Wandering Adventure Party

If the hybrid population is fertile, it has at least as much survival fitness as the “best” of the parents. But probably more because it can couple advantageous traits from both for that environment.

So, in this case, it’s better to be pessimistic: they’ll be probably fast breeders, massive colony makers and rapid spreaders, since all those traits would help them to spread further.

Last time I heard about reverse osmosis it was about water purification, exploiting that water molecules are tiny and ions + organic molecules are bulky. I’m glad to see the tech finding its way into other processes though - specially oil refining, the current solution (fractional distillation) is basically “use lots of energy to boil it, then use even more energy to condensate it”.

They achieve this using membranes produced by interfacial polymerisation. This technique, which traditionally involves dissolving the two monomers – one in water and one in an organic solvent – to form a crosslinked polymer at the interface, is therefore highly attractive for scalable production of hydrocarbon-separation membranes.

That’s quite smart.

I’m aware some energy is recycled, and I do think we (humankind as a whole) need to phase fossil fuels out. But even then, we’ll still need petrochemicals - and I’m hoping this sort of membrane eventually makes them cheaper, when used instead or alongside fractioning columns.

Hydrogen from syngas (thus ammonia), sulphur (thus sulphuric acid), ethylene, benzene, and so many others, they’re used for absolutely everything: fertilisers, medication, explosives, solvents, detergent, dyes. Even a good chunk of the industrial ethanol comes from ethylene.

And as you hinted, plastics. We still need them for water tubes, computers, and everything else.

So even in a future where we stop doing stupid shit like literally burning old dino juice, and we reduce the amount of plastics to reasonable levels, we’re still going to need petrochemicals.

I hope this research leads to the replacement of some oil-based polymers. And, additionally, I think we should decrease our reliance on industrial polymers, my balls already have enough microplastics; even if they come from a cleaner source, their presence in nature is problematic.