Listener Questions #51

24:58Love that one. And my guilty pleasure while driving is If Books Could Kill because it makes me laugh and doesn't require me to think too much. Excellent. How about you? The rest is history and the Underworld podcast. Nice. Those are, yeah, those are my two go-tos. But everyone's listening to the best podcast ever right now. And so let's focus on our podcast and answer a Discord question from Yarthvar the True. And we are continuing my tradition of not remembering to get first names from Discord listeners before we answer their question on the show. I'm sure that's the name on the driver's license, Kelly.

25:37Yarthvar the True. Why would you assume otherwise? My mistake. My mistake. Let's hear what True, Yarthvar has to ask. Hi, this is Mr. True, Yarthvar, middle name The, with a question in the form of a statement, mainly for Kelly. I would be interested in learning more about bacteria, or maybe other life forms, that are evolving to digest plastic. I think that I heard Katie Golden of Creature Feature podcast mention a study on larva eating styrofoam, for example. Thanks for the great question, Mr. True. Yeah, so this is a big problem. Like the fact that there is all of this plastic waste all over the world.

26:20This could be a huge food source for animals that could figure out how to eat it. And so to try to understand the scale of plastics that we are putting in the universe, I found one site that said that we produce 360 million tons of plastic waste each year. And another that said we produce 450 million tons of plastic waste each year. So we are producing hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste each year. And I guess plastic waste is like plastic we produce and then want to throw away because there's a lot of plastic we produce that we keep and cherish forever. That's right. That's right. No, waste, I think, definitely implies this is stuff that you have thrown either into the recycling bin or into the trash, but you are done with it.

27:02And chemically, like, what is a plastic? I have this vague notion that it's like you take oil and you process it through chemistry and you get plastic. Is that basically what's happening? Yeah, that's basically what's happening. But the important thing to note is that that oil has a bunch of carbon in it. And a lot of the, like, things that we eat have carbon in it. I like carbon. I love carbon. Big fan. There's crunchy bits when you've cooked something a little bit too long, as Katrina calls the cancer ends. I love the cancer ends of stuff. Yeah, I love the cancer ends of stuff, too. Just try not to eat too many.

27:36You can enjoy them sometimes. But if you can cut those carbon chains in different ways, you can make different compounds. And this is chemistry. That's my best definition of chemistry there. So the question is, can you take carbon chains in plastic and cut them into ways that produce things that are edible? I see. And it appears that some bacteria, some fungi, and some worms have figured out how to do that. And the first time we sort of recognized that this was happening in nature that I could find was in 2016. There's bacteria in a recycling plant in Japan. That was found breaking down the plastic.

28:22And in particular, the kind of plastic we're talking about is PET. This is found in a lot of water bottles, found in a lot of different kinds of like jugs. It makes polyester. Your clothes have a lot of this kind of plastic in it. It's a very common plastic. And this bacteria was producing an enzyme that has been named PET-ACE. Okay. Okay. And A's is something we often refer to in chemistry for like, it's an enzyme that helps catalyze something or make some reaction happen. So my first Google result, National Institutes of Health, is apparently the reference. It says enzymes are biological catalysts usually made of proteins that speed up chemical reactions in living things.

29:01Cool. And no surprise that it's a microbe that first does this. Katrina is always saying microbes learn how to eat anything. Yep, yep. And we heard like from your friend who's an expert in the deep underwater vents, like microbes are down there eating crazy stuff. So thank you, microbes, for pioneering everything, basically. And what we're going to get to is that we are trying to figure out how to use this for our own purposes to try to break down a lot of the plastics. And so the bacteria that they discovered, it looks like it actually has two reactions that it does. Like the first one uses that PATase, and then it breaks those products down into two smaller carbon chains.

29:40One is terephthalic acid, and the other is ethylene glycol. And what you need to know there are two things that I think I'm getting correct here. One is that at this stage, the bacteria can start eating those things and using the carbon. And two, these are also ingredients that we use to make more PET. So once this reaction has happened, if you can collect the products that were made by the bacteria, you can then start making new plastic products, which could be very helpful in like recycling plants and stuff. So you're saying the microbes have this enzyme in them, which breaks down the plastic into stuff that their metabolism knows how to ingest.

