What would be ideal IMO is a bug with a gut bacteria exclusive to that species alone that could eat plastics and digest them fully so microplastics aren’t an issue. Likely, a species for each type of problem plastic. A natural analogue would be termites, which can only digest wood because of such a relationship.
It would have to be an artificially engineered relationship, and an insect that’s not particularly proliferate. Preferably with a narrow set of habitat tolerances. That way they could be farmed, but be unlikely to get into the environment and become a nuisance by eating plastics we don’t want them to.
Black soldier flies are prolific and when proper conditions to reproduce are met, the females do not wander far from the place they are born and because of this are already used in organic waste disposal.
Using a complex organism to treate waste, even if only plastic, requires specialized infrastructure, designed to contain any event possible to pose a threat to the environment; this is not something we want or can do at home. Specialized infrastructure would make possible ideal conditions for the flies.
Black soldier flies also have the advantage that adults do not live for very long, do not feed, do not pose threat to human beings and the larvas die quickly if no food is available.
These flies also are vulnerable to cold and extreme heat conditions.
Im dealing with all rule breaking behavior. The unsourced comments have now been removed as the user is unable to provide a source to backup their claim. The comments that break civility rules, including this one, are also being removed.
Please report rule 9 violations so that we can act on them.
The source provided by another user gives a definitive counter argument.
From the article: “ The wheat kernel contains 8%–15% of protein, from which 10%–15% is albumin/globulin and 85%–90% is gluten (Fig. 1).1 Gluten is a complex mixture of hundreds of related but distinct proteins, mainly gliadin and glutenin. Different wheat varieties vary in protein content and in the composition and distribution of gluten proteins.”
loads of organisms that can digest gluten already exist. Not so much for polyethylene etc. Also gluten is made of proteins with definite length not polymers
Let me school you on this one, too. There are polymethylsilanes, polyphosphazines, etc. You aren’t even aware of common polymers like PVC that fall outside of your categories. There’s more exotic stuff like polyferrocenes. You ought to quit spouting off about things you know nothing about.
I’m having trouble finding a comparable number for other animals, though. Apparently for a lot of trace elements (like copper or selenium) ruminants are actually much worse at absorption, because the microbes essentially put them into a less available form.
CMYK actually sounds kind of complicated to do this with, so yeah look for a pre-made function to convert CMYK to CIE 1931 in whatever “normal” light you have. I can help you find the preimage from that once you do.
Edit: Oh wait, this was a Halloween thing. Maybe for next year?
There’s a lot of oxygen in water by star standards, so keep that in mind. It’s possible the change in metallicity will offset any change to equilibrium temperature, although I don’t really know the details.
I believe there have been multiple sci-fi stories written about such concepts. It would go to assume that any civilization still around in 10^43 years from now will have no choice but to live around black holes while harnessing their rotational energy. My current favorite series, Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter, explores some possible endings of life in the long-term life cycle of the universe. There is also the final book of the Three Body Problem, which if I remember correctly, shows civilizations in pocket universes around black holes.
There is a YouTube video you may want to watch by Isaac Arthur. It mentions the possibility of combining black holes to elongate their life, and I won’t spoil the final answer for you. But like always, entropy prevails.
The fact they spin and the bits interact gravitationally makes them symmetric. There are almost certainly some asymmetric galaxies as we know galaxies collide and they will be asymmetric for a bit afterwards, but the spinning and fiction of gravity will make them symmetric again fairly quickly on galactic time scales.
Your question made me realize I had never thought about this at all so I spent some time searching. If I am understanding this article correctly it essentially boils down to the factors that would cause rotational symmetry at a smaller scale ie spinning sand on a plate apply at the galaxy scale as well.
A literal ton wouldn’t do anything measurable but yeah, adding more material of lower atomic numbers would in theory work considering it’s a fusion engine and wouldn’t exactly scoff at having to break the water molecule before using it.
Edit: like maybe if there was a star with a bunch of particularly wet planets around it and you somehow deorbited them, since as far as I’m aware the elements heavier than iron are just dead weight, they wouldn’t put out the star or anything.
I mean, if you add enough iron I believe it would eventually disrupt fusion, but you’d need an incredible amount, far more than you’d ever get from orbiting planets.
As I understand it, the problem isn’t the presence of iron, but rather when it starts fusing silicon into iron, as that particular process consumes more energy than it releases, thus eating away at the radiation pressure that keeps the star “held up.”
I was thinking that the added inert mass would decrease the likelihood of individual fusion reactions as well as eventually overpower the radiation pressure due to its effect on total gravitational force, but honestly I don’t really know what I’m talking about so I could be completely wrong.
Stars have a lot of mass. The Sun loses almost 5 billion tons of mass every second and has enough fuel to last another 4-5 billion years. Adding a single ton of anything would make no appreciable difference. If you were to drop Jupiter into the Sun, it would have an effect, but Jupiter is only 0.09% the Sun's mass, so the effect would be small.
Depending on how you define a star, you could smush ~13 Jupiters together and make something that is maybe a star. To make a definite star you need ~80 Jupiters. To make it the same size as our Sun you’d need almost 250 Jupiters.
I suspect the answer here is yes, and there’ll be a lot more hydrogen and oxygen in the star afterwards… but really I’m posting to see what a proper scientist will say.
Am keen to know if this would pretty much include anything. For example, if I gathered a great enough density of chocolate eclairs in one place, would that become a star?
I believe anything lower from iron will make a star, when enough material added. Of course, one material from iron will give a much smaller lifespan for a star rather than hydrogen only.
I think that an iron ball wouldn’t start a fusion. Might just jump right to a black hole if you added even more iron 🤔
There is a way to find that out. We can use Schwarzschild radius to find the point at which an objects radius crosses the event horizon and thus becomes a black hole; Rs=2GM/c^2^, Rs being the Schwarzschild radius, G being the gravitational constant (6.67xe^-11^), M being the things mass, and c being the speed of light.
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