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Bio-Weapons That Eat Ammunition and Fuel
1gor writes: "This article in The Observer mentions Pentagon's plans to use genetically modified bugs that 'eat' the enemy's fuel and ammunition supplies without harming humans (they also want to to pacify the enemy by spraying Valium). Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!"
Succesful use of genengineered bugs have been used "in the field" with oil spills. Naturally while the USA will have this initially, as time goes on others will get it. The USA will just have to stay 1 step ahead in order to continue to use this stuff.
"Sarge, I gotta immunize my ammo first before I hit the front lines."
As in biology, there may be infection, immunization, reinfection with altered strain, re-immunization and so-forth. Might be kinda fun
..........FULL STOP.
They had this virus that eats oil for a long time, originially they wanted to use it to clean up oil spills, but they were afraid it would get into the oil supply back then too. So it did not get used.
Now that it is the in national interests(AKA: someone can make serious dough) it can be used by the military. I wonder what the chances of it being used if there is another major oil spill if the military has it. God knows that the US military bases are among the worst polluters in the world.
Is a chemical that tranquilize enemy still a weapon? Or, the bug that does not harm humans still a weapon? Is there a definition of weapon? These things are not only non-lethal, but not harmful in the sense that they don't even cause pain (well, for the case of the bug, it might cause a head-ache). I find this an interesting question. Does anything used by military against enemy become a weapon?
Clearly oil serves a great many needs, fueling your car being just one of those needs. To claim without basis that a group of people dream of the worlds oil stocks becoming unusable is to reveal your own bias against this group.
Ahh, my favourite rhetorical recipe, the tautological soffle.
ok. worse case scenario this stuff becomes uncontainable and renders all the world's oil resources useless. Great idea. wrong. I can't say how wrong and awful and catastrophic this would be. I'm as big an environmentalist as the next guy but, this is just ludicrous. oh no problem we'll jsut switch to renewable or nuclear resources. wrong. its not that easy. if you think it is you live in a dream land. I have no problem with nuclear but, there is one or two little problems with the idea of just switching over. Commerce would end for one. for two, in case you weren't aware of this but there are no nuclear engineers anymore. nuclear science has taken a significant hit in recent years. there are very few people studying to be nuclear scientists/engineers. so if all the gas was gone there would be no one to just switch us over. I can't say enough how bad an idea it would be for something like this to happen and get loose. In some utopian fantasy it might be a great thing for the earth but for those of us who live here it would be a disaster of biblical proportions. I won't even get into the social unrest you would have to deal with. Oh and if you're thinking Wind power? well the best windmills come from Europe. How would you get them here without diesel engined ships? Put them on nuclear carriers? how do you get them to the dock? horsecart? how do you get them to North Dakota? mushers? big picture folks thats all I'm saying.
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Such a bug, were it possible to develop, would be a boon to mankind and the West in particular. Destroying the earth's oil wouldn't destroy our industrial potential, just force us to switch to the many other available energy sources a few decades sooner than we otherwise might (since the oil supply will be used up eventually in any case).
Obviously the transition would be wrenching, but the benefits would be great. Global warming and air pollution would be greatly reduced, and, equally critically, the vast revenues that currently accrue to countries that are net exporters of oil would end. Since most of these revenues go to countries that are strategic competitors of the west and supporters of terrorism (Iraq, Saudi Arabia), ending them would be a good thing for us.
New weapons will not make us safer. War is not the answer.
right. and they probably have things that can keep nuclear tests from affecting the areas around the tests.
the government gets way too much of our trust.
sig - .
Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!
Let me clue you in on what it is that the fuel eaten by these bacteria (not viruses) eventually breaks down into - water and carbon dioxide. This is a more controlled form of a process better known as FIRE.
Flame of yet another kind: Timothy, you are an idiot. Even as a joke that was a grade A stupid thing to say. It reflects poorly on you as an editor and as a human being. If you don't know the difference between a virus and a bacterium shut your cornhole.