30:23Yep. And also produces stuff that we can use to make, yay, more plastic. That's amazing. And are they making this PETA? So did they like find it or is it occurring naturally or like is it expressed in their genome? So I think the best guess is that it evolved from ferulic acid esterases. Who cares? The answer, what you want to know is that this is something that they use to break down plant walls. So this was something that they were using to get into plants. And with a little bit of tinkering, it can be used to start breaking down plastic. So this isn't something that the bacteria had to like, you know, evolve out of nothing.

31:00This is something that they already had that it turns out if you change it a little bit, you know, for example, you've got, you know, billions of bacteria, maybe trillions, quadrillions in a recycling plant. You know, some of them had a mutation in this thing that's breaking down plant walls. And then it actually turned out that that helped them break down the plastics. And now they've got this like head start on a new food source. Yeah, that's a great example of evolution, right? You have something which does a different job and you randomly evolve to do something new, which unlocks an enormous new food source.

31:30And you can see why that would help those populations survive. I guess I'm surprised it didn't happen faster. Yeah, right. Well, and it's actually not happening super efficiently yet. Like another thing to understand for evolution is that like, you know, if a mutation happens and suddenly something that was breaking down plant wall is now helping to break down plastic, you don't necessarily get the most efficient version of that enzyme, right? Right. For that enzyme to get better over time, you need to have, you know, for example, more random mutations that need to get like tried out as they change the way the enzyme works.

32:01And then the individuals that have the slightly more efficient enzyme are the ones that have more babies. And like it's a very long, slow process that depends often on random things happening along the way. And so there are some labs that are specifically taking like the code for these enzymes and are mutating it to much more quickly move through all of the different ways, all of the different shapes that this enzyme could take and see if any of them are actually much more efficient if you like essentially speed up evolution in the lab. Uh-oh. But then like what if you release these things and they like dissolve all the plastic in the world in five seconds?

32:36Yeah, right. So that's something that people joke about a lot. I mean, they're still going to have to compete with all the other bacteria on the planet. They will have this massive new food source. Maybe this is something we need to worry about. I didn't find a lot of people panicking about it. What do you think? How much would you worry? How much would Katrina worry about this? That's what I need to know. I mean, I don't think I'm even aware of the role the plastics play in my life. Like, imagine all plastics on the planet were instantly deleted. Like, I guess my glasses would fall apart. Same.

33:05Our microphones. My computer probably would fall apart. and probably my car wouldn't work. Yeah, we'd be pwned. I don't think we're ready for that. So be careful, biologists. Yeah, right, right. It's not just physicists who can destroy the world. Well, so we will get to, in just a second, we'll get to the ways that people are trying to be a little bit careful about this. Okay. But I just wanted to note real quick that there's a company called, I think, Carbios. And they are essentially, they're the ones that are like doing this, you know evolution in the lab thing to try to find more efficient enzymes and they're trying to break down pre-existing plastics and they have some like deals with companies that make makeup and makeup containers and they are trying to up cycle it back into more plastics which is kind of cool so a lot of stuff would be staying out of the landfill or like coming out of the recycling plants more quickly so okay but so then the question is if you have for example done something in the lab and genetically modified an organism, like, for example, maybe you decide that these enzymes, it would be better if they were made by E.

34:10coli than if they were made by the bacteria we first found them in because it's just easier to manipulate E. coli. So you put the genes for this enzyme in E. coli. You probably don't want to release that into the environment because people are very uncomfortable about genetically modified organisms. And if you're the person that makes it so that all the plastic gets digested, you're not going to have a lot of friends. And so what they're doing is they are working on ways to, for example, make E. coli. And by they, I mean, like different groups, not necessarily the Carbios group, but anyway, they're working on trying to get E.

34:42coli or other bacteria to produce enzymes in large quantities in the lab. And then they release those enzymes into places where plastic needs to get broken down. So they're cutting the bacteria out, but they're releasing the enzymes. And like your laundry detergent has enzymes in it. That's cold-blooded, man. Why is that cold-blooded? You're getting the bacteria to produce this enzyme. They evolved so they can eat, and you're using it to break down the plastics without letting the bacteria have lunch. That seems cold. They're probably feeding the bacteria because they want them to keep surviving and making this enzyme.

