Outside of the Hungarian oil subculture, the practice has been largely ignored
I've always wondered whether some technologies have been given less attention in the west because they were considered 'Soviet'. Bacteriophages, an alternative to antibiotics less likely to induce resistances, come to mind as well. But of course, there might be perfectly valid technical reasons for why it didn't catch on.
Bacteriophages had serious problems that made them unsuitable for mass deployment. For example, you need to isolate a strain suitable against an infection, and that's a process which was difficult to scale. Another problem is that as far as the body is concerned, the phage is an infection too and it turns out the body can be effective at getting rid of phages. Lastly, resistances also occur against phages.
It's been awhile since I've gotten to use my "Why phage aren't quite as awesome as it seems on first glance", from the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist who has been super-interested in phage for my whole career (literally tried to get a job out of undergrad with a phage therapeutics startup).
1) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky. There are treatment guidelines for things like sepsis right now that are basically un-doable with phage therapy because of the time it takes to tune a phage library.
2) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
3) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West (after being abandoned for some very real, very serious safety concerns back in the day), which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenured professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate, especially when trying to treat at scale.
But new phage strains would evolve head to head with the resistant bacteria, right? With antibiotics you have a fixed molecule, which becomes useless if the bacteria develops resistance.
Yes, but you can't rely on that on a natural setting. Sometimes the body does get rid of a disease, right? Same thing with bacteria-phage relationship - and the resistant bacteria can then spread (while the better phages are difficult to harvest back from the body, and may not be as effective against the original strain).
I think a more personalized medical system can do a lot of good with phages given modern tech, but most medical provision systems would have difficultly deploying it, and certainly no one was able to back when it was developed. AFAIK, the ability to easily scale, transport and deploy antibiotics was what led to antibiotics being chosen over phages just about everywhere.
That's the classical argument pro phages. It's probably not easy to pick a clearly better one, @yyyk seems to have more insight than I do, but I did read an article pointing out that research on bacteriophages in the west only really took off after the cold war.
The joke is about cancer cells but is equally applicable to bacteria. Just because something is very very good at killing bacteria doesn't mean that it can also become a practical medicine.
I saw a small documentary about an American crew in Kuwait where someone said that putting out the fire was the easy part - capping was the hard part. So maybe that's part of it. That being said, the documentary did dramatize a particularly difficult to put out well head but they did manage to put that one out as well by just putting a cap on it which allowed the fire to shoot out above at a higher level and then turning off the valve to choke out the fire. I got the impression that this was an outlier well and that most of the others were extinguished more easily.
For mine rescue? These seem designed to put out fires by suppressing O2 levels. Is this helpful in rescue situations or are these more about simply putting out stubborn underground fires?
If there are two technologies, and all else is equal, and one is slightly more efficient or slightly cheaper or slightly anything, it’ll often catch on and completely overtake the other one.
Only when they’re perfectly balanced does it seem that both come into play and remain (left vs right hand drive, for example).
There are significant "snowballing" effects wrt to technology adoption, more widely adopted technologies tend to improve far more quickly. So a little bit of noise in the early days about the true potential of a technology could conceivable sway the race in one direction or another, and I was wondering whether there were instances of where the noise signal might have been that it was considered as "Soviet" and thus less likely to receive research funding/grants.
A less geopolitical example that I can think of was research in the 50's about limitations of neural networks (XOR problem,...) that some people I take seriously argue has delayed the adoption of these architectures by a generation or two (the only politics here was the battle for government funding by different researchers/labs).
To add to this purely economics perspective, the there’s a lot more at play when it comes to take up of new technological innovations: the preparedness the manufacturing sector to produce and deliver the goods, and customer acceptance.
The first is probably an economic one, but it’s important to consider that it’s not all about the cost of production - the technique may be prohibitive, and could draw out too many strategic resources from other areas in the sector… and it might not even scale, or has a short shelf life, or, or…
The second - customer acceptance - would need to be carefully considered. The doctor offers you two options to treat your babushka, the familiar and reliable antibiotic, or the new drug that sounds like a Matrix virus?
Yeah, the first point is a good one - if you have a new process that uses parts/procedures that already exist you're going to have a much easier time than if you have a better process that requires all-new parts and procedures.
For something to overtake it has to be amazingly exceptionally better; which can be hard to obtain.
