At that point it is a race between erosion and the relief wells, which hopefully will relieve the pressure on the existing well.

If the relief wells fail to get there in time, there is a real possibility of the sea floor collapsing and letting the entire oil pocket out. The potential oil spill if that happens could be up to 2.5 billion barrels.

Consider an earth dam holding in a lake. As long as the water's sitting behind the dam, not much is going to happen but as soon as a little crack appears or a bit of water begins pouring over the top, it starts eroding - carrying away bits of the dam. As the hole gets bigger, the flow increases which accelerates the erosion.

Now picture the oil eroding a hole in the casing and surrounding rock/silt/etc.

Here's a visual from a recent natural disaster: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/landslide_lake_in_p...

And like many other bad things that have occurred quite naturally in the past, we'll suffer no matter what or who's causing the disaster. When the Toba caldera blew last time, for example, we almost got wiped out.

So la-de-da let's go around doing things that might cause more of these things to happen, after all it's natural? Sounds a lot like the "everything natural=goodness" fuzzy thinking certain people are guilty of. Lots of bad things are "natural" yet it's still a very smart policy to prevent them. Contracting STDs is natural. Tooth decay and abscesses are natural. Breaking your neck in a fall is natural. I'm still going to practice safe sex, brush and floss my teeth, and use a safety harness while climbing.

A good many resources just don't make the cost/benefit cut. Self destructively promiscuous people are a readily available resource for getting sex, but they are also a good way to irreversibly get stuck with herpes.

What he is saying is that the sea floor IMMEDIATELY below the BOP is soft and sandy. That may be the first 10 to 100 feet, which is basically supporting the weight of the BOP.

As another poster has pointed out, it's another 18,000 feet down from the seafloor to the top of the oil deposit.

The consequences of that scenario are too horrible to imagine.

If any significant fraction of that volume is removed, it seems likely to me that there will be cave-ins around the bubble. If those cave-ins are big enough, they could create cracks that would cause more leaks to come out. Alternately they could produce places for oil to go that won't leak out the current hole. Or they could widen the current hole.

Of course long before that point we should have relief wells. But the challenge there is that the wells are hard to put in and the existing leak lends an element of instability. The last thing anyone wants is to have further accidents on the relief wells. But when you're hurrying under difficult circumstances, accidents cannot be ruled out.

This isn't a political article.

[1]: http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100527/BP.Presen...

This seems to be modus operandi for companies these days. Deny everything, then weeks later come up with your own sources suggesting exactly the same thing, when the issue has died down.

What is this link supposed to prove?

It's a diagram of the failure modes of the BOP and some discussion of how it failed. I can't see any indication it shows the well under the BOP is intact or that the movement of high pressure oil-and-sand isn't chewing the assembly to pieces as BP tries to suck some of the oil out of the well.

I have this on good authority by a petroleum engineer in a rival oil company. Believe me or not but I think that the people in the oil industry probably no better about how to fix this problem than Obama or anyone else in government who are just going to get in the way. First, I do not at all agree with offshore drilling, however it bothers me that people assume that BP is holding out or that this is really an easy thing to fix. They aren't because letting the disaster continue will destroy their company and it isn't easy considering they are composed of people who studied petroleum engineering and actually no what they are doing. Johnny's silly, uninformed ideas aren't going to work either. Hell, the petroleum engineer I know also said that Russia's idea of nuking the leak would be the quickest way to fix but the government, or sane people, wouldn't allow that.

The bottom line is that we should never have been drilling in the first place. This spill is terrible but it happened and we have to deal with it. It bothers me though that people really think BP isn't doing the best they can and has the best people in the world working on this. The entire oil industry is helping them. The government and other entities should worry about supporting them and helping the people affected by this cope with the fallout. Leave the technical details to the professionals because everyone else ideas are uninformed, will slow things down, and will not work. Only a relief well will and thats 4 months away so why not worry about helping the people of the golf? The truly sad thing is that Americans will still get up tomorrow and drive their gas guzzling SUVs 2 miles to work instead of riding bike and those bullet trains and public transportation efforts are still decades away...

