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(the mechabolic hypothesis started from a series of email exchanges in the fall and winter of 06. excerpts from the conversation are copied below.)

Sent: 9/21/06
From jim mason
To: xxxxxxx
Subject: a thesis?

. . . which begs a thesis i have been playing with for a couple months.
i think you might find it curious. here's the gist.

the more i play with all the biomass based fuel things and their
related combustion machines, the more i'm realizing all this as the
third leg of the grand artificial life project of replicating
ourselves: the other two being mechanical robotics and AI as digital
machine intelligence/cognition.

this bio immitative metabolic project is seldom called out as such,
but it is the core project of the history of development of heat
engines, and the various fuels that have been used to power them. all
of which are ultimately solar radiation endothermically sprung into
cabrohydrates/hydrocarbons, which are then unspring exothermically
through oxidation back to heat and co2. which then is restructured
back into biomass again through photosynthesis.

whether food or fuel, animals or engines, it is the same chemical
process, partaking of the same inputs, exhaling the same exhausts.
fuel, machines and fire as the synthetic forms of food, body and
respiration. hmmm . . . sounds like an up and coming burning man
theme, minus the green-meanie thing . . .

oddly, the early part of the history of immitating the animal
respiration with mechanical heat engines was fed with mostly biomass
sources- from whale oil to veg oil to wood manufactured gaseous fuels
to sweage digested methane. only very late in the project did
underground petro based stuff become viable and so densely sourced
that all the rest was soon forgotten, and its bio immitative origins
concealed. which oddly, is all that is reappearing currently as we
have found various issues with petro sourced hydrocarbons and are
working to reorient our machines of artifical respiration towards
other sources of oxidation ready input.

so somewhere in all of this, the project to save the world seems to be
some sort of artistic mashup of the man/machine metabolic/pyro soup
with the general aesthetic and pleasures of 50/60s gearhead hotrod
culture. and big fire art of course, fed with esoteric organic fuels.
biotech not as a medical idiom or project of physical flesh syn
architecture, but as a play and creative engagement with the sensual
pleasures of mechanical metabolism, fire and noise, as manifested
through the v-8 and its fuel/food preps.

all in all, this alt energy thing really shouldn't be a hippie
ludditite green narrative of sin and renunciation of consumption, but
rather a geek hack project of manipulating artificial life machines
and their variable bio/syn fuels. a lego code hack of organic
chemistry. ingesting municipal trash, tires, wood waste and
agricultural debris to produce the usual heat to mechanical energy to
electrical energy that has fueled most of the gig for the last
century, but mostly invisibly, and without much concern for the larger
cycles in which this energy exchange partakes.

i'm finding the positive artificial life play with the wild diversity
of carbon transactions, reckoned through big machines and fire, to be
vastly more interesting than any environmental narrative of guilt and
sin i've yet to hear. that all this should be drag racing and open
source code hacking in the service of creative play, self-expression
and general competitive customization, done in social ground up
collaboration, rather that all that it is currently.

thus the all power network and a gasifier fueled edsel bonneville land
speed record attempt and 1600gal of matthew barney vasoline powering a
container camp squat art space in berkeley.

you see anything here?

do you think any of this has legs?

j

--------------------------------------------------------------------

9.21.06
later restatement of the above

i'm starting to see all this alt fuel thing as really an artificial
life endeavor. the third leg of the grand arc engineering project of
replicating and elaborating the human animal. but a third leg we oddly
never call out as such.

mechanical engineering has broadly been the replication and expansion
of the physical body. artificial intelligence the replication and
expansion of cognition. with both now together as robotics. seems
that heat engines and their varied fuel preparations are the artifical
metabolic system that powers all this. without metabolism through
oxidative respiration, there is no life. nor is there heat to
mechanical energy to electrical energy, which powers all industrial
process. this oxidative metabolism is what powers all bio physical
and cognitive entities. but the synthetic forms of this metabolism
are largely ignored as a major challenge of artificial life endeavors.

i'm starting to see power engineering as nothing other than the
replication and expansion of the organic chemistry of life. all
biomass based energy work is immitative of the natural transactions
around carbon and hydrogen, ultimately fueled by solar radiation.
petroleum was an easy to way to ignore it and just input ready made
products from ancient and dense underground sources (which were at
one time solar energy packed and stored into the form of
carbohydrates). sustainable biomass sources require engagement with
contemporary carbon and solar transactions- whether through their
forms of photosynthesis to carbohydrates to animal respiration, or
through the gasifier/digestor preparations of hydrocarbons to
combustion to mechanical energy to electrical energy.

somehow i think there is art here. but haven't quite figured it out
yet. though i think it looks somehting like this . . .

