The World Without Us by Weisman

Ref: Alan Weisman (2010). The World Without Us. Harper Perennial.

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Summary­

  • If humanity ended tomorrow from disease, warfare, invasion, climate; what would happen to the world? How would it deteriorate? How would nature take it back over?

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Decomposition

  • Plastics (Polymers): When Hydrocarbons biodegrade, their polymer molecules are disassembled into the parts that originally combined to create them: CO2 and H2O. When they photodegrade, UV solar radiation weakens plastics tensile strength by breaking its long, chain like polymer molecules into shorter segments. Since the strength of plastics depends on the length of their intertwined polymer chains, as the UV rays snap them, the plastic starts to decompose.

  • Fossils

    • The reason that chimp remains are so rare: In tropical forests, heavy rains leach minerals from the ground before anything can fossilize, and bones decompose quickly.

  • Vitrification: High level nuclear waste is now melted in furnaces with glass beads. When poured into stainless steel containers, it turns into solid blocks of radioactive glass.

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Water

  • H20 Molecules organize themselves into hexagonal crystals that take up ~9% more space than in a liquid state.

  • In a healthy ocean, there are ~1M bacteria/ml.

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Nuclear Energy

  • Cadmium Rods: Neutron stopping; used to dampen or intensify nuclear reactions.

  • Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station: The largest reactor in the USA; 3.8GW.

    • In Palo Verde’s three separate reactor, these Cadmium rods are in interspersed among nearly 170,000 pencil-thin, 14ft zirconium alloy hollow rods stuffed end to end with U pellets that each contain as much power as a ton of coal. The rods are bunched into hundreds of assemblies; water flowing among them keeps things cool, and, as it vaporizes, it propels steam turbines.

    • Each steam column consists of 15K gal of water evaporated per minute cooling Verde’s three fission reactors.

  • Weapons

    • Plutonium (Pu)-239: Weapons grade; half-life of ~24,410 years. A Pu weapon contains a single fissionable ball that must be forcibly, exactly compressed to at least twice its density to explode.

    • Uranium (U)- 238: Weapons grade; half-life of ~4.5B years.

    • U-235: Naturally occurring; half-life of ~704M years.

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Climate Change

  • Until about 200 years ago, CO2 from the air dissolved into the oceans below at a steady rate that kept the world at equilibrium. At first the ocean’s surface will absorb CO2 rapidly. As it saturates, that absorption slows. It loses some CO2 to photosynthesizing organisms. Slowly, as the seas mix, it sinks, and ancient, unsaturated water rises from the depths to replace it. It takes 1,000 years for the ocean to completely turn over. The geologic cycle will take CO2 back to pre-human levels. That will take about 100,000 years. The more oceans warm, the less CO2 they absorb, as higher temperature inhibit growth of CO2-breathing plankton.

  • Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)

    • Methyl-Bromide: The most potent O3 destroyer of all.

  • Glaciation: There should be no encroaching glaciers for at least the next 15,000 years.

  • Afforestation: Unlike almost anything else on Earth, New England's temperate forest is increasing, and now far exceeds what it was when the US was founded in 1776.

  • Thermohaline Circulation: Fresh meltwater from Greenland’s ice cap chills the Gulf Stream to a halt, closing down the great ocean conveyor belt that circulates warm water around the globe. That would bring an ice age back to Europe and the East Coast of North America after all.

  • Sea Level Rise: More likely, in the short term, is the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In the past 50-years the waters around it have warmed by 2.5 degrees Celsius and collapses have increased dramatically. Because of the underlying geology of the area, a large-scale collapse is all the more possible. If so, sea levels globally would rise between 4.5-6m on average.

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Misc Quotes

  • Baboons have the largest brain of any primate after Homo Sapiens, and are the only other primate that adapted to living in savannas as forest habitats shrank.

  • Evolution and Ozone: Back when the primordial goo of the planet's surface was being pelted with unimpeded U radiation from the sun, at some pivotal instant- perhaps sparked by a jolt of lightning- the first biological mix of molecules jelled. Those living cells mutated rapidly under the high energy of UV rays, metabolizing inorganic compounds and turning them into new organic ones. Eventually, one of these reacted to the presence of CO2 and sunlight in the primitive atmosphere by giving off a new kind of exhaust- O2. That gave UV rays a new target. Picking off pairs of O2 atoms joined together- they split them apart. The two singles would immediately latch onto nearby O2 forming O3: ozone. But UV easily breaks the ozone molecules extra atoms off, reforming O2; just as quickly, that atom sticks to another pair, forming more ozone until it absorbs more UV and spins off again.