Let's say that I'm an American with a gas guzzling SUV. For the sake of discussion, what would you suggest are my better alternatives (taking into account the money I've already invested in the SUV)? How would those alternatives help fix the current BP problem? I'm not trying to be contrarian. I would like to start a discussion here.

Besides public transportation though, just working on our infrastructure would help with fuel saving. Sitting in traffic all day doesn't help MPG. Hell, sometimes I wish I had an SUV for some of the roads here in Pittsburgh, with the potholes its like I am driving through in Iraq. Also, my beef isn't really with all SUVs. I mean the Traverse gets what 33/mpg? I am talking about the people who drive Escalades to and from work and don't haul anyone around.

    Bombs          Bombs
    \\      |      //
    --------|--------
    ########|########

Edit: I'm not really suggesting bombs; that's just something off the top my head. The main idea is that I want to know if there is any potential mitigation if the story is true? And just how bad is it if there isn't?

The first thing you need to know is that it's 5,000 feet from the surface of the ocean to the ocean floor at the well, and then there's another 18,000 feet of shaft below the ocean floor to the oil and gas reservoir. So, there's no clear position from which explosives can be used to "seal" it. If explosives were used, there's a pretty good chance it would blow up in our face, so to speak -- not only would the gas ignite (making the process somewhat unpredictable), but it would also likely create a huge number of microfissures that would lead to an even bigger oil geyser.

How catastrophic is it? It's ... well, not to be dramatic, but if this doesn't end up being one of the nastier long-term natural catastrophes of the next few decades, then I shudder to imagine what's coming next. Not only is this killing seabirds and mammals, it's also de-oxygenating a large portion of the Gulf rather nicely.

If BP does stick to their commitment to pay for the whole thing, I expect that they will file for bankruptcy next year. (In large part because their market cap is dropping like a rock.)

This particular incident is sort of the perfect storm of conditions for an oil disaster: it occurred at challenging depths, and when efforts have been made to stop the leak at those depths, something has gone wrong each time to stall or defeat the effort.

For further perspective: the US Navy's Seawolf class submarine has a crush depth of approximately 3,000 feet. At that depth, you're dealing with around 2,000 psi of pressure, but that's not the nasty part: the gusher is estimated to be at around 12,000 psi.

So, yeah. Explosives are probably not a wise idea here.

How exactly is the gas going to ignite in the absence of atmospheric oxygen? Remember, this is the bottom of the ocean. There's no air for the gas to react with. Presumably the solid oxidizer and fuel components of any explosive that would be used for this purpose would be well mixed and present in a stoichiometric ratio and, therefore, side reactions between oxidizer and gas aren't all that likely.

I agree on the fissure problem, though.

Point of clarification, this is a man-made catastrophe.

Anyway, if it makes you feel better, you can try to come up with an extinction's dollar value and add that in to your estimate. That sort of thing is perfectly valid. I suggest: "How much money would I pay (or advocate to be paid) to prevent this extinction?" Then do that for each extinction you believe is likely.

So, how much would you pay to prevent me from, say, burning the Mona Lisa? Or pulverizing the Statue of David? Or bombing the Sistine Chapel?

I don't think it's valid at all to assume that everything can have a dollar value associated with it; that would mean that the word "priceless" would be meaningless.

...and I happen to think that the value of life in the Gulf is pretty priceless.

Would you allow a type of fish to go extinct because some eccentric billionaire has a grudge against it and offers to end world hunger if you do?

Not easy questions, and clearly not all "priceless" things are equal. But if you go about ranking things and comparing how much you want one thing or another, you're basically giving it a price.

A loaf of bread isn't "worth" $4. It being $4 just means that you would like a loaf of bread approximately as much as a venti frappuccino, or that you'd be willing to work 15 mins (if you make $16/hr) for it.

So, yes, I could assign dollar amounts to all of those questions.

Think of it this way: What positive thing would you see done in exchange for the burning of the Mona Lisa? Nothing at all, really? You wouldn't have us land a man on Mars? Surely that would be as historic and beautiful as the Mona Lisa. What about free art supplies for life for an entire generation? Maybe that would inspire some artist to create something as breathtaking as the Mona Lisa.