here's a musing from the shipyard list today about such that i though
you might enjoy.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

from the shipyard list:
subject: scented fuels
date: today

continuing on the idea of "fuel is food" for the metabolic needs of
our artifical life machines. injesting the same
hydrocarbons/carbohydrates that we do, exhaling the same co2 and h2o
as we do. all of which goes round and round in the fabulous organic
chemistry of life. with solar radiation providing the power to
endothermically restructure the C and H into better sprung forms, so
we can "burn" it again, exhaling heat and co2 and h2o again. reminding
us yet again that the world is on fire. and man and machine burn
through largely the same respiratory process, through largely the same
chemical transformations. (the gasifier being the stomach in all
this. the v-8 being the lungs and blood.)

but as we don't treat our "energy needs" as a raw energy problem, but
rather as the creative idiom of "cuisine" in all its forms, whereby we
find sensual pleasure, sociality, relationship to land and distant
cultures, etc etc, it seems that we should show our machines the same
respect, and enjoy the pleasures of better fuels with them, instead of
suffering with the junk we usually feed them. that as we power
ourselves with pleasure, we should also power our machines with
pleasure. we could all eat gruel and live. but who does? no one.

therefore it seems there is an opportunity in the biodiesel industry
to sell scented fules. fuel alcohols as well.

imagine that when you were buying your biodiesel, you had a choice of
"indian", "thai", "italian", "sushi", etc. that you could choose the
oil base of the fuel you were buying, and have to pay differently
depending on what it was, and how pleasant it is to smell while you
are driving. instead of different octane grades, you have choices of
smell. with all the jokes and play that follows.

smell is one of the few direct sensory returns from fuel, other than
ones in the imagination (which maybe are mostly of interest to me), so
smell seems the place to differentiate them.

the smell industry is giant. the car customization industry is giant.
as soon as there is opportunity for vanity and distinguishing oneself
through customization, people will pay. and in doing so often pursue
things of greater quality and creativity in the process.

which is the critical turn we need to make with fuels.

fuel should not be an invisible need fulfillment problem. a zero sum
game of solving a problem so we can forget about it, only concerned
with economic optimization. but rather relearning it as an expressive
medium, whereby we can get past zero and into other areas of interest
with it. pleasure, play, learning, humor, community, etc.

and thereby release fuels from their raw btu/$ calculus, and open them
into a realm where much more than btus are being transacted. when was
the last time you saw food in the market costed by the calorie? i've
never seen a food label that said, "these noodles are 10cal/cent."
which is essentially how we label the food for our mechanical animals.

it seems to me that the personal meaning and opportunities of fuel for
our machines are as rich as food for ourselves- which long ago left
the realm of raw starch and burned meat.

but currently there is no where to buy such "otherwise" distinguished
fuels. hmmm . . .

j

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sent: 12/20
From: Nesdon booth
Subject: Re: the mechabolic project

Maybe it will need to be scaled back, but I really think the idea of trying to make energy policy more comprehensible by modeling it as metabolism is truely inspired. I look at the way we cut our power consumption in the yard when the pEEfomatic was installed, and how that feedback of systems that we normally keep invisible is a powerful interpretive tool to understand and control them. And this project which models machine energy conversion as biologic metabolism anabolism and catabolism is jsut such a tool.

. . .

It is Gaia theory that I imagine in all this. Gaia gets a bit of a bum rap from the scientific community as it was so quickly taken up by the oobie dooers, and Lovelock hit the metaphor of one global cell a bit too hard. But his idea for Gaia came out of his work for the Viking Mars Landers. He worked on ways to distinguish between biological and geological chemical processes. It is interesting that the results from Viking are still ambiguous.

His central epiphany was the our atmosphere is extremely unstable chemically, and by all rights should have evolved to very stable atmosheres like mars and venus both have. But ice cores and other data all suggest that our atmosphere has been incredibly stable over a very long periods, in fact more stable than many of the important inputs, such as insolance, which vary in both short and long term trends would suggest. His inevitable and I think correct conclusion was that collectively, life on earth has coevolved with the soil and the atmosphere to form a homeostatic system whereby crucial compounds are maintained at optimum levels for the continuation of life. This is surprisingly analogous to what living things in fact do within their tissues. It does look very much like the global ecosystem functions in many ways like a single large organism.

He suggested a thought experiment he called Daisy World, whereby populations of daisies (good old asteraceas) with white and black indviuals might evolve to vary the proportion of white to black to compensate for the historic change in insolence (a star's output grows steadily over time, up to a point) by altering the albedo (more black and more heat is absorbed, more white and more heat is reflected) and thereby maintaining a constant pro-daisy local temperature.

