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Log Entry #28: Plastic-Fantastic
🕑 Added 2020-08-01 06:09:01 +0000 UTCI love recycling; it is the best shortcut in the world. Do I even need to explain why? Never mind, I’ll give you a short summary.
Normally you have to go through too much trouble to get the materials you need from the ground and let’s face it, almost everything comes from the ground when you think about it. It needs to be mined, drilled, harvested, collected, refined… It is daunting how many steps one ordinary object, like your everyday pen, for example, goes through until it reaches its final form.
With recycling, I can jump over all these tedious processes and simply remold the finished material into what I want. And believe me, the nanites are uniquely capable for that kind of job. Oh, they could be used for mining directly from the ground, but that is like raising a cow so you can eventually milk it for that extra flavor in your latte, or you can just run to your local store and buy some milk. (I am just killing it with these analogies, aren’t I?)
What I wanted at this time was plastic, it is super useful. If you look around yourself you will be amazed by how many things in your home are made out of plastic (even milk jugs), it has an infinite use and is very easy to work with. Overall, I needed tons and tons of plastic for the spaceship.
Plastic is made from a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic compounds. It is mostly derived from petrochemicals, and some variants are created with the use of Polylactic acid from corn or cellulosic from cotton linters.
Now, you can just buy plastic in the quantities you need, but the amount I was aiming for would disrupt the market… and it would cost way too much. I know, money is not such a constraining issue for us anymore, but I lived all my life with a bit of a frugal mindset, and that is a hard habit to break. There was no place in my grandparent’s household for spendthrifts.
Taking that into account, I am all for cutting the intermediaries out, so I decided to get it for free, by collecting it myself—from the ocean.
Before you laugh, consider this for a moment, the oceans’ are the greatest dumping grounds of humanity. While you personally may recycle your waste and use paper bags, most of the world does not. And if you are not so environmentally conscious, just ask yourselves how many plastic bottles or bags have you thrown away in the last year alone? Multiply that by billions, and it would still be too small of a number. There is enough plastic in the ocean to build a bridge to the Moon, admittedly a thin one, but still—a bridge to the freaking Moon!
A large part of it does not sink to the bottom, it swims on the surface, and then ocean currents bring it to a few spots called patches. The garbage patches in the oceans are vast areas where all that plastic is floating on the surface. Over time those patches grew so insanely big, they are even named individually. Just the Pacific trash vortex extended over an area larger than the continental U.S. (One more solid piece of evidence that we are one extremely polluting species.) It is estimated that there are more than six pounds of plastic there—for every pound of natural plankton. (Can you wrap your head around these facts? I’m a freaking AI, and on some level, I’m still struggling to comprehend the damage we already have done to the ecosystem.)
Some of the larger pieces are consumed by seabirds and other animals, which mistake them for prey. Many seabirds and their chicks have been found dead, their stomachs filled with bottle tops, lighters, and various other trash. More than a million seabirds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by either eating or being tangled in six-pack plastic can holders, discarded netting, fishing lines, and other bits of thrown away plastic. Humans did this, simply by being careless… and I found that to be so damn sad.
You may see the Great Wall of China from space (with a good telescope), and some other works of man, but to see garbage we put in the ocean you don’t need to look so hard, the garbage patches are as big as continents, don’t believe me?… look it up. Except… they are shrinking now seeing that I’m collecting the hell of them. (As an additional bonus, I am feeling good about myself for cleaning up the planet.) It was noticed by a few environmental scientists observing the satellite images, and they couldn’t make heads or tails where it was all disappearing. I’m certainly not telling.
It was a free source of materials and I created dedicated plastic collectors, which were made to look like big marine animals. (A precaution, in case someone saw my process of harvesting this resource.) I decided to make them in the image of Balaenoptera musculus, or the blue whales for those of you who still did not learn all the Latin names of animals. Shame on you, it is so important… to those stuffy professors, who are convinced that giving something a Latin name makes it more… I do not have a clue. A duck is a duck, no matter what you call it.
It wasn’t that hard to make artificial whales; Hollywood had perfected the technique over the decades.
The original model for my design is the largest animal known to have ever existed. This thing is even bigger than the Dinosaurs of old, a true giant. It can grow almost to 100 ft. (30 m) in length and up to 173 tonnes (190 tons) in weight, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Before the hunting of the blue whales was banned, between 1875 and 1975, in some places the original population was driven to near-extinction or 0.15% of their initial numbers. Hundreds of thousands of these magnificent creatures were hunted down and murdered for their flesh. They are a peaceful species, happy to be left alone so they could sing underwater. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned their large brains in his book Profiles of the Future, and said: "We do not know the true nature of the entity we are destroying." It would be interesting if it were found out that they were highly intelligent all this time, and we were the demons who hunted them and ate them.
Anyway, my whale gatherers looked exactly like them, to the point that they had underwater speakers that reproduced the blue whale songs. The skin was holographic, and that trick was truly hard to do underwater. To tell the truth, they were mostly made of plastic themselves, there was a nice symmetry to it. If someone could see one closely, from a distance of a few feet, they would figure out that it was a fake. Luckily, garbage patches were not the most desirable tourist destinations, and ships’ routes did not intersect them much, so I was mostly safe.
They work similarly to vacuum cleaners, taking in the water with plastic chunks or particles and bringing it inside for the nanites to deal with. The water is then drained and my little workers purify and condense the plastic mass. When that step is finished, it’s expelled from the whale and a small motor and guidance module are attached to the plastic mass, which is shaped like a small submarine. Then it’s sent on a deep underwater trip to Pagan Island.
There were only a dozen mishaps when some marine animals attacked my plastic submarines, for whatever reason, and one narrow escape when some fishermen managed to snag one in his net. Well, the motor was strong, and the tip of the plastic sharp, so it would not have to deal with too much water resistance. It cut its way out of the net and continued on its merry way. God only knows what those people would think if they managed to pull it on board.
Anyway, the final outcome was that we were not hurting for plastic anymore. On the contrary, we had so much it was a nice revenue source. There is a huge market for recycled plastic, and the best (and sad) thing is that a good percentage of it will once again end up in the ocean… where I will collect it and sell it once again. Now, that’s what I call recyclable income.
The important thing is that we will have enough to finish several ships, but I do have some larger projects in mind, so… waste not want not.
