Just curious.
A Bulgarian chap I work with mentioned some sort of “glycerine” compound that if introduced into the ocean would eventually spread worldwide and result in the killing of all life therein.
I find this relatively difficult to believe, in that a small amount of chemical would have a really hard time imbalancing such a large body of water. Anyone know anything about this?
A bit of ice-nine would do the job. Non-fictional chemicals aren’t nearly so potent.
Don’t loose any sleep over it. In university, one of my profs mentioned something that could thepretically be done to water (sorry, I forgot what; which is an indication of how much it worried me) that if this water spread to un-altered water, again theoretically this would cause all that water to alter to the same form, blah blah blah, kill the oceans and the whole world with it, and so on… No one had ever actually performed this transformation, but supposedly some researchers once thought they had got it rather accidently. Mental alarm bells all over the lab, phone calls, and then they realized it was just a regular beaker of water… phew!. So in theory, if we imagine a hypothetical scenario where we could actually get the chemistry right, there would be certain compounds that would start a chain reaction with all the Earth’s water/air, and spell doom for all life. Then again, ASAIK, the same probability exists that we will be invaded and conquered by the Klingons. No worries here :).
One has to worry where the energy needed to drive the chemical chain-reaction would come from. Don’t think it’s possible. Now, something biological could get the energy to spread it’s poison via photosynthesis or metabolizing existing nutrients in the water, but that’s a whole different story.
I think Squink and mmmiiikkkeee are talking about more or less the same thing. There was a time when some chemists thought they had discovered a polymeric form of water called polywater, and before someone showed that polywater didn’t really exist, Nature published a letter warning that polywater was a grave danger to the whole world because it seemed to be able to convert normal water into more polywater. I think it was after that happened that Vonnegut wrote Cat’s Cradle, in which someone discovers an alternate form of ice with a crystal structure that’s stable at room temperature and that seeds its own formation when it comes in contact with liquid water. A little bit of this “ice-9” gets into the ocean and the whole world freezes and dies. It’s true that there are different forms of ice that melt at higher temperatures, but they’re only stable under pressure.
I think it the past there might have been a little bit of reason to take such threats seriously, especially if Nature was publishing them, but the alternate-forms-of-water threats have been pretty well discredited.
Actually, Cat’s Cradle came out in 1963. Boris Derjaguin started the polywater fad in 1966. It was sort of sixties version of cold-fusion. If I recall correctly, the odd properties of polywater turned out to come from contamination with silicates.