Now, once you have that minimum positive thing, ask how much it costs. (e.g. free art supplies for life for a generation: 100M people * $250/yr * 80 yrs = $2T.) That's the worth of "priceless" Mona Lisa.

Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make. If I were offered the chance to trade the existence of an entire species in order to end world hunger, I would have to decline. I might forever regret the decision, but I have no natural right to make that decision. (Unless we're talking about mosquitoes. I would happily contribute to their extinction.)

If philosophy isn't the proper arena for this crowd, then perhaps game theory is more applicable: if I decline that offer, then we're no worse off than before; however, if I accept, we may be better off -- if the gambit works -- unless there are consequences, in which case we may end up worse off. This is a classic high-risk/high-payoff situation, and I do not gamble.

A loaf of bread is $4 not because it has anything to do with what I'm "willing" to pay for, but because someone has calculated that they can produce that product and sell it for that price and continue doing business. You might counter-argue that they only charge that because enough people are willing to pay for it, but the reality is macroeconomics is much different -- as is the reality of supermarket pricing.

It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people.

I mean, to bring this point home, how about if someone asks me if I'm willing to trade the lives of your family for the sake of feeding the homeless in my county? Based on your argument so far, that should be an easy choice for me to make ...

Ah, but here's the kicker: When it comes to valuing things, you can't help but choose. If you refuse to choose between the life of your $FAVORITE_PERSON and the destruction of the Sistene Chapel, then you have chosen whatever consequences arise when you refuse to choose.

The important thing is not the specifics at stake, which are quite silly here, but the fact that you have to choose. You can't not. You don't get to not choose because it's "arrogant" to choose. You don't get to not choose because "it's hard". You have to choose. Choosing to "not choose" is a choice and in whatever situation your are in constitutes some choice itself.

People in the real world have literally and truly faced the choice of which of their children they will save. They chose something. I imagine a non-trivial number of them were paralyzed by the logic you are applying and chose poorly as a result.

It may help if you realize that a dollar isn't just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one's family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They're not just scores in a game. They're human life.

(In other news, I consider white collar crime grotesquely under punished. Bernie Madoff may not have killed a man, but the damage he did in the aggregate adds up to at least one murder, in my book. He did not steal dollars, he stole life.)

This could in a certain sense be a case where the broken window fallacy actually holds up to scrutiny. Since the money is merely symbolic, no value is actually lost, merely shifted. People are adversely affected, but if they are spurred to create more value, it's plausible that the net benefit is positive to society.

Money and wealth aren't directly connected (IMHO a critical and underrated aspect of understanding real-world economics), and it is true that money rarely justs evaporates. Wealth can, though, and even merely inefficiently applying money can build up to an opportunity cost. There were better things to do with that money than to spend effort making it, then piss it away.

Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose?

It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option.

Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.

I am refusing to be backed into the corner you're painting with your hypotheticals, yes.

I think we'll have to simply disagree here. I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.

If deepwater oil drilling cannot be done without a near 100% guarantee against disasters like this one, then I simply think it shouldn't be done. I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.

Well, what percent guarantee would you need? Is 99.9% per year per well good enough? 99.999%? Seven nines? And how do you propose to measure that risk? These types of situations are after all inherently unforeseen.

Anyway, by admitting that a near 100% guarantee is good enough for you (no matter what that "near" is), you've admitted that you're willing to put a price on it. That price is, naturally, the dollar amount that would be required to reach the level of guarantee you want. So yes, the rest of this conversation has just been you being difficult.

I am a virtue ethicist for consequentialist reasons. While good results (consequences) are the end of my ethics, the real world is too complex for a real time evaluation of the likely results of even relatively simple decisions. So you use virtues (my definition is slightly non-standard) - rules that are more likely than not to result in better outcomes.

in a discussion on Less Wrong http://lesswrong.com/lw/2aa/virtue_ethics_for_consequentiali... early this month.

Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed.

Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything.

Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster.

Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.

Sure you did; you were just passive-aggressive about it with that "to be polite" bit at the start. You're the one who took the dialogue to this level. I'm just more direct.

> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster

Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner. There are other adjectives to describe it but I think the one I've already used is apt. Anyway, I'm sure you don't mean this, or wouldn't if you would just think about what you're asking for for a second. Since I can't seem to get a thoughtful, honest answer out of you, continuing this is probably not productive . . . although that was probably true several posts ago.

But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?

That said, by allowing for a dollar cost thaumaturgy was not holding the debate hostage. In fact, he accepted your challenge to debate him in the frame of reference YOU set up. A frame of reference which, btw, is not the only one in common use to decide such questions.

What you need to respond with now to keep your credibility is whether the 'true' dollar cost is:

a) The cost to mitigate every single effect from the disaster.

or

b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells then perhaps we should explore them rather than drilling.

It's not an ethical impossibility. It's a pragmatic imperative. AND it's the root of the entire conversation. It's what I started this comment tree about! How can it possibly be holding up the debate to talk about it?

> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible. Some obvious things I don't really care about are restoring BPs bottom-line to its pre-disaster levels. As a general rule I'm also not interested in paying to mitigate damage to wildlife that would fall under ICUN's Least Concern designation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_Concern) even after all harm to populations from the spill are taken into account. I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.

Endangered animals I do want to protect, but once again there's a line somewhere (I don't know where) where their protection costs more than its worth. For example, if there is a rare mosquito in the marshes of southern Louisiana that ends up being wiped out entirely because of this crisis, I would not assign a cost of a billion dollars to that lost. Some cost, yes, but not a billion dollars.

If the oil slick bears out to be very large but cause small or questionable harm across a huge region, I also don't think we should necessarily spend money compensating the victims of such small harms. (For example, even if the oil spill stopped now some amount of oil would probably disperse even as far as the west coast of the U.S. after enough time.) To assign a metric, if the amount of compensation we might provide to a given victim is less than ten times the administrative cost of giving that compensation, we should not compensate.

Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up. Obviously this would be a really bad trade because the fishing in that region accounts for a much smaller portion of GDP than a quarter. BP should have to pay to support the people in that region, but realistically even the profits of an oil giant like BP would quickly be quenched under such a deluge of liability. Maybe the government can help them move and pay for their retraining, but in the end there is no point throwing good money after bad. They would need to do something else or maybe relocate to another place.

Obviously all these numbers are sketches. I can hardly tell you what the actual numbers are (if you'll recall, my initial comment was a request for speculation on what that number might be). But there is no question that there is a number, or a range of reasonable numbers, to describe the cost of this disaster.

> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .

That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling? We are talking about whether it makes sense to assign a numeric cost to the disaster, which it obviously does.

> Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible.

So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?

> I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.

Often yes I agree with you. Although that is not an absolute. Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem so the extinction of a species not directly used by humans may cause difficulties if it is necessary for the continued survival of another species which IS directly used by humans.

> Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up.

Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!

:)

>> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .

> That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling?

My bad, I completely misread you.

I think you will be sympathetic to my mistake given that cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms are so commonly used to justify ideas that would still be bad no matter how good the numbers looked.

No, I'm quantifying it in terms of how much I'd want to see paid to avoid that outcome, or in terms of how much would need to be spent to "make it right" to my own satisfaction. There's nothing about such a quantification that is entropically impossible. Put another way, there's basically no possible outcome of this disaster that you could not pay me _some_ amount of money to endure. But the amount might have to be very high.

> Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem . . .

I agreed elsewhere that that would have to be taken into account when calculating the total cost.

> Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!

Yeah, that's pretty bad, right? Hopefully that is the worst case scenario, but I'm no biologist so I'd have to leave that to them. One of my friends tells me that oil does break down in water over time and that it is unlikely it would be that bad.

But even if that were to happen, life would go on, albeit worse than before. This account of the after affects of the gulf war spill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) gives me some hope that although there will doubtless be great harm from this spill, it is not going to be the end of the world.

> cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms

OK, I see where you are coming from. I am entirely amenable to the outcome being that offshore drilling is not worth it given the extent of this disaster. Personally I think gasoline should cost much more than it does in the U.S. today, and that would go some way toward making that a reality. But I do want to look at it honestly.

