Subject: Biomimicry, the old way...
Older than the hills, awkshally ... as in billion-year old.
We may owe the present green Earth and abundant fresh air to an
ancient global "deep-freeze" ... for which [previously unlikely]
scenario, "snowball earth", there is now accumulating evidence -
i.e. that the entire planet was once covered in thick sheets of
ice, billions of years ago.
There was so-called anaerobic life prior to this, but that is all.
The "air" contained little or no oxygen. That is the premise of
"expanding" to the limit - a prescient article in "NewScientist"
[28 Nov '06] the magazine which SciAm "ought-to-be" trying to
mimic. Real science based on 'taking a risk' with some degree of
educated-speculation, instead of real-fluff based on total
mainstream obeisance.
End of the obligatory SciAm mini-rant.
OK, the evolution of oxygen-based photosynthesis has been hard to
explain in the past, without speculative thinking - since oxygen
is deadly to the very primitive life which would first want to use
it ... and Mother nature knows very well that you don't piss in
the same pot you eat out of ...
...whereas we had formerly suspected that using sunlight to free
electrons from sulfur, calcium and iron compounds in a terrestrial
but oxygen-free environment is possible. But not if the whole
earth is totally glaciated. That terrestrial kind of oxy-genesis
could not have happened first IF the entire planet had been
ice-covered, as it now seems that it was. Consequently, we need to
add another layer of complication. See ... until fairly recently
... we were totally unaware of this "snow-ball" earth situation
and like most new findings - it raised more problems than it
solved.
But oxygen somehow appeared anyway, from putative snowball-earth,
as it melted. How did this transpire and how did organisms evolve
oxygen tolerance? Short answer: HOOH.
Ultraviolet light from the Sun produces hydrogen peroxide when it
hits water molecules. Always - even nowadays. So how come the
oceans aren't full of peroxide? Turns out, sunlight at the same
time destroys almost all the peroxide as it forms, so that very
little accumulates - ergo, substantial O2 cannot be released from
water this way.
The situation is similar with a peroxide catalyst. It is a
constant see-saw recycling process of:
H2O <--> HOOH
... in the "unfrozen ocean" [or the lab] and H2O is far more
stable to UV and everything else, but HOOH is always there,
especially if some extra O2 is available.
However, when UV light penetrates through a few meters of
semi-transparent glacier, small amounts of peroxide will form a
certain depth and can be shielded by the glacial ice for a long
enough time to disperse into the layers below and then the oceans
below, without being immediately destroyed, if that glacier is in
the process of melting. Then ... as the glacier thaws, any trapped
hydronium/hydrogen, left in it after the peroxide formed, is
dispersed, while at the same time, the HOOH in the ocean also gets
destroyed, releasing oxygen but too late to recombine with the H2
and we have ... Voila: instant breathable atmosphere. Ok it might
take snow-ball earth a few tens of million years to pull this off,
but fresh air is worth every second.
HOOH has been spotted on Jupiter's icy moon Europa, and that may
be one of the reasons that this new theory is taking hold. The
surface of Europa is shielded by a terrestrial ice sheet and would
have been very similar on a primitive Earth which lacked an
oxygen-rich atmosphere, and a protective ozone layer - which
layer, BTW, has all but disappeared over the polar regions. BTW,
this moon is the best candidate in the solar system for life
(unless Mars really has a remnant)
OK enough speculation on ancient history: snowball earth and a
breath of fresh air. What Vortexians want to know: is there a
free-energy angle in all of this?
Yup, or at least there could be.... if only in the fertile
imagination of terraforming futurists.
Antarctica. Will it be a powerhouse of future energy resources?
Maybe. Here is how it could happen: once we get to the level of
robotics and primitive AI (since it is pretty hard to entice many
humans to work down there, digging out a glacier). Look for this
level of robotic sophistication, at mass-produced cost - within a
decade.
Imagine a workforce of 100,000 small mass-produced crawler robots,
kinda like the ones which were used to investigate the "shafts" in
the Egyptian Pyramids - yet each equipped with a laser, solar
cells and a "Son-of-X-box" brain. You start out with a big tunnel
dug into a glacier near its flow-path into the ocean - where the
factory ship is anchored ... which glacier is the size of Texas,
and then you unleash the robots. They are programmed like little
moles to begin forming an intricate web of tunnels and shafts,
using the laser to cut out cylinders of ice at just the correct
depth below the icy surface - maybe 10 meters below the surface
where there is ample light but a lesser degree of UV. At this
level (whatever it actually turns out to be) HOOH is created
faster than it can be destroyed and since its freezing point is
much lower than water and it will trickle down the shafts into a
waiting tanker. This can be accelerated by pumping O2 into the
shafts.
Far out enough for you? Well... if the economics don't work out
favorably in Antarctica, even in the era of $100/barrel oil, then
later on - they might be more favorable on Europa... ;-)
There's more to this peroxide stuff to ponder ...but hey,
bleacher-bums ... it's not even spring-training yet, so let's
chill-out for a while and let the A-team loosen up.
Jones
