ForumGarden

I'll assume other people idly play games with their spreadsheet package of choice. I thought perhaps a thread of them might be entertaining.

This one's about the value of seawater. Assuming you can get the content into separate piles, that is.

Just as a clue, people are looking at millions of different species of tiny sea-plants and sea-animals (there's not much practical difference when they're microscopic) and seeing which have a tendency to accumulate different (or any!) metals out of what they swim in. The best candidates get bred in bulk, zapped with x-rays to mutate them, re-tested at their skill, the worst thrown away, the most improved bred in bulk again, and the cycle perfomed until a superbreed emerges that's good at concentrating a single element. It's been done successfully with bacteria and plants to decontaminate heavy metal contamination of landfill and mining sites on land. Seawater's next.

Why's seawater more difficult? Getting the tailored tiny sea-plants and sea-animals back, or chaining them somewhere so they can be harvested. They tend to be hard to get hold of once they're out swimming.

Anyway - some numbers.

A litre of water, that's a kilogram, that's 10x10x10 cm. I know you'd rather do this in pints and gallons but no, trust me, litres is simpler.

A ton is about a tonne, a thousand kilograms, and it's a cube of water a metre on each side. A cubic kilometer is a billion tonnes and that's my assumed unit of seawater to process.

So, I went and got a webpage with mineral concentrations as a basis. That let me work out the weight of each element in a tonne of seawater.

It's interesting - what's there mostly is what's most soluble, which are the elements with only one spare electron present or missing. Lots of halides (Group 7), lots of alkalis (Group 1). A tonne of seawater is mostly water with about 34 kilograms of salt in it, Sodium Chloride.

So I sorted the elements into their weight present per thousand tonnes of water and banged in a column of bulk prices for each of those that were present at over a gram, multiplied the columns into value per cubic kilometer and stared for a while. Here's what I found.

Rubidium and Strontium are surprisingly expensive if you want to buy any, because there's not really many ores to mine - they're so soluble. There's also a lot of each in a cubic kilometer of seawater - 120 and 7800 tonnes each. Obviously if seawater extraction became practical they'd be less valuable, but right now they're worth respectively 9.6 and 1.4 billion dollars.

The salt and the freshwater themselves, once separated, are worth 680 and 800 million dollars at bulk prices.

Anything else valuable? Not a lot. $58,000 worth of Vanadium, $60,000 worth of Molybdenum and $322,000 worth of Uranium.

A quick double-take on that last number - that's 3 tonnes of Uranium.

I don't think anyone expects these tiny sea-plants and sea-animals to separate U-235 from U-238 so nothing instantly reactor-grade is on the cards, but it's still raw material for the next round of reactors. Current world production is around 40,000 tonnes a year.

The total value of a cubic kilometer of seawater, if everything's purified?

$1,250 billion, less whatever you lose by adding the new process to the marketplace.

Who's in for starting the ForumGarden Chemicals Corp?

Attached files sea1.zip (9.5 KB) 

Go on, you can't be a schoolteacher and not have maths, it's not allowed.

Raising this from the depths of oblivion was above and beyond the call of duty, Pinks. I can't see it running to a riotous conversation in here whatever you do.

Unless, of course, we write another spreadsheet?

With a figure like yours, that would be superfluous.

И ты сможешь продемонстрировать, Как деваха навроде тебя, Заторчать может и Обалдеть от меня....

(Please demonstrate how a girl like you can be thrilled and overwhelmed by me...)

You know, I think I could try these, they sound quite plausible.

A single bottle of Becks goes a long way with me.

Что такая девушка, как ты Делает в заведении навроде этого?

(What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?)

The truth is far stranger - I have a word document with the entire lyrics of Frank Zappa's "Live at the Fillmore East" album translated into Russian. All the phrases are on the tracks. It's one of my favourite bits of classical music, that and Hot Rats.

Here's another jeu d'esprit with a spreadsheet specially for Pinky (her being a teacher and all), this time taking a table from a report made to the House of Commons relating to the African Slave Trade in the year it was made illegal for UK ship owners to engage in the business. The last legal three-leg circuit was made in 1807. The table is titled "An Account of all ships or vessels which have annually cleared outwards from [Bristol], for the coast of Africa, for the last ten years", in "Accounts presented to the House of Commons relating to the African Slave Trade 16th July 1806". The whole report also details sailings from London and Liverpool.

So, a touch of background. The Bristol Slave trade that involved taking manufactured goods to West Africa, slaves from there to the Americas and sugar and tobacco from there back to Bristol, got into gear once the British had thrown out their autocratic Scots kings and swapped them for Constitutional kings from Holland in 1688 (called "the Glorious Revolution", as opposed to the Civil War we'd put up with during the previous two generations). From then until 1738, Bristol was the main Slaver port in England, with up to fifty ships dedicated to the trade.