That's nice, but how about some evidence. After all, you're wanting to spend a lot of money.

> I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether you agree with the statement, your actions "put a price" on the existence many species. You may not want that to be true, but it is.

As a result, the question really is "What is the price?", not "Do you want to put a price on it?"

We inherently place importance on things by a) spending time on those things, or b) spending money we earned by working on those things.

> "Consider the effort to save the modern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs -- that is, the income surrendered by the logging company and others -- would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million an owl."

This is followed by a list used by the state of Connecticut in determining the amount of compensation allocated to work-related incidents - a specific value for the dismemberment of each body part.

The OP's point wasn't that this habit of affixing values is ethical, or even wanted, but that it is possible. You are arguing that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) it is not wanted.

The first is not true because thought experiments usually are ridiculous (hence the qualifier 'if') and even if this were not so, as the Freakonomics example shows, there are certain instances in real life where you would have to put a dollar value on a 'priceless' transaction in order for things to work.

And the second is also mistaken because, while something may not be nice to think about, that fact doesn't detract from the fact that it can be done, and is done, sometimes for good reason.

Quoting the figure that way is really strange. The relevant thing isn't the cost per owl alive now but either the cost per owl potentially alive now and in the future (probably with some discount rate) or the cost for the species considered as a whole.

Imagine three alternative worlds. One is ours. One has 10x as many spotted owls currently alive. One has 1/10 as many. In all of them, the owls will (all) go extinct unless we spend $46bn. Does it really make sense to say that in one case the cost is $900k/owl, in another it's $9M/owl, and in another it's $90M/owl? Is there any plausible belief about the value of these owls that would say we should be willing to pay 100x more to prevent extinction in the case where there are 50k of them rather than 500?

(It would probably make sense to pay some more when the population is larger. Larger population now means (a) probably larger populations in the future if extinction is averted and (b) better prospects that avoiding extinction now really will avoid extinction for longer. But I don't see any reason to think that either of these is simply proportional to the present population, or anything like it.)

Air for electricity. Risk (ie, life) for progress.

The choices have been made before, and will be made in the future. Refusing to admit that such choices exist is your choice... but then how do you explain reality? Doublethink?

You and I disagree on the ability to measure disasters in terms of money. OK, how about this: let's measure it in terms of Iraq wars.

If you had the choice to put our national/world life through this N times or the Iraq war once, how large is N?

There's no such thing as 'priceless'. The Mona Lisa is worth more than $10 million but certainly less than $10 billion. Same for David or the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure these treasures are also insured for some fixed amount too. We may call them 'priceless' mainly because they can't be replaced, not because they actually have infinite value.

Most museums of the type of the Louvre carry no insurance. The premiums are out of their budgets, which are usually state / ticket sales funded, and there are major valuation problems on irreplaceable artworks, as you have pointed out. Musuems probably spend more money on public liability insurance than they do on their artworks.

Instead they put the money they would have spent on premiums into fire and security systems, and 'self insure' to an extent.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 'priceless' is actually originally a technical insurance term, like 'write off' that has entered the lexicon (probably not true, just using it to make a point)

disclosure : used to do some coding for one of the worlds 'great' museums, learned a lot of this stuff.

You haven't convinced me that everything has a price. Here, you cannot predict the result therefore you cannot predict the cost value of the result. There's an easier way of stating that: it's priceless.

For arguments sake though, what is the dollar figure you require to murder all your friends, all your family and then commit suicide ... can't be priceless so are we talking $10,000 or closer to $10,000,000,000?

They'd have to be some pretty damn awesome people I'm saving, and there'd have to be no other way. I wouldn't do it for poor starving people in Africa, that's for sure (You could probably save the lives of a million Africans for a lot less than you'd think . . . I wouldn't murder everyone I knew for a billion dollars and that would probably be enough to save a million African lives. Yeah, I'm a little selfish.). But you're right, there is a price. I'd certainly do it to save the entirety of the remainder of humanity. But even then you'd have to convince me that you could deliver on a promise like that, and I'm a tough sell.

But since we're not dealing with a dollar figure, as your original post indicated and many of your follow ups required, you're right. Nothing is priceless and in exchange for killing off an entire species I require everlasting world peace. Make it so, number 1.

