New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity (2016)
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
One could say the same about Na+, K+, and Ca++. So what's so hard to imagine about electron carriers?
However, just because something is and old idea does not mean inclusion does not represent a prediction.
Soft Sci Fi: Han Solo running around around on an asteroid with only a face mask. (can't find the source right now)
Edit
>"Hard science-fiction” is defined as “stories in which Han Solo does not saunter around the surface of an asteroid wearing only an oxygen mask and a leather jacket”
I've read one or 2 convincing essays that SW is basically fantasy rather than science fiction. You have princesses getting rescued, and 'magicians', etc.
When you start analysing it, that basically holds. Sci fi should be about holding up a mirror to contemporary issues, or imagine what may be. I suppose the hard/soft difference is how rigorously they think about the mechanics of that, but theres a big grey area in there. I supposes theres an element of no true Scotsman in there, but these aren't hard and fast rules.
To return to my original comment, I don't think there was ever an attempt to predict, or realistically portray anything. TNG I would expect to at least check up on the state of the art was at any particular time. If data uttered something about doing the kessel run in 12 parsecs, I would expect that to be in the context of a thought out space folding drive. I'm still not saying that ST is 'hard' Sci fi, as the multitude of things that happen as you approach warp 10, or the many ways to travel back in time evidence.
Star Trek is "Wagon Trail" in space. Star Wars is, I think, space opera. The Expanse gives a nod to hard science, and I respect them for trying, but e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g. i'm not complaining, I think realistic sci-fi would be kind of boring. Like the first half of "2001: A Space Odyssey", it was basically Dr. Heywood taking a plane. A freaking awesome plane to space, but still.
I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set with lots of old movies from a span of decades, and it's pretty clear that at least some sci-fi did start as attempts to do a kind of scenario planning, but there has always been "speculative fiction" depending on how you categorize things. Was Plato's Atlantis science fiction?
In the Expanse TV show yes, it seems that way. However I suspect that is more due to keeping production costs down. In the books, gravity varies all over the place depending on what moon/planet/rock/station the characters are on, and even goes into details describing the differences of spin gravity near the center of a station vs outward.
At one point they use CGI to show off Coriolis force on the asteroid, and I took that to be a kind of message from the show, "We know about this stuff but it's too expensive to do all day every day, so here's some science "fan service"." Like I said, I respect them for it. :-)
Regardless it's a pretty cool series :)
[0] - Han Solo actually saunters around the inside of a creature whose body contains an atmosphere which inexplicably isn't expelled when the creature has its mouth open; which makes even less sense.
I love TNG (and SW) but have to point out that their ideas in many places aren't new.
Example: Silicon based lifeforms
It's in the same column as carbon so we can have similar bonding structure and properties, so why not silicon-based life instead of carbon-based?
I think when you get down to the virus and microbe level, there isn't a lot that's truly analogous to our layperson's understanding of "an animal eating a chunk of stuff it found".
Imagine a ball of fat plus a glass of water for lunch. Yummy!!! :)
They supposedly create "proteins...produced from CO2, water, and electricity." According to their numbers, yield per unit of water is 10x soy and at least 500x beef.
Plus protein are only 1 type of body input - what about carbs, fat, minerals, vitamins etc.
Plus protein are only 1 type of body input - what about carbs, fat, minerals, vitamins etc.
It's important that they also use some vitamins and nutrients, but it's not clear what they mean, and there is a lot of room for cheating here.
With CO2, water and electricity you can produce carbohydrates and fat, but you can't produce proteins because proteins have Nitrogen, so the question is what is their source of Nitrogen?
You can get Nitrogen from the N2 in the air, but it's very difficult to transform the N2 of the air into a form that can be used by living things. Only some bacteria and archaea can do that. But yeast, fungus, animals and plants can't do that. (Some plants (and animals?) host some bacteria to get usable Nitrogen in exchange of food and protection.)
We can transform N2 from the air into ammonia (or something similar) in an industrial plant, it uses a lot of electricity. It's one of the biggest invention of the XX century. Without artificial ammonia the global agricultura production would fall to less than the half of the current level.
So ignoring the source of the Nitrogen in a system to produce proteins is very misleading.