35:20I guess it depends on do you have to kill the bacteria to get the enzyme, or can you make the bacteria excrete the enzyme in some way? We should have invited Katrina today. The bacteria should unionize, man. They own the means of production here, right? They have nothing to lose but their chains. That's right. That's right. Getting political. But I guess I'm a little confused. I would have thought this is something you wanted to introduce into a landfill so that the plastic in the landfill degrades more quickly, turns back into soil, all that good stuff. But it sounds like you're saying we want to collect plastic out of this waste stream and isolate it and then break it down so we can like reuse it to make more plastic and stuff.

36:00Isn't there like a big energy cost to recycling and taking these things out of the waste stream? Is that really worth it? So it depends on who you're talking to, what the goals are. So there are some groups that would like to take plastic that's already going to a recycling plant, for example, and use that to make new plastic stuff. And so essentially just make the recycling process a lot simpler. There are other folks who are, for example, taking plastics maybe from a recycling plant and then they're trying to turn it into things like vanillin, which is the chemical that gives vanilla its taste.

36:34And apparently you can make that by breaking down plastics and then just tinkering with it a little bit. What? You can make vanilla flavor from plastics? Oh my gosh. Yep, yep. Apparently we already make vanilla flavor from petroleum stuff. What? And so the like scientist that was, you know, answering questions was a little bit defensive, presumably because this has been asked of them many times. But if you get synthetic vanilla flavoring, it might have a bit of a petroleum background. All those folks out there who defend vanilla ice cream is like a legitimate flavor and a competitor to actual chocolate ice cream.

37:09Like, yeah, I don't think so. Yeah, I agree. They're bad people. Wow. I was trying to be choice in my words, but that's what you're here for, Kelly. Unleash it on everyone. That's right. That's right. I was obviously joking. But then there's other groups that are, for example, trying to put these enzymes into bacteria that can survive in saltwater environments so that then you could release those organisms, like, I don't know, into the giant trash patch in the ocean. Actually, I think there's many giant trash patches because we're a great species. We're wonderful. We're the best. And you could release them into the ocean and then let the bacteria start breaking down those trash patches.

37:49So there's some people who are talking about like wanting to release this stuff into the environment. I think a lot of people have very complicated feelings about genetically modified organisms. And so I think there'd be a lot of people you'd have to convince that that was a good idea if you wanted to go forward with that. But Mr. True wanted to know if there were other organisms that do this. It looks like fungi do it as well. They have an enzyme that breaks cutin down, and this is a part of plants again. And so fungi here again have a thing that they were using to break down plants. But it turns out with a little bit of tinkering, it can break down plastic.

38:25And so some fungus can do this as well. And some wax worms appear to be able to do this. So there was a scientist who had some beehives, and these worms are really bad for beehives. and she started taking them out of the beehive and then she put them in a plastic bag and she noticed that not only were they eating their way out of the bag, but anywhere their saliva had touched, the bag started to degrade. And so I think the follow-up work suggested that to some extent this is stuff being produced by their microbiome, so it goes back to bacteria again. But there are some worms that seem to be able to, some grubby things that seem to be able to live on plastic as well.

39:04Wow. Fascinating. Yeah. So anyway, maybe we will be able to harness biology to fix a massive problem that we have caused, but we're going to have to wait and see. It does feel like biology has these tools, or at least it's better at adapting. I mean, the whole process of evolution is just such an incredibly parallel way to search for new techniques, right? You have quadrillions of bacteria constantly trying new things and evolving in new ways. And the chances that we could find a new solution faster than a zillion bacteria all in parallel seems ridiculous. But it's cool that you then isolate it and fine-tune it and then are hopefully careful about how you implement it.

39:47Yep. We can be inspired by biology in a lot of different ways. All right. Let's see what Mr. True has to say, or Ms. True. I didn't realize that Yarthvar could also be a lady listener. So anyway, MxTrue, what do you have to say? Hi, Yarthvar again. Thanks for the informative and complete answer. I don't have any follow-up questions, but I do have a couple of comments. First, I echo your concern with releasing these organisms into the environment. I would hope that we only take such a bold step after conducting our due diligence with the utmost of rigor. Second, even though there is a grain of hope that these organisms might break down some of our plastic waste, I think that we still need to limit the amount of plastic that we allow into the environment.