Probably north of a hundred billion dollars but south of ten trillion. I know it's a big range, but for some amount of money in there I'd probably do it.

> Nothing is priceless and in exchange for killing off an entire species I require everlasting world peace.

LOL. How much money would it cost to provide everlasting peace? Probably far more than the total economic output of the world in a year (that's sixty-six trillion dollars). Let's suppose you could do it for just sixty-six. That means sixty-five is not enough, and you'd prefer to save some species from extinction rather than receive sixty-five trillion dollars. Really?

So you could either have twelve thousand years worth of National Cancer Institute research. Or you could save this (http://www.lmrcc.org/Ecosystempage1_html/E-T%20Species/LA%20...). I can't really understand your prioritization, and I vehemently disagree.

With so many arbitrary qualifications there, how could you begin to evaluate the net result? Or simply, what is "at least as good as"?

> How much money would it cost to provide everlasting peace? Probably far more than the total economic output of the world in a year (that's sixty-six trillion dollars).

Continuing with the hypothetical, the species that will disappear would have prevented a global pandemic that wipes out all of humanity. And here you weren't willing to pass on a single years worth of global economic output to save the species that saved humanity. How could you! I can't really understand your prioritization, and I vehemently disagree.

There's a Zen koan that I'm going to murder here:

A boy in a village falls from his horse and breaks his leg. The village elders gather around the monk and cry "oh no, how terrible! isn't this sad for the boy to break his leg?" To which the monk replies "perhaps it is, perhaps it is not". The elders walk away in bemusement. A week passes and the despot ruler of the kindom declares war against a peaceful neighbor. Soldiers come to the village to round up all the able young men to fight. The boy with the broken leg is passed over. The village elders gather around the monk and cry "oh how fortunate for the boy to have broken his leg so that he does not have to go off to war and die! isn't it fortunate for the boy?" To which the monk replies "perhaps it is, perhaps it is not".

It's a Zen koan, so the meaning is probably buried layer under layer (assuming there's a meaning at all). But perhaps it means that everything is priceless because you can never know the real value of anything.

You've just changed the hypothesis in order to ridicule it. Playing a different game and saying "see? I won" is worthless. If you had stated that previously, I'm sure effectively everyone in the world would have agreed that a year's global output would be worth saving it - it also saves them.

Without that part of the hypothesis, there's the vanishingly-small chance that this could actually happen. As it could happen, it should be factored into any of the replies... but at what probability? Certainly not 100%. And as we are not yet extinct, but have been around for / caused the extinction of thousands of species...

Not that it can't happen, just that it would be an exceptionally unlikely occurrence, and should be treated as such. It's entirely possible that, on your next inhale, you'll die. Will you hold your breath until you die to prevent it?

It's not always easy to estimate large prices . . . that doesn't mean there isn't one.

> Continuing with the hypothetical, the species that will disappear would have prevented a global pandemic that wipes out all of humanity

I can see why you would factor that into your estimate, considering there have been so many species to go extinct so far that have had that property.

The difference between your part of the hypothetical and mine is that mine is a likely understatement of the costs for your demand, and yours is a likely overstatement of the value of an extinct species.

Let's put it another way where quibbles over estimates and hypotheticals would not come into play. You said that the minimum you would accept for one extinct species is world peace. That means that any less value than world peace per extinct species is not sufficient.

So if I were to offer you world peace in exchange for two extinct species, you would presumably turn that offer down. Say, this species of mussels and a species of bottle fly. Now I very much doubt that this is actually true: you seem to be more than capable of putting two and two together. But it does mean that your claim that world peace was your minimum price for an extinction was false.

There isn't one. There are multiple guesses all based upon assumptions and limited knowledge.

Here's an example:

m: I have a book, how much will you give me for it?

f: Uh, nothing, I don't want a random book.

m: I forgot to mention it's a first printing Tom Sawyer.

f: Oh, ok. I'll give you $10 for it.

m: Collectors regularly pay $5000 for it.

f: OK. How about $1000?

m: It's signed by Mark Twain.

f: $2000?

m: It's missing a cover.

f: $500?

etc.