It's a damn good show. So good that I even wrote a blog post about it!
Kids: go read the books!
I can't even remember if I finished the third season now that I think about it ...
So do plants, technically.
What we're actually after with this kind of thing is enzyme mechanisms. Enzymes are doing chemistry we've never done in labs before. Maybe we can replicate that chemistry on an industrial scale to solve some problems. Particularly the Fe-S clusters are of real interest, as they're responsible for moving individual (or sometimes pairs) of electrons around.
Or is it 'just' an inefficient oddity?
One reason we are looking into these "extremophiles", as they're termed, is because electron flow at a molecular level is pretty important when it comes to renewable energy. Things like solar panels and batteries are still environmentally damaging. The DoD and DoE are both very interested in experimenting with methanogens, cyanobacteria, etc, to figure out ways to harness and manipulate electrons from the environment.
The chemical mechanisms these cells employ are typically higher-order and not super useful. The more low level the interaction (e.g. the NiFe hydrogenase referenced in the article), the more potentially useful to us. There may not be one particular plug-and-play use case like there is for say, a PETase, but we currently don't entirely understand how electrons move around in an ordered way, and so elucidating that mechanism is a high priority. At this point we have it narrowed down to Fe-S clusters in enzymes, and some particular organic intermediates.
As with any process of discovery, the lower-level the organism we can investigate, the hopefully clearer picture we can generate.
I bet "gamifying" the process of reading an article to completion like that encourages longer visit times too. I'd like to see an A/B comparison of how long a visitor stays on the page with & without that element.
Seems different with this one posted here.
What
For simplicity, let's imagine that you eat methane. The reactions is
CH4(food) + 3 * O2(air) --> CO2 + 2 * H2O
CO2 ~~> C{4+} + 2 * O{2-}
H2O ~~> 2* H{+} + O{2-}
* the Oxygen has a fake charge or -2, i.e. it has two additional electron.
* the Carbon has a fake charge or +4, i.e. it has four electrons less the neutral version.
* the Hydrogen has a fake charge or +1, i.e. it has one electron less the neutral version.
Now, how do you decompose the methane in the food:
CH4 ~~> C{4+} + 4* H{+} + 12 * e-
So if you decompose the methane molecule using "happy" atoms, it has 12 more electrons than what you expect. So in some sense, with each methane molecule you get 12 additional electrons.
The oxygen molecule decompose as
O2 ~~> 2* O{2-} - 4 * e-
So the 12 electrons travel from the methane in the food to the oxygen you have breathed. (I'm not so convinced to use "expel" here.)
With more realistic food the equation is bigger an more difficult, the number of electrons and oxygens molecules change, but it's the same idea.
You can even follow how the electrons travel in the reactions in the mitochondria, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_transport_chain in each step they release a small amount of energy that is collected. [This is a technical detail of the biological part, you can't release a lot of energy altogether and pack it later.]
[Important: Again, this is not the standard notation. Use the standard notation in a midterm. The question was more difficult to explain than I expected I had to use not standard notation. I hope it's clear enough to read the standard notation and understand the idea.]
This is still not "get electrons from food and expel them with our breath", is it? We are not stocking up electrons in our bodies, using them somehow, then exhaling spent electrons.
What we are doing is taking in matter with a certain amount of chemical potential, putting out matter with less chemical potential, and capturing the difference. Electrons are intimately involved in this, but they're a bit of an implementation detail.
> What we are doing is taking in matter with a certain amount of chemical potential, putting out matter with less chemical potential, and capturing the difference. Electrons are intimately involved in this, but they're a bit of an implementation detail.
You are totally correct too. :) It's equivalente to the previos point of view where the electrons are the important part and the molecules are the implementation detail. It is just that sometimes it is easier to think from one point of view and other times it's easier to think from the other point of view.
(Essentially, Volt = Energy / Charge. Since the charge of the electron is fixed, you can convert easily (or use eV to measure the energy).)
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If you think about the methane as a charged battery and the carbon dioxide as a discharged battery, then the idea is that the high potencial electron comes from the food and go away as low potencial electrons in the breath. I'm not 100% happy with this analogy, I think I understand it, but I'm not happy. You are not accumulating electrons.