The “Broth of Life”....
von Frank A. Gupta
for an editor or author contains a great deal of information – information from various reliable sources or “wells”. From all this information he tries to look at the bigger picture, condensing and distilling until he can present something useful to the reader.
But what to do when the well runs dry? It can be that the source or well retires, moves company or there is a change in the information policy of the particular company. In that case the hard work of exploration starts. New information wells have to be found and a basis of mutual trust has to be developed on which the exchange of information can work.
This kind of exploration is comparable to the work of the prospectors of big oil companies. They also have to search for new wells before the old ones run dry to maintain the constant flow of the “broth of life” (crude oil) of our economy. The formation of oil and gas out of biomass over millions of years may be thought of as common knowledge but there is no real available information to prove or disprove an alternative hypothesis of an abiotic process producing oil in the earth’s mantle. In this theory a “Fischer-Tropsch-like” synthesis in the upper earth mantle produces crude oil from vulcanic gases like CO and H2 via an ironoxide catalyst. One might think, how nice it would be, if the theory of the abiotic oil genesis and with it the unlimited availability of crude oil was proven to be true.
Really nice. Really?
For the oil companies definitely not, because only a scarce raw material can command a high price. The consumer of course would be most delighted if gasoline prices and heating costs would fall into an abyss. But that is short term thinking, because at the same time all ambitious efforts to create environmentally friendlier processes or new concepts of energy conservation would stop. With this, all new plastic applications which provide greater energy efficiency through lightweight construction or better insulation would become obsolete.
If that happens more of our information wells would run dry and we would have nothing interesting to report on any more.
Whether or not carbon dioxide is proven to be the real culprit of climate change that has resulted in extreme weather such as the recent floods in Pakistan, China and even here in Germany remains hard to tell. Whether or not the world will run out of oil and gas, energy efficiency and reducing our voracious appetite for the world’s resources are important issues that continue to drive research and development.
So even if some “wells” run dry of information, the “Broth of Life” provides plenty of food for thought.
With best regards
Frank A. Gupta
By the way ... “Broth of Life”...
for most of you the “Broth of Life” or “Primordial Soup” experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold C. Urey are very well known. The now-famous “Miller-Urey experiment” used a highly reduced mixture of gases – methane, ammonia and hydrogen – to form basic organic monomers, such as amino acids. A more feasible approach (from my point of view) made Günter Wächtershäuser in his paper “From volcanic origins of chemoautotrophic life to Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya” (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2006) 361, 1787–1808) … You might like to read it when you finished this issue of the International PU Magazine ;-)