40:34And finally, Yarthvar actually is my name, though in a different language. It's Edward in Old Norse, the medieval language of my Scandinavian ancestors. It might sound funny to the modern ear, but I prefer it to my other ancestral option. Old English is I'd weird or I't weird. Anyway, thanks again. I appreciate you both and wish good health and happiness to all.

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41:47All right, and we're back. And our last question of the day is from Sebastian. And Daniel hinted earlier in the show that this would have something to do about the speed of light and time. Let's go ahead and hear the question. Hi. I've been trying to wrap my head around the block universe for a while. From my understanding, you always see a different slice of space-time depending on your speed and direction. So if you and I are traveling in different directions at high speeds, we would have a different view on what is now. What does that say about the future being unwritten? Or is the future already determined in this theory?

42:23If so, what are arguments for or against the block universe? Thank you. Love the show. I remember that you and I once had an episode where we were checking out like sci-fi books and movies and how they dealt with like space and time and time travel. And at the end, I was like, well, this was a Daniel is a wet blanket episode, which is out of the ordinary, but, you know, very refreshing. And so I'm looking forward to what you have to say here. This is a really fun question because it gets to the heart of like, what does it mean that special relativity breaks our ideas of now? And, you know, do we still have free will or is the future somehow determined because maybe somebody else can see more of it than we can or something?

43:10So let's dig into it first and remind ourselves what exactly special relativity says and doesn't say about time and about now and the future. Okay. So special relativity says that light always moves at the speed of light, regardless of the observer or your velocity, as long as it's nearby, right? In a little flat neighborhood. And that breaks our sense of whether things have to happen at the same time or not. And the classic example is Kelly's on a train and she has two flashlights and she shines a flashlight forward and a flashlight backwards. And because she's standing in the center of the train car, she sees the light beams hitting the front and the back of the train at the same time, right?

43:52Makes perfect sense. They go the same distance in the same amount of time. Of course, they hit the front and the back at the same time. But Zach is not in the train with Kelly. He's on the ground. He's eating his breakfast cereal or whatever. He's watching Kelly on the train do this experiment. What does he see? Well, he sees the back of the train moving towards where the light was emitted and the front of the train moving away from where the light was emitted. And because the light moves at the same speed relative to Zach, he sees the light hit the back of the train first and the front of the train later.

44:28That would not be true for sound waves, for example, because sound waves don't move at the same speed for all observers. They move at the same speed relative to their medium. So for example, if Kelly shouted instead of using light beams, then Zach would see the shout moving slower going backwards and faster going forwards because it's moving at the same speed relative to the air, which is moving relative to him. But light doesn't work that way. Light moves at the speed of light no matter what. And so he sees it hit the back of the train before he sees it hit the front of the train. So Kelly says these two things happen at the same time.

45:03And Zach says, no, they don't. And somebody else going the other direction sees the opposite, sees it hit the front of the train before the back of the train. What's going on? Is the universe broken? No, what's going on is that special relativity tells us that there is no global now. It's not like there's one clock for the whole universe and the universe ticks forward one step at a time and everybody can agree on what time we're at and what's happening at the same time. Instead, like the listener asked, we all see like a different slice of space time depending on our speed and our direction. So there's as many moments of now as there are locations in the universe and velocities in the universe.

45:47Wow. So if you're not at the same location and you don't have the same velocity, then you see time flowing in a different way. And you can even disagree about the order in which stuff happens. And so are we like mostly talking about little things like, you know, you're a second or two off about when the light hits the train or could are we talking about you could be a year or two different? I guess it depends on how far the thing has traveled. Like if you're looking at how far light traveled across the universe and you got different results. Yeah. How how how how big of a time? I'm very confused.

46:28It can be a big difference. You know, if somebody gets on a spaceship and they're moving at 99 % of the speed of light away from us for a long time, then their clock can differ by years from our clocks. So it can be a huge difference. And that's actually nice if you're going to travel to like Alpha Centauri, you know, then it might take a long time on Earth clocks for you to get there. But it doesn't take that much time on your clock on the ship, which is nice because you're the one on the ship. So it can be a big deal for sure. And for people who wonder, like, hold on a second, how can the order of events be changed?

47:01You know, like if somebody shoots an arrow at an apple, can somebody else like see the apple get hit before they shoot the arrow? Does this break causality? And the answer is no, there are limits. Special relativity can reorder events, but only ones that are causally disconnected. I think we're living in a simulation by somebody who wrote a fictional world that has kind of crazy rules, but we have to follow them. And this just is very counterintuitive. Yeah. Events that are close enough in space and time where light can move between them are causally connected because you can send a message from one to the other.

