Mexican Gulf Oil Spill.

Mexican Gulf Oil Spill.
Andre Willers.
10 Sep 2010

Synopsis :
The biological agent responsible for eating 80% of the spill seems as man-made as the original spill . The agent has to be biodegradable . Hence , fishing is going to be very good in the Gulf of Mexico for the next decade .

Discussion :

Plan 9:
A last ditch plan involving the US Govt , BP , Venter and others who created an artificial organism that incorporated pre-oxygen molecular machinery ( archaeo-bacteria ), together with some newly designed ones .

Using principles as set out in
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "The Beauty of the Genetic Code" 22 Feb 2010
Reminiscent of the Manhatten Project .

When the previous plans failed , the cultivated organism was bubbled out alongside the oil-spill . It performed better than expected .

It’s population exploded exponentially , not decreasing the oceanic oxygen level below fish survival concentrations .

The lack of oxygen depletion is a signature of human intervention .

The organism grows by replicating itself , using the oil , but very little use the of oxygen in the surrounding sea-water . (Think gun powder) . Hence the explosive growth (Probably a design requirement , given the low O2 concentration in seawater.)

But this means that the products of the organism (itself or it's excretions) are high energy . Since a bio-organism was used as a chassis , these are nearly certain to be usable by other organisms in the food-chain .
An explosion in the number organisms in the food chain can then be expected .

Really , really good fishing can be expected .

Safety :
As expected , this has been kept secret , since few of the safety protocols have been followed.

From a purely environmental viewpoint :
The organism (call it Vee) will persist , purely from evolutionary principles . If Vee can flourish in the wild , it will stay and evolve in the wild . Not a problem . Oil fields can be insulated . It will be spread by ships like any other contaminant

If archaeo-bacteria have been used as part of the gene-structure (as seems likely) , oxygenation should prevent most problems involving hydrocarbons in fishes and mammals . This has been going on for hundreds of millions of years .

This means that Vee would be handled like a normal infection .

Remember , this has happened before . Only , now it is faster . Predator species will switch on unknown genes .

Interesting times .

A much less probable scenario :

That a natural organism did this .(Spin doctor scenario.)

Counter-arguments :
1.It has not been observed in other oil spills .
2.Extreme speed of propagation . Even if existing organisms switched on oil-eating genes , there are simply not enough of them in the clear waters of the Gulf of Mexico .
3.Lack of oxygen depletion . (The kicker) Not possible in a natural system .

Long-term Safety .
This intervention seems to have gone down quite successfully .
This opens the gates to more dubious endeavours .
Exactly my fears , as expressed in
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com "Apology"
Humans should not have learned to stitch together codons of different numbers of coding amino acids before understanding how these are translated .
Now , anything can happen . And will .

A Personal Note:
I did not expect such a drastic , large scale application so soon . But , I suppose , needs must .
The Intervention will be a mix of :
nAminoAcids + nStops + nStarts = 1/3 * 4 ^ 3 = 1/3*64 for mammalian DNA
nAminoAcids + nStops + nStarts = 1/3 * 5 ^ 3 = 1/3*125 for mammalian DNA
nAminoAcids + nStops + nStarts = 1/3 * 4 ^ 4 = 1/3*256 for archaeo-bacteria DNA
where the prefix n denotes "number of"
Designer molecular structures will need this relationship , especially the 1/3 , since this incorporates the reserve infinity arguments to ensure stability .( Stability is the biggest problem in ephemeral DNA events .)

This will be reminiscent of the post-Cambrian on fast-forward .
The Gulf of Mexico will have high-energy food sources available , combined with
Vee and Vee-evolutionary results .

Expect some weird , but also very useful things .

Biological Kevlar armor is a near certainty .
Your nearest friendly crab would need a armour-piercing missile to eat it .
Very Green , but I doubt whether they had that in mind .
Worry if it gets into grasses .
Human predation would ensure that very strong structures survive ,
We are breeding our own survivors . Look at the numbers .

The bleed-through into human genetical structures is a certainty . Is already happening .

It cannot be stopped , either , without sterilizing the whole planet .

Gumbo anyone ?

Andre.