We, Environmentalists, object to gasoline being burned (turned into Carbon Dioxide) faster than it is deposited in peat marshes and such. I don't want to rehash the global warming argument here, so don't y'all even start.
The fact that the gasoline, while burned, does useful work, instead of, say, fueling the growth of a manmade organism, does not bother anyone.
You can find out more about Hydrocarbon Utilizing Microbes (HUMs) here. The document is fully accessible to a non-scientist. The people at Brooks Air Force base, who are/would be (?) developing these fuel eating microbes for offensive use have already made use of them in a peaceful context. Again, the press release is non technical. Personally, I find this to be admirable work - they're using them to clean up petrochemical contamination of soil and groundwater, which is an underappreciated ecological problem. I'm not terribly worried about these organisms going out of control and eating the world's petrochemical reserves. They exist in nature already in various forms and have not done that.
The New Scientist has an older article about the fuel eating bugs, or, more specifically, about the circumstances surrounding the release of documents discussing the bugs; I think this may have come up on slashdot before but I searched just now and didn't find it. The sunshine project also has an article about there efforts to get the documents released.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
"All research is good, all knowledge is good"
;-) has tried to nail down ideas like knowledge and truth for several millenia. It seems likely "we" have struggled with it for longer than we have records. This isn't simple stuff, and it's not taught in science, math, or computer courses.
As a person in the research business, I'm not so sure that all reasearch and knowledge is good. Defining "research" is hard, and some people have "crossed the line" -- think of Nazi science research on people in prison camps. Clearly that was not good.
As for knowledge, is it ethical to use knowledge gained from those prison camp experiments? Almost everyone says no. This suggests that the statement "all knowledge is good" is not true; my off-the-cuff opinion is that it is an oversimplication with important exceptions.
Maybe we could say that Wisdom is good, and with wisdom, knowledge is good. But that depends on defining wisdom, and we'd probably end up with a tautology when we did that (wisdom == whatever it takes to make knowledge good). These aren't just semantic problems. There are records which suggest our species (I'm making an assumption here
-Paul Komarek
The Nazis weren't doing "research." At best they were playing. Their methods were shoddy at best. They came up with ideas they wanted to be true and tried to find subjects that showed those ideas to be true. They didn't try to gain knowledge, they were just being sadistic under those pretenses. That, I suspect, is what you're suggesting we avoid. But knowledge is knowledge, and is neither good nor bad. It depends on how it is gained and what is done with that matters.
I think you're being very narrow-minded. A few centuries is a long time. Look how the world has changed. Yes it is physically possible to live without petroleum, but we wouldn't exactly make the switch smoothly. We are hugely dependant upon our own technological advances.
Just imagine that all the oil and gas in the world disappeared right now. How will you heat your house tonight? If that's not an issue, how will you eat tomorrow? You'll probably have enough food on hand for a couple days, and maybe if you get to the store quickly you can grab some more. But, that will soon run out, and then what? No new food will be getting to the stores, because it all comes on trucks, and they sure as hell won't be able to convert them all to peanut oil, and find enough peanut oil quickly enough (keeping in mind any petroleum powered machinery won't work) to supply our entire civilization.
Certain people, mainly farmers, would still have the skills and resources to feed themselves. I haven't the foggiest idea how to turn a cow or a pig into food. I'm sure that "scarcely a few centuries" ago, this was common knowledge. Even if I did know how, I live in a city, my 60x40' yard won't feed an animal, even if I could acquire one.
Sure, there are other possible sources of fuel, but to think we could convert to them, even within a couple years, is doubtful. Totally losing petroleum would result in most of our population dying off. There's no way we could support our current population with the technology and machinery we have now, and there's no way we could convert it to some other fuel fast enough. It would set us back 100 years, and completely change our entire world.
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"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
I'm surprised not many of the normally astute /. readers have noticed but this is a an environmentalists nightmare!
The bacteria convert the oil to carbon dioxide and water... the same thing that happens when the oil is set on fire albeit in a more controlled reaction. If it's gonna be releasing the same CO2 pollutants anyway, I'd rather it be doing something useful in a power plant or moving cars about than just having it disappear