In unfathomably complex ways we all collaborate (I think the soil bacteria and phytoplankton still have a little edge on us, but not for long) to make this world inhabitable. All of the engines we have built, we have built essentially as cyborgs, to augment our natual human functions. Since they are all conceived in this anthropomorphic process, and then must function within this lifelike global ecosystem, they are fairly literally part of the metabolic functions of Gaia.

That's why I think this Mech-A-Bolic thing is such a damned good idea. I'm not sure how to make it doable. I will certianly put my rhetorical shoulder against the Bmorg wheel and help however else I can.

Nesdon

---------------------------------------------------------

Sent: 12/20/06
From: jim mason
Subject: the cyborg gaia idea

also remember, the system being suggested in all this is not really a
single animal organism, but the larger marco-metabolism of solar
energy and co2 through photosynthesis to carbohydrates to heat, motion
and exhalation of co2 back into the atmosphere, so that solar
radiation can start it again. a giant planetary system of power
conversion, driven by the sun.

that is the larger metabolism of interest here. with our industrial
machines and fuel preps, we are still rather fragmented in all this.
we have the respiration part down near perfect. but our
carbohydrate/hydrocarbon preps are a complete mess, as in we take them
out of the ground, and don't deal with any contemporary
photosynthesis.

and to the degree that we are trying to harvest solar to run this
synthetic macro-metabolic machine, we are trying to use pv, which is
equally fragmenting of hte larger system. yes, pv is great, but it
has little imaginative potential when trying to get our minds around
the larger system.

and in absolute terms, the more i read on this, the more i see that
the biomass based inputs into our existing MASSIVE infrastructure of
synthetic respiratory machines, is what is going to make the biggest
dent in all this. not the silver bullet. but likely the most
important comonent that can change. well, that and nuclear. all
projections for pv are not impressive. about 90% of current energy
use on the planet is petro based. yes, even hydro and nuclear is that
small. all this petro fuel is burned in machines of synthetic
respiration that can already use biofuels with very minor
modifications.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

1.27.06
From: jim mason
Subject: GMO

the more i listen to the energy debate, the more i hear
two strains of cultural bias. one is "go back to nature", which all
the associated ludditeism and wishes for a non-consumist, non-stuff
based life, and the other is "go forward to artificial life", which is
arguing the good of GMO, active hacking of the biosphere, and general
techincal solutions.

nesdon's previous post about the corallary of the gaia hypothesis,
that we are collaborators in the atmosphere, and it has evolved with
us. not just humans. but all life. all organic life is part of the
larger biosphere organism.

it seems to me that humans, as fundamentally tool making creatures,
have made synthetic metabolic machines of such size at this point that
we have injected a new type of species into this biosphere. i don't
think we can go back to a pre mechanized time. our machines are us.
and as we had the power to mess up the atmosphere through them, we
also have the power to fix the problems with them. but NOT by
returning it to how it was. but rather, by hacking to get to the
desired end state.

i'm starting to called this the "mechabolic hypotheis". that global
metabolism is now primarily a cyborg entity, as we need to more
thoughfully operate our machines of mechanical metabolism within it.

given thus, we should look around for greenhouse gas mitigating
gestures. the one i'm seeing as the biggest lever is methane.
methane is like 4x or 5x the effect as co2. if we could reduce
methane faster than we are adding problematic co2 from non
contemporary sources, we could get to a statis we like better.

the biggest source of methane is all the rotting stuff on the planet,
made worse by biodegrable consumer products, and worse of all, hippies
composting things. all organic matter put into the ground in these
manners, rots and produces large amounts of methane (ch4).

it would be vastly better if we collected up all the waste biomass and
"burned" it through thoughtful gasification, mining its energy as it
is returning back to the atmostphere as co2, all the while generating
a high carbon ash that is a vastly better fertilizer than just organic
mulch. this is the terra preta soils in the aztec amazon.
charcoalized soils. also why things grow so well on volcanos in
hawaii.

interestingly, such a char/ash out of gasifiers would allow us to use
an already existing global infrasture for carbon sequestration. it is
called agriculture.

redistribute the char/ash as fertilizer, burying it in the ground,
where it is now out of the atmosphere.

there would be some balance in here where you are reutrning enough
better char/ash as fertilizer to replenish the soil, while mining all
of its energy that wouldl have otherwise been lost when it just rotted
into the ground.

given all this, i believe i can make a sound argument that a systemic
approach to gasification is a carbon NEGATIVE energy system. and one
that produces heat, power, fuels and fertilizer in the process.

is this bullshit? i think this argument is correct.

can someone help me see where it is wrong?

j