I remember some Soviet scientist had trouble cutting thin samples for transmissive electron microscope because the cutting itself introduced stress which then ruined the sample so he created a method of slowly cutting the sample with thread dowsed in sulfuric acid, this didn't deform the sample.
It's common to employ a similar technique when making cinnamon rolls.
Sweet dough/cinnamon/butter/sugar mix is rolled up into a long tube, then you cut the individual rolls using dental floss wrapped around the tube. Generally, the H2SO4 is omitted.
And now I know what I'm making for breakfast tomorrow!
TBF, you (fortunately) don't have out of control burning oil wells that often, so such a specialized firefighting vehicle is needed very rarely. But in situations such as Kuwait, it sure is handy to have one...
Prior to reading this, I had an impression that the most used method for putting out the burning oil wells is TNT - the blast wave just blows off the burning fire, and it burns no more. However, this article suggests that just blowing off the fire is not enough, because hot sand and air might re-ignite the oil. So, probably, the explosives also damage the well, disrupting the supply of the fuel.
Capping the well while burning has a huge advantage over explosives which is that it's much harder for people who don't know what they're talking about to bike-shed the process and therefore has less risk of cost ballooning over time and investing in those techniques/experience/know how often look like the more assured option even if it's the more difficult and costly technique on paper both up front and per use.
Yes, sometimes technologies are forgotten, and sometimes they didn't catch on because there were some complicated gotchas
The space pen vs. pencil story comes to mind, and it seems silly they wouldn't use a pencil except that it is a dust hazard, a short-circuit hazard (especially if you're using circuits more densely packed) etc
The space pen vs pencil story is a classic example of a story that catches on because it sounds great, except that it isn't really true when you look more closely. Another classic is the historic tulip bubble, which was far more contained in reality than people tend to assume (there was a price crash, but the financial fallout was largely limited to a few families who could mostly afford it).
Would highly recommend watching Fires of Kuwait - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2deGanpWvEo
They show this and other technologies developed by the different countries involved in the firefighting efforts. Also astounding videography
This thing relies on jet engines. There are lots of odd machines around the world that use jet engines for strange high-energy tasks (ie speed record attempts). Invariably they rely on used aircraft engines that are, for whatever reasons, no longer suitable for flight and would not be financially practical if built using new engines. As they are no longer flying, these engines are likely not serviced appropriately. They are likely just using them until something pops. You wouldn't want to be around an aging jet engine when it decides to give up the ghost. Things get very energetic very quickly.
> In its original form, Big Wind put out nine burning oil wells in Kuwait, more than many teams that were working with the more traditional method of blowing out well fires with the use of high explosives.
> The companies responsible for extinguishing the fires initially were Bechtel, Red Adair Company (now sold to Global Industries of Louisiana), Boots and Coots, and Wild Well Control. Safety Boss was the fourth company to arrive but ended up extinguishing and capping the most wells of any other company: 180 of the 600. Other companies including Cudd Well/Pressure Control, Neal Adams Firefighters, and Kuwait Wild Well Killers were also contracted.
The vast majority of Kuwaiti oil well fires were put out by flooding with sea water. A smaller number of problematic fires were put out with explosives.
Big Wind is a fun story but was a drop in the bucket compared to the work of the real well services companies that operated in Kuwait.
The Kuwaiti oil well fires are also a bit of science history because the data gathered there provided an experimental refutation of then-popular nuclear winter theories.
It’s not quite that simple, the dramatic reduction in nuclear stockpiles significantly reduced the threat.
What the oil wells did is suggest that the threat from burning cities was also lower outside of the bombs direct fireball which is very effective at transporting material to the upper atmosphere. However, more recent models show that fires across larger areas may be more capable of sending particles to the stratosphere.
Combined the overall threat still exists, but would be less severe than initial predictions.
Kuwait being in 1991, "then-popular nuclear winter theories" propagated the idea that nuclear war would essentially eradicate all life on earth, cause a drastic long-term drop of global temperatures, reduce the ozone layer to a level that plants would be burned by UV etc.
That's literally where the "uninhabitable, lifeless rock after WW3" idea comes from.
Public perception never really lines up with the predictions.
The Day After Tomorrow for example somehow jumped from slowing down ocean circulation resulting in lower temperatures in the north, to ice tornadoes. It’s like stuff can’t just be really really bad for a lot of people it also needs cause people to run somewhere or be flying around in helicopters.