The second half of the 1700s saw Liverpool far outstrip Bristol (from 1738 onward). The numbers of ships trading out of Bristol dropped as talk grew of outlawing the practice (though "it was reported that when William Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade was defeated in Parliament in 1791, the bells of St. Mary Redcliffe were rung amid general civic celebrations.").

Overall an estimated 2,108 slaving ships were fitted out in Bristol, with each ship holding on average 250 Africans. A total of half a million were taken as slaves by Bristol-fitted ships, about one fifth of all the slaves transported to the Americas by Britain.

Now, what else fits... The French had a revolution in 1792. That screwed trade in general, and Bristol shippers went out of business like fish in a heatwave (that's meant to invoke a mental image of going belly-up, but perhaps it didn't). Matthew's Directory for Bristol, in 1793, notes the drop in volume:The Ardor for The Trade to Africa for men and women, our fellow creatures and equals, is much abated among the humane and benevolent Merchants of Bristol. In 1787 there were but 30 Ships employed in this melancholy traffic; while the people of Liverpool, in their indiscriminate rage for Commerce and for getting money at all events have nearly engrossed this Trade, incredibly exceeded London and Bristol in it, employ many thousand tons of shipping, for the purposes of buying and enslaving God’s rational creaturesEven so, in 1793 there were 14 slaver sailings from Bristol. The numbers went rapidly down from then.

So, to the spreadsheet, which starts in January 1795. Please open to the scattergraph on Sheet 3...

The pink dots are non-slaver (presumably trader) ships sailing to Africa from Bristol. The further right the dot, the later in the year. The higher the dot the bigger the ship. The blue dots are Slaver ships. There's 60 dots and that's the entire sailings for the ten years before the trade ends, bar two which I'll get to later.

Two things to notice first. There's a lack of ships between 100 and 150 tons. All but four of the lighter ones are traders, all but five of the rest are slavers. There's two classes of ships going to Africa, and the heavyweights are the slavers (being transatlantic vessels).

Next, two thirds of the sailings fall into April-May and July-August. There's two distinct sailing seasons.

During these final ten years of the Bristol Slave trade there are 23 ships engaged, these being (with multiple voyages noted in brackets) the Active (3), African Queen (2), Alert (6), Allison (2), Aurora, Bacchus, British Tar, Dick, Hibernian, Isabella, Lapwing, London (2), Minerva (2), Nelly, Peggy (2), Pilgrim (2), Prince of Wales, Reliance, Robust, Sally (2), Swift (4), Triton and Wanton. Just ten ships made two-thirds of the slaver voyages out of Bristol during this final period of the trade, and the most active three sailed a third of the total.

Here's a glimpse of one of the ships. The African Queen was originally owned by Thomas King and ship builder and merchant Sydenham Teast and built in the docks on Redcliffe Parade. By 1792 it was owned by James Rogers and captained by Samuel Stribling. The 1793 bankruptcies resulting from the drop in trade triggered by the French revolution saw James Rogers sell the ship. Under the command of Captain John Evans in 1795 it was owned by John Anderson.When she left Bristol in 1792, with Samuel Stribling as captain, the African Queen was sailed for what is now Nigeria, then called Old Calabar. According to one report, once there, the captain bought 255 enslaved Africans. Slaves were scarce and he spent months on the coast trying to buy enough to make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean worthwhile.

At least 21 of the ship’s crew died during the 7 or 8 months spent at Old Calabar, waiting whilst the captain purchased slaves. One report says that of the 255 enslaved Africans on board, 28 died in this long wait at the coast, and 114 died in the Middle Passage from West Africa to the Caribbean. The crew and enslaved Africans would have become ill from spending so long onboard the ship, in cramped conditions where diseases spread quickly.

The ship arrived at Jamaica in the Caribbean in distress, and one agent refused to sell its cargo, because the slaves were in such bad condition. James Rogers’ ships had a much higher death rate amongst the slaves than other Bristol merchants.

Captain John Kennedy had been sailing the Juba for James Rogers in 1787. By 1800 he was still in the slave trade, captain of the Minerva.

I'll post this as it stands, I'm not sure how to develop the story at this point. Suggestions would be welcome.

Oh... the end of the trade. There were two final sailings in 1805 and that was the end of it. The Alert put in one final run under William Lund. The British Tar under James Gordon, previously Master of the Reliance, made the last legal Bristol Slave sailing on Christmas Eve 1805, nine weeks after the Battle of Trafalgar. By contrast, Liverpool saw 110 sailings in 1805 and London 17. Bristol had timed the shutdown to perfection. The trade was abolished in 1807.

Attached files slaves bristol 1795.zip (12.7 KB)