Car Science: living and breathing
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Let's skip the apology paragraph. Things have been bad. I increasingly suspect they're never going to be anything other than that again. IndyCat died and now I have to find a different argument for why I can't kill myself, etc. Probably how a lot of us feel. Here's a random edition.
We fantasise about cars being alive a lot. Or well, not really alive but conscious; from Herbie to the lingering and disturbing questions about how the Cars universe really works, through to the sort of psychosexual themes of Dean Winchester's Chevy Impala and Titane.
Maybe it's because our little mammal brains can't really process the idea of something that carries us which isn't another animal. That we can't quite understand communicating with something purely mechanical, let alone the complexity of modern vehicles.
All machinery gets its own tics eventually. You know you need to flick the door of the washing machine a certain way to make it actually lock. There's that quirk to the hot tap. Don't press the F key at the same time as the space bar or something weird happens. Every time I switch pubs to do a random shift I have to re-learn what all the odd little things about the pumps and fridges are, not having the muscle memory I do in my own bar.
Even if you're pragmatic enough to know these are all just wear and tear and the compromise of every different fitting and use case, machines develop personalities because of how we interact with them. Anthropomorphisation is just the process of an object becoming a subject in the way that you have to address it, as something you've learned.
We are, blessedly for those of us who've ever been troubled by visions of a David Attenborough documentary set in the Cars universe, a long way from living vehicles. Even ones smart enough to have a semblance of intelligence are constricted to small-scale, university-based projects that mostly look like abject failures.
Roborace managed to get an autonomously piloted LMP3 car to overtake another autonomously piloted LMP3 car a few years back. It was the first time a vehicle had ever fully made its choice about how to do an overtake and done it successfully, with both cars responding to the maneuver - one to do it and the other to avoid a collision during it. I don't think it ever happened again, even during Roborace's testing and it's a huge distance from being something a road car could do. Especially with anyone in it.
"Autonomous" systems, as they stand, don't really make choices, they just follow route commands within safety parameters - well, hopefully within them, although I've heard some seriously alarming things about Cruise and Waymo. So although your car's infotainment might have a cutesy Alexa-type voice you can interact with, it's still a long way off actually understanding you the same way you have to it. Even if your tricksy animal brain has made you relate to it, you and it and everything are only spacially relative objects in the car's limited capacity to calculate them.
Where am I going with this one? Basically, that we are a long way off being able to simulate animal consciousness. Even the most basic animals have more spatial decision making capacity than the most complex autonomous car.
In fact, even really basic organisms have functions we cannot hope to replicate. Not just in terms of cognition and awareness but things like basic chemical functions where nature has worked out a more efficient way of converting energy or filtering something than we can.
Take mussels, for instance: a bivalve so simple there's some argument they're actually vegan to eat. It's a bullshit argument but nonetheless, people are out there making it based on the fact they don't have cognitive functions.
What mussels lack in IQ scoring is made up for with their incredible ability to filter microplastics and other pollution out of water. A big problem we are not really doing a lot to address because of all the other catastrophic things is that there are a lot of waterborne microplastics and a conservative 65% of them come from car tyres. Whoops.
That's not the only thing wrong with car tyres or even the only ecosystem they've systematically fucked (hello, rubber crops) over the course of the last 100 years but it is currently fairly high on the list of things we should've been addressing forty years ago. Enter the humble mussel, which can filter microplastics directly into its poop without suffering harm. Mussel poop sinks and can be removed, as well as just getting the microplastics out of flotation. Car companies should really stop hoarding so many bees and start getting into mollusc farming to greenwash their sins.
Anyway: basic digestive tracts, actually the most efficient filters around. But at what point is making other organisms do this stuff for us kind of wrong? The mussels seem like a probably fairly rapid way to fuck up another ecosystem in the name of cleaning one but also probably the best solution we've got. Desperate times call for desperate measures and we have another big problem, which is methane.
Everyone who knows me knows I am completely obsessed with the deep sea episode of the original series of Blue Planet. If I was less of a nerd I would totally take some gummies and watch the bioluminescence bit on repeat loop but actually what's always blown my mind is the cold methane seep. Without heat or light and at incredible, crushing pressures methane-consuming bacteria support beds of mussels. It absolutely defies science, everything we thought about how ecosystems develop never saw methane as a source of life. But there they are, the freaks, absolutely screwing up biology AND physics. Good god.