The nuclear winter models and papers were explicitly designed to create that perception for political reasons. Starting with the outcome of your model, then designing your model to produce that outcome is not exactly fine science, and I don't understand why you're trying to act like that didn't happen or whatever it is you're trying here.
Because that’s not what happened. I don’t want to suggest politics had no role in why people where investigating it, but the models had to be plausible with available information.
Global temperatures where approximately 10C colder during the last ice age which humidity survived. So, initial estimates that global temperatures could briefly drop by 10-20C don’t automatically mean the kind of earth devoid of life that you described. That people looked at a range and only paid attention to the worst case says little about the paper involved.
> Their ominous conclusion was that the sooty smoke from burning cities could bring on a "nuclear winter" — months or even years of cold so severe it would gravely endanger living creatures.
> The scientists did this work mainly for public consumption. When they announced their results in 1983, it was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control.
> ... The computer models were so simplified, and the data on smoke and other aerosols were still so poor, that the scientists could say nothing for certain. ...
Keep in mind that among the assumptions made here are that a 1D vertical weather model is meaningful when trying to estimate global weather effects from localized emissions and that Western and Russian cities are built mostly from wood, like WW2 Japan.
> When they announced their results in 1983, it was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control.
That’s 25+ years after the initial research. “But secret studies supported by the U.S. military suggested that a war's effects on the atmosphere could be quite serious.” I am not saying politics never showed up, but it’s clear the initial research was of a more practical nature as was the 1958 paper.
As to the paper you’re referring to:
“As a side effect, the studies helped to improve scientific understanding of how aerosols could affect climate.” So it was actually an improvement on existing models.
Though science marches on and the debate continued, my understanding is that people found how the early models underestimated a specific issue they investigated and got more concerned. Others would discover areas the model was overestimating impact and investigate that, but overall the models got generally more accurate over time.
>> The crew all wear flame-resistant gear to protect themselves from the immense heat
Can't we add tele-operation to modern versions of such firefighting tanks? Remote controlling the tank and water nozzles wearing VR glasses and intuitive controls, instead of exposing people to those temperatures.
I think it's a cost thing. I bet those older tanks require a good bit of strength to operate, so to replacing an insulated human that cost a few hundred dollars a day at most with robotics that can withstand 600 degree operating temperatures and still reliably exerting the forces needed to control the tank would be a tall order and it would take a long time to earn back the equivalent expense
I dream of a museum full of this kind of one off machines… and I always thought the only appropriate name would have to include Thunderbirds somehow. I have largely settled on “The Thunderbird Museum of Innovative and Unique Machinery” to avoid potential trademark problems… like the Air and Space wing of the Smithsonian but full of weird and interesting machines like this firefighting tank. Such examples of “necessity is the mother of all invention” are worthy of saving to inspire others to think beyond the conventional form of the solutions they are most common with.
Silly question, but I need to know. Could this help slow done rapidly advancing forest fires? Maybe if it could be used to "split" them into smaller fires?
Almost certainly not except in very limited cases.
Big Wind is designed for reasonably contained fires, often fuel-fed as with oil or gas well fires. There, if you can extinguish the immediate flame, you've got a chance at capping the well, cutting off the fuel, and preventing further combustion.
Wildfires are more akin to a battle front, or in their worst cases, a literal storm of fire which behaves unpredictably and doesn't simply advance across terrain but can skip and jump, creating tremendous winds in the process. Fire tornados in recent Northern California fires picked up and tossed trucks and heavy equipment, killing several people in that process.
Wildfires also tend to advance not simply as a flame front but through blown embers, which can carry the fire foreward 100s of metres, or even kilometres, from the primary flame front.
Combatting is more a matter of saving people and property --- evacuations and "treatment" (clearing brush, foaming or gelling walls and roofs, possibly setting sprinklers and soaking ground and surfaces), "fuel denial" through brush-clearing, cutting fire lines, and back-burning, and laying suppressant through aerial attack. Fire lines may stretch for kilometers, with crew deployed along them. Methods used are far more strategic than tactical.
Wendover Productions did a pretty good "How Fighting Wildfires Works" video four years ago:
I've always wondered whether some technologies have been given less attention in the west because they were considered 'Soviet'. Bacteriophages, an alternative to antibiotics less likely to induce resistances, come to mind as well. But of course, there might be perfectly valid technical reasons for why it didn't catch on.