Which value was the true value of the book?

Value is entirely contingent upon knowledge, which is always imperfect. Given just two pieces of information - the oil spill is damaging the environment and a species may become extinct - it is entirely within the realm of reason to state that there is no dollar value that can be assigned to that extinction. Therefore that species becomes priceless. Given more information the value of the species may become something less than priceless. And given even more information the value may become priceless once again.

There is no species or even combination of species that is threatened by this oil spill that is LIKELY to have anywhere near the value you have assigned by any rational measure. That's my point. If you can't address that point, then there's really nothing more to discuss.

You're certainly free to guess at any value you wish for any thing you think of. The validity of your guesses will always be directly proportional to the limited extent of your knowledge on the thing. Ultimately, you appear to assign far too much value to the concept of value.

The problem is we rely on other species for our own survival. And the vast web of interconnected life is so complex we don't even know which species are crucial and which are not (we have an idea in some cases, but very few).

Other species manufacture the air we breathe. The current inter-species balance in the oceans is why they're not teeming with jellyfish and nothing else.

We absolutely rely on many other species, even ocean species, for our survival, and we don't completely understand which ones matter to us most. We are part of a huge interspecies network. We do not stand alone, even though it's easy to think so living among all our manufactured artifacts.

Viscerally, I definitely care much more about other humans than I do about some eels or whatnot in the Gulf. But my relative sense of attachment to people and other species, evolved over eons, doesn't necessarily reflect the truth of our interdependence.

EDIT: Grammar

Why is it such a hard leap that the DNA of recently extinct (as in holding the last one in your hands) cannot be recovered and used to perform similar methods. If you've got the species you can harvest the eggs and sperm and produce thousands of offspring.

It's exceptionally naive to say "no amount of money can bring back extinct species" because you just have no grasp of what money can actually buy. If I can harvest the complete DNA of several animals from one species, including their mitochondrial, you can easily reproduce the species by emptying one of the species native eggs and filling it with the harvested foreign material, by all standards that I've read it should survive until gestation (assuming regular IVF failure rates for the species) and resurrect a species.

You don't need an African Elephant to give birth to African Elephant babies, because an Asian Elephant will do a suitable job. In fact it's believed an African (IIRC) elephant would be a suitable enough host to resurrect a mammoth (mitochondrial DNA would be required due to its specializations).

Please any amount of money can do virtually anything. It's currently engineeringly feasible to construct a gigantic nuclear powered mass driver on the moon to turn it into a world ship . . . or alternatively a massive billiard ball to explode mercury with. It's far, far, far from practical, but screw radiation shielding and deploy a few gigantic RTG's onto the moon and your money is getting what you want.

Money is a direct equivalent to resources, which is the entire point of why we use it as a common currency instead of arguing over how much steel a bar of gold is worth and how many bars of gold it would take to turn said steel into a car. If you have the money/resources, you can do anything physically possible.

People believe a lot of things.

The difference between a scientist and an armchair philosopher is that the scientist knows how many tedious hours of painstaking work, followed by screwups, followed by more painstaking work, followed by the tiniest of advances, followed by a setback, followed by more work are necessary before the theoretically possible becomes the known to be possible... or, more likely, the oops, not quite so simple as we thought.

Here's the state of the art in cross-species surrogate motherhood according to an actual biologist:

http://www.askascientist.org/askascientist/answers/how_would...

"There are few successful examples of cross-species nuclear transfer to date. The most publicized case was the cloning of a gaur, an endangered Asian ox, but the calf died two days after birth. Other efforts are ongoing, but questions remain about the incompatibility of nuclear DNA from one species with the mitochondrial DNA and cellular environment of another species."

"Nuclear transfer has been suggested as a way to restore endangered or extinct species. There are a number of problems with this idea. First, the procedure is only possible when intact cells are still available, so long-extinct species cannot be restored. Second, it is difficult and expensive, so it would be feasible only for producing one animal or a few. With only a few animals to start a new population, there would be little genetic variation and the population would be susceptible to extinction factors such as disease. (Incidentally, if only one cloned animal was produced and then backcrossed to a closely related species, the effect on taxonomy would be negligible—similar to a single hybridization event.) Finally, cloning does not address the root cause of extinction, which is usually destruction of habitat. Despite technological advancements, habitat preservation is still the most effective way to save endangered species."