Well now they're here for chemistry, too. Buckle up fuckers, turns out that process we've all been trying to find small efficiencies over have already been mastered by lifeforms too basic to have invented MILF Island.
As previously discussed on Car Science, a lot of things are just a load of hydrocarbons. Which is why, if you hit the right alchemy, you can make butter out of plastic and whatever else NileRed is doing this week.
Methane is a hydrocarbon. It's also an incredibly potent greenhouse gas, trapping 80 times more heat than CO2 for two decades after it hits the atmosphere.
It's an extremely worrying one, too because we mostly know what's generating greenhouse gases, seeing as it's us. But methane is currently being released in vast amounts from melting tundra and belched out from poorly sealed shallow water gas and oil rigs.
Capturing methane, even at the point of it being generated, is incredibly difficult. It's massively potent but not very dense, with small amounts of it being released extremely fast but in such vast clouds of other stuff it's hard to pin down. The oil and gas industry is about to start being charged for throwing it into the air and even the most evil-backed projects you can imagine to make that work can't really come up with much.
Direct air capture is even more of a bust because of course the further from the source it gets, the less of it is there is to grab in your big fan-powered molecular net. If trying to capture CO2 is energy-disastrous because of the amount of nitrogen you have to pump through to get a meaningful amount of CO2 then doing the same with capture-defying methane would be thousands of times worse.
The other thing is once you've got the methane, what the fuck do you do with it? Breaking down a methane molecule isn't trivial because the carbon bonds are hard to break, so there's no easy process to convert it to a safely storeable form. What that means is the "best" option is flaring it off and converting it to CO2 but, again, you need high concentrations of it for that whereas extremely low concentrations of it in the atmosphere will continue to fuck everything up incredibly badly.
So: how to solve a problem like chronic anthropogenic climate change? Well, the short version is synthetic fuel. It turns out one way to store all those greenhouse gases we found lying around in the ground and then burned is to turn them back into sludgy liquid forms of themselves.
Ideally, that'd be as bricks and tars and straight back into the ground with them but as we live in the hellish era of adding shareholder value to the apocalypse, instead we have to pretend this is a sensible product opportunity and not a survivalist necessity. I'm sure you could do a very on-the-nose Apprentice sketch about it.*
Anyway, nothing breaks down methane factoid actually statistical error. Methanotropic bacteria, which mostly live at the bottom of the sea consuming 30 million metric tons of methane a year, are statistical outliers and should not have been counted.
The weird thing about methanotropic bacteria is that, until really recently, we didn't have any idea what they were doing in chemical terms. Which is where we loosely get back to the original premise of this newsletter: basically, we've been out-scienced and out-maneuvered and out-fucked by a bunch of organisms less complex than plankton yet again.
We still don't 100% know how the little guys are using an enzyme embedded in their cell membranes to extremely efficiently process methane but new research has worked out a way of deconstructing the enzyme (pMMO) from the cell wall and then re-embedding it in the bacteria's lipids so that it can be studied actually doing its thing.
That might not sound like a lot of progress, since the majority of questions about this research still aren't answered. We still don't know how methane gets into the process, why copper is in the bacteria that do this or how the methanol byproduct of the methane processing leaves the enzyme layer. But it is progress, to have nailed down this amazingly efficient, low power, chemical system and potentially have some answers as to how to recreate it, soon.
Of course, it all sounds kind of brutally horrifying, in cellular butchery terms, when I'm writing it out like that. But then I spray down 90 tables with sanitiser 12 times a day at work and spend my time trying to get bacteria off me, so how much sympathy can I really be generating for.
I guess it's like thinking the car's alive. And why I prefer to stick to the relative ethical safety of metamaterials or whatever.
Anyway, god knows when I'll send another of these. Maybe next week, maybe next year but at least this can leave my drafts.
Hazel
x
*Whoomf, what was that Formula E episode? Not absolutely sure they should have gone for a partnership that made it sound at absolute best like a fictional motorsport series for dead-eyed INFP business psychopaths.