Atlantis Dispatch 006:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates adaptability
Strange jellyfish, indeed. Image courtesy Mote Marine Aquarium.
June 4th, 2021
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It’s been a wild few weeks in space, reader. Every time Atlantis looked up, it seemed like something new and crazy was flying through the atmosphere.
First, we watched debris from the Chinese Long March 5B rocket crash land in the Indian Ocean. This was the fourth largest uncontrolled descent of manmade debris in the history of space exploration. Then, we heard that Russia and Hollywood are in a tight heat for placing actors on the International Space Station for some on-location movies. It looks like Russia will send actor, Yulia Peresild, and director, Klim Shipenko to film The Challenge, the first ever full-length feature filmed in space. In doing so, they’ll beat out actor Tom Cruise and director Doug Limon for the title. Meanwhile, we found out that Elon Musk is getting into the cyber-toy business. Tesla has teamed up with Hot Wheels to roll out the new mini Cybertruck, which contains a detachable Cyberquad for all of your mini-Martian off-roading needs.
Now, we know what you might be thinking: Will Elon send Tom a tiny Cybertruck to play with while he’s between shoots on the ISS? Might Tom stage a no-gravity, mini-monster truck rally between space-walk takes? Maybe, reader, maybe. And what about this? If Tom does engage in some extravehicular activity with one of those Cybertrucks, will the detachable Cyberquad fall off and eventually end up in the ocean with all of the rest of the debris?
As you may recall from our last dispatch (when we were wondering what would happen to all the junk in low Earth orbit), we learned about some exciting new science that suggests that we’re on the cusp of a great interplanetary recycling program. When ecosystems accumulate enough junk, organisms in them start to repurpose their trash. At this news, a hit of optimism began to run through old Atlantis’s planks. It felt, well, revivifying.
But when we imagined the splashdown of Tom Cruise’s Cyberquad, we faltered. We wondered whether this power to adapt and repurpose junk could ever really work for the ocean. Maybe we can recycle the satellites in LEO, but what about all of the plastic in the ocean? This posed a challenge even larger than the forthcoming Russian film in space. Are there limits to how much we can adapt to our own floating junkyards?
Think of it this way: Consider Elon on Saturday Night Live. Would you say he adapted to the earthly world of late-night comedy, and therefore, became, well, human (less alien)? Or did he remain seemingly unassimilable, like so many of those oceanic plastic bags and six-pack loops? We were torn. The Atlantis transom nearly broke in two like that boat that ran aground on the Rock of Gibraltar.
We were about to contemplate this whorl of plastic-inspired thinking when, lo, out of the scientific deep, we learned of a potential new sea creature. Back in 2017, when Tom Cruise was gearing up for Mission: Impossible—Fallout, SFI External Professor Ricard Solé was thinking about a different seemingly impossible mission: to find out what is becoming of all of the oceanic plastic.
Solé and his team looked into the waves for answers and, in them, they saw something very strange. They observed that there is a great gulf between the amount of plastic that we expect to observe in the ocean and the amount that we actually observe. Wait, what? Where have all the plastics gone? It’s not like we shuttled all of them into space.
Solé and his team proposed that the observation might be explained by a set of organisms who evolved to degrade plastic. Sole’s group created a mathematical model for an environment where there is a constantly increasing supply of plastic and a hypothetical plastic metabolizing species that is evolving. They found that the rates of plastic accumulation (again, lower than expected), reflect this kind of scenario. As of yet, the researchers do not know for certain if there is a plastic eating species evolving in our oceans, but they’ve got us thinking about it, and wouldn’t that be great!
Yay! It seems we may have solved the problem of the litter amassing in our oceans, and all we had to do was, umm, dump tons of plastic into our oceans and wait for something to evolve into a plastic predator.
Hmm. Well, we don’t know about you, but Atlantis has some mixed feelings about these potential emergent plastic-eaters. Is this the solution to our junk problems? Wait for evolved (or engineered?) microbes to eat our garbage? Send in the beavers to clean up our rivers? Atlantis may be nothing more than a ship, but we wonder if adapting organisms to metabolize our unrecyclable waste products is the form of adaptation we want to embrace. Is it adaptation, really? Or is it kind of like asking Elon to “play it human” on SNL?
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Tune in next time, when Atlantis contemplates inorganic Martian salts, phosphine seeking missions to Venus (wait, déjà vu...) and the hunt for complexity in the universe…