Possibly a small one. It would vaporize a large volume of water around the blast, leading to a vast surge in pressure, and as we all know, water isn't compressible. So you'd have a large pressure wave expanding away from the blast, followed by a trough when the vaporized region cooled, forming a partial vacuum and the area collapsed. It would be like a small version of a megathrust fault.

Fortunately however, the amount of energy even our larger H-bombs can release that way is miniscule compared to what a real megathrust fault would release, so the wave would probably not be much more than a slightly rougher surf for the nearest coastlines.

Lakeview Gusher: around 9 million barrels, est. Gulf War Spill: around 6 to 11 million barrels

Deepwater Horizon has a ways to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill#Largest_oil_spills

#2 On land, relatively easy to cleanup, but expensive

#3 5000 ft underwater....expensive

How is the oil flow being contained, and how effective is this - remembering there may be billions of barrels to be contained...

What percentage of the oil will be sub-surface - a lot harder to contain. And how can this be contained?

What are the flow-on effects of a possible sea-floor collapse and how much of an impact will this have on the structure of the gulf?

And then the overriding question of all - is it worth it?

If there is a relatively easy way to extract crude from the water, it may in fact be more economically feasible to extract the oil by destroying the well than to repair the well itself. Of course, none of this is taking into account the environmental impact...

The problem with those plumes is that bacteria eats the oil, and then breeds. Those organisms use up the oxygen in the water, leaving a dead zone unfit for life. There was already a decent sized dead zone from the Mississippi, but this has the potential to dwarf it.

Water is heavy. 5000 feet of it is a whole lot of pressure that such a tunnel would have to withstand.

The "simplest solution" is often one that is completely impractical given the facts.

There are few strong currents in the Gulf - it is a source for the Gulf Stream, but internal currents are fairly weak compared with those dealt with regularly in the oceans.

I don't think the solution is practical in this case for various other reasons, but the fact that offshore platforms exist incites me to think that long, underwater pipes can in fact resist ocean currents. They will also be naturally buoyant so long as there's enough air pockets in the material (or just floaters as the other person posted).

In other words, even if it's filled with water at 5000 feet of equal pressure, isn't there still a much greater pressure exerted on the pipe's walls at 5000 feet than there is at 100 feet?

Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental about water pressure?

According to this ( http://www.calctool.org/CALC/other/games/depth_press ) the pressure would be around 15 MPa (this isn't hard to calculate by hand either). Consider that the mud/oil pushes 15 MPa, and water the same: that gives 30 MPa of purely compressive stress. Concrete could take this much ( http://www.cement.org/basics/concretebasics_faqs.asp ), and steel even more easily ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_strength -- if I'm not mistaken, steel behaves roughly the same in compression and in tension).

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

-- H.L. Mencken

Building things in water is many many times more complicated than the same things not in water. Which is why deep sea drilling is so controversial to begin with.

Flash forward a few crazy ideas (namely tossing a bunch of trash into the BOP to try and clog it) and they went back to a similar method called the LMRP. This time they sawed off the riser from the BOP so that the opening was flush and designed a containment cap that fit better around it than before (less of a chance for water to mix in and make the hydrate crystals) and developed a system that continually pumps hot sea water and methanol down the pipe to also help tap down on the hydrates. This method is actually gathering oil, but since they sawed off the riser a lot more oil started leaking so the net result is even more oil is getting into the ocean. BP hasn't "sealed" the LMRP for fear that it will blow out the BOP, which is pretty much what the Mother Jones piece is about.

tl;dr they have and it's not that easy.

It seems the article was too long for many people's patience/understanding threshold.

You decide that you need to stop it up, so you place the top of a bird-bath over it, upside down. How well do you think that will work?

The sea floor is not made of bedrock.

Relief wells must be made MANDATORY or we've learned nothing and it will happen again.

BP's deepwater Atlantis is poised to do the same thing in our lifetimes.

Rumors.