girl lives, maybe it will be less harmful than burning coal, fighting over oil, or building nuclear plants that could get hit by tsunamis and leak radiation everywhere.

E85 is 85% corn ethanol and 15% gasoline.

Okay, so I'm sure you've seen the perky little graphics at gas stations that provide ethanol, with an appetizing ear of corn. And indeed, you can make biofuel with corn. But corn is environmentally expensive. It requires farmland, first off, and lots of it. It requires oodles of fresh water, sunlight, and care. If the weather is bad, the yeild is bad. And if you do succeed in growing a good crop, using it to create fuel instead of food drives up food costs, which directly affects families on a daily basis. Also, since it must be grown far from where people are, the transportation costs are huge.

Algae can be grown just about anywhere, it grows fast, it's easy to manipulate, and it doesn't cut into our food sources. It's a better candidate for creating biofuel than corn is. (For much, much, more go here.)  I, for one, am glad my corn on the cob is boiled, buttered, and a part of my summer picnic rather than used to fuel my car.

But that's not all algae can do. It could help support space travel.

It's the same old thing with the fish. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish and he eats forever. We'll take the analogy one step closer to space travel: Sea travel. Bring a carton of eggs and you can have scrambled eggs for breakfast for a few days. Bring a coop of chickens...

I think you get the idea. Algae is at the bottom of the food chain. It is THE bottom. And not just the food chain either. Back at the beginning of the world, when life on Earth was in version 1.1, organisms like algae helped create the atmosphere and make it ready for version awesome.cool, aka Humans.

So let's take a leap here. If we were to take a space ship to Mars, it would take about 3 months to get there. How much food do you eat in three months? How much water do you drink? How much air do you breathe? Cause you know, the air you breathe out doesn't have as much oxygen as the air you breathe in.  And--lets not be delicate here--how many pounds of poop do you flush in three months? (Everyone Poops, if you weren't aware....) 

How on Earth (or off of it) are you going to feed yourself, and what are you going to do with the waste? (FYI, I would not ask a certain Howard Wolowitz...) And if every breath depletes the amount of breathable oxygen in the ship, what are you going to breathe?! Problems indeed. Well, algae can help with the oxygen part of it.

Dr. Leslie Prufert-Bebout, aside from having a cool last name, is working on space-age algae: “…for

Dr. Leslie and her algae.

long-term, extended space habitation life support, utilization of the (Microbial) ecosystem-scale recycling methods that support human life on Earth will provide cheap, clean, and virtually waste-free primary support systems.” (via Algae Industry Magazine) So, the basic idea is that to make space livable for humans, whether on a space ship or in a settlement, we use some of the same systems that work here on Earth to keep us alive.

But replicating these systems is next to impossible. In fact, people have been researching this for years, and though most agree that it's a possibility, and probably a desirable thing to use biological systems to keep us alive in space, it's kind of been put on the back burner. The thing is, life is weird. Biology is weird. And complex. You are a biological creature. A computer is not. If I give you a worksheet with 100 simple math problems to do every day for a year, and give the computer the same thing, guess which on is going to make a mistake? Guess which one will forget to do them one day? Or get sick of it and refuse?

Well, the computer is not going to feel anything at all about being asked to do math problems every day for a year. It won't forget. And it probably won't make a mistake. We can't rule out mechanical failure, obviously, but I bet the computer would come out the more reliable. For one thing, almost any mechanical problem can be traced to a source and repaired. Biology is much less concrete.

So you can see how relying on biological systems to keep you alive in space might be kind of nerve wracking for the average space traveler.

But! It beats having to bring bulky machines that can only aspire to the efficiency of algae when it comes to disposing of carbon dioxide and producing oxygen.

Of course much of this cool use of algae in space is in the future. Research takes time and money.

Lots, and lots of money. Fortunately, people like Dr. Prufert-Bebout, whose team ALEX, (Algae for Exploration) is funded by NASA. It's good to see that even if the space shuttles will be grounded for good after this summer, that NASA itself isn't shutting down--there's still a ton of research to be done, and people who want nothing more than to carry it out.

As long as people keep asking questions, keep being curious, I don't have any fear that science won't get done. Especially since seemingly mundane or unpopular things like algae can be so useful and fascinating!

For everything you ever wanted to know about algae (and for the source of most of my research for this blog) check out Algae Industry Magazine.

Humans are Harmful

Reason the First: Humans are Harmful

This post is Part 2 in a 5 Part series about why space travel should be made a priority by
governments, world leaders, private companies, engineers, scientists, and teachers. Click here to read Part 1.  Follow my blog or follow me on Twitter @jajaamanda to be alerted when
the next one is up!

Trash in the pacific ocean. Photo Credit

It's been in the news a lot lately: weird weather brought on by global warming, massive amounts of floating trash in the pacific ocean, Japan's compromised nuclear power plant leaking radiation all over the planet, dying bees, dwindling rainforests, disappearing habitats and animal species....

We are squandering the wealth of our planet and leaving our trash in its corners.

Maybe I've watched Wall-e a few too many times, but what if human impact is too far gone, and the Earth is irredeemable? What if we can't get it back? We'll need somewhere to go, or perish.

Part of what makes humans successful is that we're adaptable.

But perhaps we're too adaptable. If an ecosystem in nature can support X amount of animals, then any animals more than that die from lack of food, or are picked off by predators. And Nature prunes carefully. It is the sick, the young, and the old who die first from starvation, are first targeted by predators. It is those with inferior genetic code that are eliminated. The population regulates itself naturally.