47:37And those events you cannot reorder using special relativity. Only things that are causally disconnected where they're far enough apart that light can't go between the events, those things you can't send any message from one event to the other. So those kind of events can be reordered based on your velocity. All right. So what does that say about the flow of time, right? Are different people seeing into the future or different futures? Like definitely what I consider to be now is different from what you consider to be now. And it's tempting to imagine that like, you know, Zach versus Kelly are seeing different slices of the future and that what they're doing is just revealing slices of an already determined future.

48:20And your speed through the universe is just determining like which slice of the pre-existing space-time block you're getting. It's tempting. And that's the theory of the block universe that says that the past, the present, and the future all exist simultaneously within some four-dimensional space-time structure. What do we mean by four dimensions? Well, you know what we mean by three dimensions of space and time? You have X, Y, and Z, three directions you can move in space. Now, if you imagine that to be a 4D structure, that just means that through time, stuff is happening in space. And so you can't stack up 3D spaces on top of each other in a 3D space.

49:00You have to imagine it changing as you move the arrow of time. And so in this block universe theory, the past, the present, and the future are already fixed, right? The future exists as much as the past exists and the present exists. The way like when you go to watch the Spider-Man movie, the ending is already determined. You're just happening to watch a certain frame of it. You haven't seen the ending, but the past, the present, and the future in the movie are already fixed. So the block universe theory says that that's our universe, that the past, the present, and the future are already set.

49:34And we're just like, we're having a certain slice through it. And the special relativity version of that is the slice you see of the universe depends on your location and your velocity. So this is a no free will theory. Is that right? Exactly. It's a no free will kind of a theory. And so Sebastian's question is, does special relativity imply the block universe? And I would say no. It's compatible with the block universe. The idea that special relativity gives you a different slice of that block universe. But as you say, the block universe is a deterministic theory. It says the future is already set.

50:09But special relativity doesn't require that. Special relativity says that the past, the present, and the future are different for everybody. Like we disagree about what now means, but it doesn't mean that you don't have choices to make. You can still have a universe where the laws are probabilistic, for example, like quantum mechanical, right? Where the outcome of an experiment is determined by random probability and not fully determined by the past. So the past might determine the probability of something happening, but not the actual outcome. And so the past doesn't determine the future in our universe, for example, because we think the universe is quantum mechanical.

50:46And so the universe is not fully deterministic. And so it's not consistent with a block universe. So special relativity just means that now is local. It doesn't mean that the future is determined. You know, it says something weirder. It says that you don't get a unique universal answer to the question, what is happening everywhere right now? but it doesn't say that the future is determined. And remember those cones we talked about, like where you can influence and things that are causally linked to you or not causally linked to you. Special relativity doesn't say that like Kelly has seen my future because she's moving at a different velocity or whatever.

51:26You know, you can rearrange certain events, but only things that are not causally linked together. So it's not like Kelly can see what I've decided to do, All right. Kelly can't rearrange the future in a way that changes my chain of causality. No, that's too bad. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense, but it's disappointing. I mean, you can influence the decisions I make, and you certainly do. Make a good argument, make a funny joke. You're definitely going to influence the path of Daniel's life, but not by getting on a train at half the speed of light. Okay, got it. All right. And so if you didn't already predict that answer, Sebastian, in your block universe, then I'm curious how our answer determines your response.

52:06Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I think that clears it up. So Free World still has a chance. All right. Thank you, everybody, for sharing your amazing questions with us today. As a unfortunate reminder, Kelly is still on an email hiatus and probably will be till 2027 because I have about six months of amazing questions from y 'all to work from still. So hold on to your great questions. I still am going to want them at some point, but I'm working through the stack as we go. All right. Thanks, everybody. We really love hearing from you, hearing about your curiosity, hearing your questions. And we love being a part of your journey of curiosity.

52:42Thanks so much for taking us along for the ride. Thanks for listening.

52:52Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman he really is a wizard you can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram and xDNKUniverse come engage with us you can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org we really do want to hear from you and you can find our website www.danielandkelly.org where you'll also find an invitation to join our discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators.

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