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Terminology

  • Dioxins: The unintended byproduct formed when HC’s combine with Cl; they act as sex-changing endocrine disruptors, their most infamous application before being banned was in Agent Orange.

  • Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs): Initially conceived to make crops produce their own insecticides or vaccines, or to make them invulnerable to chemicals designed to kill weeds competing for their furrows.

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Chronology

  • 2100: CO2 is projected to reach 900 ppm.-World Without Us by Weisman.

  • 1999: The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) begins operating as the boneyard for detritus from nuclear weapons and defense research; handling 6.2M ft3 of waste (~156K 55gal drums).-World Without Us by Weisman.

  • 26 Apr, 1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Meltdown in Ukraine with a 30km zone of alienation. Fallout is mainly Cs-137 and St-90, byproducts of U fission with 30-year half-lives, and both will significantly irradiate solids and food chains until at least AD 2135.-World Without Us by Weisman.

  • 1972: The Gaia Hypothesis is proposed by British scientist James Lovelock, which describes the Earth as behaving like a super-organism, its soil, atmosphere, and oceans composing circulatory system regulated by its resident flora and fauna.-World Without Us by Weisman.

  • 6 Sep, 1953. The division of the Korean peninsula begins when the USSR declares war on Japan on the same day that the US drops a nuclear warhead on Hiroshima. An agreement by the US and USSR to split the administration of Korea, which Japan had occupied since 1910, became the hottest point of contact for what became known as the Cold War.-World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

  • 2 Dec, 1941: The first controlled nuclear chain reaction occurs in a squash court beneath the stadium at the U of Chicago. Fermi and his American colleagues created a primitive reactor as a beehive shaped pile of graphite bricks laced with U. By inserting rods coated with Cadmium (which absorbs neutrons), they were able to moderate the exponential shattering of U atoms to keep it from getting out of hand.-World Without Us by Weisman.

  • 1907: Bakelite is discovered by Chemist Leo Bakeland; while searching for an artificial shellac substitute, Baekeland mixed tarry Carbolic acid phenol with formaldehyde in his garage in Yonkers, NY, creating Bakelite.-World Without Us by Weisman.

    • Chemists were soon busy cracking long hydrocarbon chain molecules of crude petroleum into smaller ones, and mixing these fractionates to see what variations on Bakeland’s first man made plastic they could produce. Adding Cl yielded a strong, hardy polymer unlike anything in nature, known today as PVC. Blowing gas into another polymer as it formed created tough linked bubble called polystyrene, often known by the brand Styrofoam. And the continual quest for an artificial silk led to nylon.

  • 24 Nov, 1859: Evolution is deduced by Charles Darwin. In the Galapagos, 13 different finch species emerged in response to locally available food, their bills variously adapted to cracking seeds, eating insects, extracting cactus pulp, or even sucking the blood of seabirds.-World Without us by Weisman.

  • 1841: The first artificial fertilizer factory begins operating in Rothamsted, UK. Created by British Chemist Lawes, after realizing what a bother it was for a busy farmer to buy bones, boil the, grind them, then transport sulfuric acid from London gasworks to treat the crushed granules, and then mill the hardened result yet again. Soon he was selling superphosphate to all his neighbors. Lawe’s factories multiplied, and his product line lengthened. It included not just pulverized bone and mineral phosphates, but two N fertilizers: NaNO3 and NH4SO3.-World Without us by Weisman.

  • 1839: Vulcanization is accidentally discovered by Charles Goodyear, a MA hardware salesman, after accidentally dropping some natural latex mixed with S on a stove. The solution did not melt (until then, the tendency of natural latex was to turn gooey in high temperatures, and to stiffen or even shatter in cold.-World Without us by Weisman.

  • 1830s: Fertilizer is discovered by German chemist, Justus Von Liebig, after noting that powdered bone meal restored vigor to soil. Soaking it first in dilute Sulfuric Acid, he wrote, made it even more digestible.-World Without us by Weisman.

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