Humans, on the other hand, are equipped to avoid pitfalls like this. We protect and heal our sick and young. We are both predator and prey, but we have super-powers. There is no prey we cannot catch. There is no predator that can diminish our numbers in any real way. If our food sources dwindle, we can create high-yield crops. There is nothing to prevent us swarming over the Earth and destroying everything in our path, like the plague of mice in Australia. (If you haven't heard of this, I recommend checking it out. It's crazy.)

We're in the middle of a Green revolution right now. We are beginning to realize that we are damaging the Earth that sustains us.

But what if we are too late? What if there is no way to bring us back? What if we replace every light bulb in the world, but Nature still deteriorates?

An artist's rendering of Gliese 581g.

Or what if our wars escalate, and we destroy the earth by nuclear holocaust?

Well. We'll need to escape.

It sounds fantastic. It sounds like a movie. Something that only happens on sound stages and comes from the minds of storytellers and animators.

But crazier things have happened. (I do live in America, right? No one fell off the edge of the world when they sailed out into the unknown?) 

And if our planet is destroyed, space may be our only escape.

And according to Discovery News, scientists have identified an earth-like planet a mere 20 light years away that seems like it could support life. Her name is Gliese 581g, and she could be our future home.  They can't yet measure specifics about the planet with the current technology, (more about pushing technology in the next post) but our solar systems are similar, which means the conditions planet-side could also be similar. And more recently, according to Space.com, "French scientists verify alien planet Gliese 581d's climate is stable and warm enough for oceans, clouds and rainfall."

In fact, there may already be life there. "'Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it,' Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz," said on Discovery.com.

It's like a furnished house, just waiting for us to move in, if, in fact, we can get ourselves there. It IS 20 light years away, so even if we could go the speed of light (which you can't, the speed of light is a constant, so no matter how fast you go, it's still going faster than you.) I'd be 44 by the time I got there, if I left tomorrow morning. But if it is to save the entire human race, I'm not sure I'd mind a few generations in space. (There are logistical problems with this, but as you'll see next, a little Hawaiian squid is helping us smooth out the kinks.) 

And Gliese 581d doesn't have days or nights or seasons. We'd have to find a different way to keep track of time, if time is relevant at all on a planet that doesn't have days.

We would certainly have to take care not to lose our cultural identity, and to carefully study history so that we can avoid destroying Gliese 581d like we could Earth.  Our priorities would have to shift significantly.

Still, it doesn't seem like the far-off dream it once was. And it might be our best bet.

Part 3: The Science! The Science!

Wild Herds of Feral Shopping Carts Sighted in Germantown

I had to finagle the camera to get a trash-free view, and if you enlarge it....It's there.

We've been having glorious weather this week in Maryland, 75° and sunny, low humidity, and cool breezes, and I've been taking advantage of this to walk Tilly almost every day.

Unhappy ending to a deadly scuffle over territory?

During these walks, I've been noticing something disturbing more and more.  In ditches and creeks near footpaths between the apartment complexes of Germantown, I saw several shopping carts, blocks away from their stores, trashed.

The footpaths that go through the apartment complexes here are generally pretty nice walks. They get you off of impersonal streets and into a quieter area green and shaded by trees.  The one I take crosses a bright little creek a couple of times and last time I saw a bird with a wingspan as wide as my spread arms. It was black and immense, and it eyed Tilly and me for a few moments before it flapped off. Birds swoop, chipmunks scatter as you walk by, and the trees make little dapples of sunshine. It would be a perfectly lovely place to walk, if it weren't for the wild shopping carts that roam the area.

I come across their remains quite often along the otherwise picturesque path. Lately, I've been seeing the little black ones, but I've seen full-size, rusted, half-submerged shopping carts stuck in the creek bed, sunken into muddy areas. Sometimes there's one by itself, sometimes they're grouped together. And it's only been getting worse.

I've seen shopping carts blocks away from their stores, huddled under the bus stop. They're not in their orderly rows, corralled in parking lots and the vestibules of grocery stores. They're not even near any cart-providing stores. They're just huddled at the bus stop with the rest of the commuters. They look like cows grazing, or urban nuisances like pigeons or geese. It's kind of cute, when you can theriomorphize them. (Fabulous word, the product of an arduous word hunt and supplied, in the end, by @melindamcguire on Twitter.) When you interpret what is not animal in terms of animal characteristics, they become sympathetic.

Gross, ugly, and harmful.

But these carts, and all this other trash I photographed on my walk, is really dangerous to the natural ecosystems of the area. Wildlife has a hard enough time surviving when we "tame" (read: destroy) all of their habitats. It only adds insult to injury to then pollute the few places we leave for them.

And treating this trash like it's a natural part of the ecosystem removes the feeling that is harmful, and removes responsibility to keep our area nice for us and for the wildlife here. The carts and bikes and basketballs and pop bottles do not occur naturally in nature.

It is always astounding to me how blatant people can be about not putting their trash in appropriate areas. Granted, there will always be accidents. Baseballs will be batted and never found. Wrappers will fall out of pockets. But a few weeks ago, I saw a woman pushing home her groceries in a cart, a child riding along in the kids seat, and another one on a razor scooter. I've seen teenagers riding grocery carts down my street like they're some sort of skateboard.

Come, on, people. Don't you want to live in a nice area where there isn't trash all over the trails, and where people act with integrity and thoughtfulness?