I’m sure if archaeologists excavated the garden of my childhood home, they would find a layer of green plastic infantrymen from the 1970s, and it’s strange to think those misplaced toy soldiers might still be there hundreds of years after I’m gone.
Everybody knows that plastics are a huge problem. They are too durable, and don’t decompose. Instead, they break down into microplastics that pollute our oceans and infiltrate our food chains. The trouble is, they’re just too damn useful.
Recently, though, a number of projects have started to address the effects of our addiction to plastic. A recent report in The Engineer looked at the development of a bitumen substitute made from hard-to-recycle plastics and graphene, which is hoped to create longer-lasting, more durable road surfaces. US scientists have developed a process to transform the most widely produced plastic, polyethylene (PE) into the second-most widely produced plastic, polypropylene (PP), aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Other projects have developed processes to convert plastics to ingredients for jet fuel and other hydrocarbon valuable products, or employ sewage sludge to make biodegradable plastics. There’s even some research to suggest difficult-to-recycle polyurethane plastics could be degraded in compost heaps using fungi.
As a science fiction author, that last one rings a note of alarm. In Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain (1969), an alien organism evolves to eat plastics and rubber, bringing down a jet fighter sent to investigate by eating every instance of those materials in its cockpit. Similarly, in Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler’s Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971), a plastic-eating bacterium gets loose and, “…within forty-eight hours, the centre of London had become a freezing chaos without light, heat, or communication." And in Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson (1995), an oil-eating ‘designer microbe’ is deployed to mop up the environmental disaster caused by a stricken tanker in San Francisco Bay, only to spread into the city and start emptying the gas tanks in all the cars. Within a few days, every piece of plastic in the world has dissolved and civilisation collapses into anarchy.
Just as plastics get everywhere, so it would be very hard to contain any kind of microbe or nanotechnology designed to break them down. The temptation to use such a microbe to cripple another company’s manufacturing output or another nation’s economy might lead to an unstoppable outbreak. We are so reliant on plastic for everything from food packaging to electrical wiring and fuel safety seals, such an outbreak would be potentially as catastrophic as the mess it was intended to clean up.
Perhaps such giant, post-human super-intelligences might be better suited to life in a universe as large and harsh as ours. We can only hope they remember us kindly.
When it comes to less biological methods, the notion of rogue nanotech escaping into the world and multiplying at an exponential rate has become something of a trope in science fiction. The American engineer, Eric Drexler, wrote a book called Engines of Creation in 1986 that warned against such a scenario and coined the term, “grey goo” to describe what happens when scientists lose control of self-replicating nanobots that go on to consume the entire planet, turning everything into copies of themselves.
If you take this concept a step further, and imbue these nanomachines with the ability to process data and hook them up to an AI, you get a planet (and maybe an entire galaxy) consumed by a self-replicating intelligence that wants to convert everything into ‘smart matter.’
Such an entity could break down all the planets of our solar system to create a Matryoshka Brain - a concept first proposed in 1997 by Robert J. Bradbury, who suggested such a computational entity would want to enclose the Sun in a shell capable of trapping and using one hundred percent of its energy output. Several nested shells would be constructed (hence the reference to Russian matryoshka dolls), with each one feeding from the waste heat of the one before. The inner shells could run at nearly the same temperature as the star itself, while the outer ones would be close to the temperature of interstellar space.
Such a powerful processor would be able to house a consciousness of god-like proportions, but it would not bode well for our survival. But then, our development didn’t bode well for the other species of human ancestor who gave way so that we might dominate. Perhaps such giant, post-human super-intelligences might be better suited to life in a universe as large and harsh as ours. We can only hope they remember us kindly.
Gareth L. Powell is a British author known for using fast-paced, character-driven science fiction to explore big ideas and themes of identity, loss, and the human condition. He can be found online at www.garethlpowell.com
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