The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach writes about the new toilets being delivered to the International Space Station on Space Shuttle Endeavour, which recycle human waste into drinkable water:

“Standing between the urine and the consumable end product are muscular apparatus that distill, filter, heat and chemically transmogrify the liquid. The instruments include a catalytic reactor, a gas separator, multi-filtration beds, a particulate filter, a reactor health sensor, a microbial check valve, a fluids control and pump assembly, and a pressure control and purge assembly. This removes almost all the organic molecules from the liquid.” 

Love the use of the word “transmogrify.” And ”almost.” 

On a related topic, I’ve been reading a paper by Jason Matheny, “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction” which, aside from being highly humorous in spots (for those of us with a dark sense of it), is an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of preventing human extinction. In other words, “How much is it worth to save humanity?”

Naturally, one of the options discussed is avoiding total human extinction by isolating or sheltering some people from the risk of earth-based catastrophic events such as asteroid impacts, pandemics (natural or man-made), nuclear war, Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) from nearby stars, and drastic climate change. Means of achieving this could be in the form of Earth-based sheltered communities, or space-based colonies in Earth orbit, or on the Moon, Mars, etc. In any of these cases, such recycling technology as Joel describes would be required for self-sustaining communities with few outside resources available, particularly water.

Matheny’s paper is a little dated in spots (it was published a year ago):
“For instance, if we invest our money now in a stock market with an average 5% real annual return, in a century we will have 130 times more money to spend on extinction countermeasures (assuming we survive the century). This reasoning could be extended indefinitely (as long as we survive). This could be an argument for investing in stocks rather than extinction countermeasures if: the rate of return on capital is exogenous to the rate of social savings, the average rate of return on capital is higher than the rate of technological change in extinction countermeasures, and the marginal cost effectiveness of extinction countermeasures does not decrease at a rate equal to or greater than the return on capital.”

As if the state of my 401K isn’t enough to make me want to jump off of a building?

It seems that NASA is shooting for the stars with these state-of-the (ahem) art recycling toilets, and perhaps we will need something like them if we decide that we’re worth insuring over the long term. To that end, I’ve counseled my children to reconsider their plans for law school in favor of a future in plumbing after getting a Bachelor’s in Information Technology, of course. [This could position them well for an early career for data waste management in Government IT shops before blasting off into the Wild Blue Yonder of solid and liquid waste management for NASA.] 

Something that NASA nor Joel mention, though would be much on my mind — recycling human waste in a closed environment would be one thing, and even turning the solid waste into some sort of compost or fertilizer to grow fresh foods would be acceptable, but somebody needs to figure out how to develop an add-on to this Galactic Standard Techno-Throne system for recycling toilet paper, pronto.

Well, and there do not appear to be any special instructions for jiggling the high-tech handle, either. I would think this would be very important in orbit, where the nearest plumber is 200 miles away and falling behind at 17,000 miles an hour.

I’ll leave you with a thought from Matheny’s paper:

“Farthest out in time are astronomical risks. In one billion years, the sun will begin its red giant stage, increasing terrestrial temperatures above 1,000 degrees, boiling off our atmosphere, and eventually forming a planetary nebula, making Earth inhospitable to life (Sackmann, Boothroyd, & Kraemer, 1993; Ward & Brownlee, 2002). If we colonize other solar systems, we could survive longer than our sun, perhaps another 100 trillion years, when all stars begin burning out (Adams & Laughlin, 1997). We might survive even longer if we exploit nonstellar energy sources. But it is hard to imagine how humanity will survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter expected in 10 [to the] 32[nd] to 10 [to the] 41[st] years (Adams & Laughlin, 1997).3 Physics seems to support Kafka’s remark that ‘[t]here is infinite hope, but not for us.’”

An infinite future for humanity without toilet paper sounds hopeless to me, too. If there’s no cost-effective way to save humanity with TP, then perhaps we deserve to be wiped out.

bc