Robert+Frazier

Robert's Radical Wikispace: My Top 5 UN Sustainability Goals:

1. Climate Action

 * Climate Action is one of my top goals as each year new record highs in heat are recorded, countless animals die from their habitats being destroyed, entire species go extinct, and natural wonders are ruined by reckless endangerment through unchecked industries. Without climate change we will not have anything left of this beautiful world eventually, if we do not stop climate change then coming generations won't be able to see the splendor of this world and will be left with a hot dead rock of an Earth.

3. Life Below Water

 * Life Below Water is also one of my top goals since the vast majority of this Earth's oxygen comes from plankton in the oceans and each year mass amount of dumping in the oceans acidify them which kills off many of the species in the oceans. If we do not do something to stop this process we may eventually drastically kill off much of the plankton we need in order to breath.

5. Sustainable Cities and Communities
[|NASA's Mars InSight]

  NASA's Mars InSight is the latest attempt to uncovering the red planet's ancient history. Set to arrive in November 2018 the new Mars lander will deploy an array of new tools to monitor the planet and discover the early geological evolution of the planet. It is a primarily geological mission that's two primary instruments will be deployed by a robotic arm from the "deck" of the lander. The first is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), a seismometer that will provide the first seismic readings of the dead planet and create a map of the planets interior structure. Deployed along with it will be the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP^3), a probe that will burrow itself 5 meters (16 feet) into the ground and work to detect heat coming from the core of the planet. These along with other complimentary instruments such as ones to track weather, take pictures, and track planetary rotation will fulfill two goals: work to understand how Mars formed and evolved and to determine the level of tectonic activity. It will determine the structure of Mars finally allowing us to learn the size of Mars' core, if it is liquid or solid, how thick the crust is, what the mantle is made of, and how active tectonics are on the planet. These will not just let us learn about the red planet but it will also give us insight into how all terrestrial planets formed as well. This attempt to look into the past will help us work towards seeing if Mars could have ever had an active geology similar to Earth's and if so this would bring us even closer to the belief that Mars is the potential future of a planet once full of life and water.

Mars of course does not directly relate to the class' discussion on water availability as it's not even on Earth so we could not practically use it as a source of water. Even if we could it possesses very little in comparison to the Earth's and it is by far and large only in the form of ice on the planet. InSight can still give //insight // on the topic of water though because as previously mentioned, some see Mars as a possible future for Earth and through it we can see what the future of the water situation may be (though any preparations would be a bit early saying it would most likely take of millions of years to get like Mars). It will also give us a clue on what to look for on future planets for water and determine if they had already passed the chance of hosting life as Mars had, and if we miraculously find signs of past life we can use those methods on other bodies to hopefully find current life such as macro-invertebrates on the far flung reaches of Europa.

[|Nanoparticles Help Save Crops]  A common problem that faces crops throughout the globe are the plants themselves suffering from malnutrition. This failure to grow crops because of malnutrition then affects humans by having them starve and get malnutrition themselves. The common solution for this is to spray the plants with just a solution of the nutrients they're lacking free within the solution but it has a low chance of success with the plants only sucking up a fraction of nutrients they're provided.[| A team of scientists]though has found a solution for the problem by looking towards drug delivery systems used in medicine. The solution they came up with was artificially creating plant based liposomes that contained the nutrients needed for the plant. To compare the efficiency of the nanoparticle spray to the normal water based spray they used the radioactive and easily measurable europium to measure uptake. Plants sprayed by the ordinary spray took up only .1% of the europium while plants sprayed with the nanoparticles took up 33% of the europium. They also proved its efficiency by using it to save tomato plants that had iron and magnesium deficiencies that were not solved by using the ordinary spray. Some concerns with the spray are solved by the nature of the liposomes, such as concern of the particles spreading to distant plants through the air, as they dissolve into ordinary phospholipids when travelling over two meters. Liposomes create some difficulty though as it is costly to manufacture them, especially when compared to just spraying the nutrients, and they can only go through pores greater than 100 nanometers while plant pores can range from 50-150 nanometers. Although these concerns still need to be addressed and more testing on a wider variety of plants need to be done, this does present a promising advancement in agriculture.

This directly relates to the discussions in our class on food as this provides a hope to solve malnutrition in plants which of course would allow us to more efficiently grow plants thus helping solve malnutrition in areas that struggle to grow crops. Many places have soil that is insufficient for successful farming and by solving this problem not only would starvation and malnutrition rates go down but population density may decrease in overpopulated areas and increase in underpopulated as more places are able to more easily grow crops in a not perfect environment for them. Though this part would be small scale as many underpopulated places do not just suffer from poor soil but also lack of water and harsh climates. This is still a step forward to making sure to ending world hunger though.

[|Easily Recyclable Plastics] 

<span style="color: #58bcc9; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">A common problem in recycling plastics is that it isn't very easy to just break them down and reform them into new plastic products and those that are easy to break down often face problems as they break down too easily in day to day use such as a plastic cup melting when coffee is poured in. Biodegradable plastics are of course a solution to this but many of them never go away as they require specific microbes to break them down so it is unreliable to rely on that. A group of scientists at Colorado State University have been working towards this problem, They are hoping to solve the fact that only about 10% of plastics ever made gets recycled and that many of the previous polymers they created in the past were too soft and too easy to melt. With their plastics they want to be able to easily break down the polymer (the plastic) into the monomer base components. To this end they have taken one of their previous monomers thats molecular structure is in a ring shape with another ring shaped monomer, the two rings braced together formed a much stronger temperature stable bond that when exposed to high enough heat or certain mild chemicals it would easily break down into the base monomers again for reuse. One of the most extraordinary aspects of this was that the cycle was repeated multiple times and their is a belief that the plastic could be recycled infinitely. The ease and adaptability of this new plastic shows hopes for decrease in overall creation of new plastics and an increase of recycling plastics, thus saving the planet from the massive amount of landfills full of plastic that will never break down.

<span style="color: #58bcc9; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">This of course directly relates to class discussion on recycling and consumption as it shows great hope for increasing the rate of recycling plastics and the versatility of recycled plastics and this would hopefully also make it less expensive to run recycling plants as those often run on a deficit. The fact that so many plastic products are never recycled creates immense environmental hazards and problems, especially for wildlife as landfills of course just take up space but also the fact that the massive amounts of plastic and garbage dumped into the ocean end up getting eaten by sea-life and posses an immense threat to their lives. Their constantly reports and findings of seabirds and fishes dying from ingesting plastics or being strangled/suffocated by them. Just recently a pilot whale in Thailand was found dead after it ingested 17 pounds worth of plastic bags. As plastic recycling and recycling overall increases we hopefully can combat these terrible tragedies and reduce our production of plastics.