People have a problem with scale. They often don't understand how really big some things are, and esp. don't understand the difference in size between the ordinarily big in terms of every day experience, and the size of large bodies of water, or nations (to say nothing of stars, or the distances between stars).
This leads to people believing ideas like "if we don't recycle more garbage will start covering the whole country".
It also lead to a discussion I had recently when someone suggested we should feed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico through huge tankers and either filter out the oil, or dump the whole oil/water mixture elsewhere (a suggestion was we could dig a hole the size of the Grand Canyon, which would be too small, but still impossibly big in terms of actually getting it dug).
In terms of being able to carry the water off, I made some off hand comment about needing billions of supertankers. Today I did a little math on the issue. It would take about 5 billion of the biggest supertankers to carry the water from the Gulf of Mexico (and what about all the water from the rest of the world while we are pulling out the Gulf's waters, I suppose their are giant force-fields to keep it out...), there are currently four tankers of that size. I guess we have a lot of building to do...
Then I talked about how natural processes (such as bacteria in the ocean) would break down the oil and in the future it will be almost like this spill never happened.
For some reason people are often more skeptical of "it will eventually be ok, even if we don't do much" type of solutions than of enormous impossibly scaled programs to actively do something.
From the e-mail I sent today
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Volume of the Gulf of Mexico compared to tankers
The TI Class of ships are the four largest double-hulled supertankers in the world and are currently the largest ocean going ships…
…Capacity: 441,585 DWT[2], 3,166,353 barrels (503,409,900 l)
en.wikipedia.org
a barrel is 42 gallons, so the tanker holds just under 133 million gallons
now for the Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico (Spanish: Golfo de México) is the eleventh largest body of water in the world…
…The gulf basin is approximately 615,000 mi² (1.6 million km²). Almost half of the basin is shallow intertidal waters. At its deepest it is 14,383 ft (4,384 m) at the Sigsbee Deep, an irregular trough more than 300 nautical miles (550 km) long. The basin contains a volume of roughly 660 quadrillion gallons (2.5 × 1015 m3).
en.wikipedia.org
660 quadrillion gallons is almost 5 billion times as much as 133 million gallons. You would need 5 billion of the largest tankers in the world (and there are only four of them) or an even large number of bigger tankers (and there are only thousands of them, not billions which is thousands of millions). Even if you want to only grab on tenth of a percent of the Gulf’s waters you would still need about 5 million tankers this size. And even if you had them (and that many pumps, and enough people to operate them, and enough space to fit them), when you start pumping out the Gulf’s oil the rest of the world’s water would flow in to the gulf. |
