Scientists create crate-sized waste water treatment

This is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Wired is carrying a story about a bacteria-driven waste water treatment unit designed at Sam Houston State University. Two units are being sent to Afghanistan and another may be sent to Haiti.

These crate-sized units use common ground bacteria to clean waste water in about 24 hours without producing any toxic byproducts. Modern waste treatment plants don't even come close to that kind of efficiency.

Once commercial production begins for this technology, it will probably be used on planes, trains, buses, ships, and in remote outposts. But it could also be combined with other technologies such as drawing water from humidity that harvest moisture even from desert air. Desert communities and homesteads can be built that work somewhat like Star Wars' "moisture farms" on the arid planet Tattooine (where Anakin Skywalker was born and his son Luke was later raised in secret by Owen and Beru Lars).

Numerous proposals have been put forward for decreasing salinity in salt lakes and using waste water treatment to produce electricity. Water desalination and treatment is expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of energy.

Solar-based and bacterial initiatives may help reduce the costs of producing or recovering potable water from waste and salty water sources (lakes and seas). The military and disaster-recovery markets will probably lead the way as they have high demand for low-cost water production and management technologies, but eventually there will be industrial, residential, and even perhaps ecological benefits from the technology.

I believe firmly that we should be transforming our deserts into habitable lands for ourselves and wildlife. Southeast Australia, one of the greenest areas of the southern continent, began drying out 15 years ago.

In a matter of decades, environmentalists will no longer be charged with preserving natural desert habitats -- they will be mandated with creating new habitats to keep our ecosystem alive. That transformation cannot begin until people change the way they think about the environment and how man can and should interact with it. We're not going away any time soon (I hope), and we are part of the environment, not outside of it.

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A final word about SciFi and Green Police

A friend mentioned to me today that there is a concise explanation of the "broad range of grass roots movements" around the world that have been labeled Green Police. Last week, in a series of articles on the SF Fandom Wordpress blog as well as here, I explored the "green police" concept from my limited perspective. I have been aware of the growing environmental movements around the world for some time and realized that science fiction (and fandom) have played their parts in developing the message.

Here is a concise list of the articles I wrote on both blogs:

SF-Fandom Wordpress Blog Environmental Series

• Are the Green Police Real Enough?


• Galactic Green Police


• Should man change his environment?


• One last word about Green Police

SF-Fandom Blogger Blog Environmental Series

• How green are your police?


• Green Lantern to the environmental rescue


• Who Are the Green Police?

BTW -- Black Oak Arkansas fans might think that second article title is familiar. It was inspired by the goofy song "Jim Dandy to the rescue". Sorry -- my resistance was futile.

I opened a discussion of these articles at SF-Fandom. Please feel free to drop by and leave your thoughts there if you don't want to comment on either of the blogs: SF Fandom blogs and environmentalism.

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Who are the green police?

So today I am asking if man should change his environment on the Wordpress blog but it has been pointed out to me that I missed a connection to the term "green police", which seems to have found quite a few uses.

There is a band called the Green Police. I wonder if they should call their lead singer "Green Sting"? Sorry. You just had to live through the 1980s to enjoy that kind of humor, I suppose.

I want to point out that in my other article I linked to an article I wrote several years ago called "How to steal the planet Venus and make it your own". I just think that is such a really cool concept -- taking ownership over a planet by getting there first.

The other evening I was watching a Star Trek special features Blu-Ray Disc and it included a semi-interactive section where you can watch brief explanations of the planets in the various movies. The commentator used a star chart (as did the interactive navigation) to show you where all the planets are supposed to be.

I get that civilizations might claim worlds, but how do you claim the space between stars? In Star Trek: Voyager the ship was constantly entering someone's space and being challenged. How do you monitor and control the space between star systems on that scale? You're literally staking out a huge 3-dimensional claim in galactic chunks.

None of which really has anything to do with science fiction and environmentalism, I realism, but once you start thinking about all this stuff you sort of get carried away with it. It just takes you along for the ride.

Maybe one day we'll start imagining what we could do with all those brown dwarf stars floating around the galaxy that failed to ignite for lack of sufficient mass. Think of all that hydrogen and helium that is so neatly packaged.

And maybe someone will come up with a way to utilize dead stars that are just huge diamonds (the remnants of white dwarfs that failed to collapse into neutron stars).

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Green Lantern to the environmental rescue

So this week I'm publishing articles about science fiction and environmentalism on the other SF Fandom blog. I'm publishing related articles on this blog as well. Tody's article is Galactic green police. This article continues the theme of how people can take action to help the environment -- and science fiction fans get in on the action now and then.


Source: Freaking News
Green Police poster calls for science fiction fans to get involved with environmentalism.

I like the idea of using Green Lanterns as "green police". I went looking for good Green Lantern costume pictures and found a few.


Source: How Stuff Works
Green Lantern fan at a convention.


Source: The League of Heroes
Green Lantern man and woman in costume at a convention.


Source: Halforums
Justice League characters line up, including Green Lantern and his friend Black Canary.

You might wonder what the connection is between Green Lantern and environmentalism. I don't know how closely tied he is to the cause, as I stopped reading comics decades ago. But I shared some memories in this week's articles.

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How green are your police?

I was inspired to launch an ambitious series of articles on science fiction and the environment on the other SF Fandom blog this week but I wanted to publish related articles in tandem on this blog, too.

Today's article is titled Are the Green Police Real Enough and it sort of wanders and rambles in my usual fashion but it's all about accountability: who is accountable for what we do to the environment?

I wanted to dress up the articles with some pictures and I found this cute picture (sorry -- I don't know how else to describe it) of kids dressed up as "green police" (thus inspiring the name for the article).

Source: Lincolnshire County Council

It turns out that quite a few communities have invoked the idea of "green police" and I decided to follow that theme through the whole series, but I can't include all the pictures I found in those articles (despite the fact that they are typical very long-winded Michael Martinez articles).

So here are a few other "green police" pictures I looked at but didn't go with for the first article.


Source: Avon and Somerset Glastonbury Festival 2009


Source: You Can Go Green


Source: Blog In A Box

These two ladies give a whole new meaning to the expression, "Going green" (I can't believe I'm going to leave that comment in place).

Source: The Punch

They probably advance the cause much better than Irwin Allen did in the 1960s' television show, Lost In Space:


Source: Cracked

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