excess paperwork to coal

[wilfulton]

Okay, the bureau of all bureaucracies has decided to make a decision. The exact wording of the decision would probably eat up all of Mike's bandwidth, so I'll keep it short. They have decided we must do more paperwork. Assuming the BIQ (bureau in question) decides to use standard 8 1/2 x 11 in typing paper, they must do millions of pages of pointless paperwork.

Storage of this paperwork can get to be a problem at times, however, since they are known to deforest entire planets just to process it. One idea was huge underground vaults, however a problem has arisen. One of these vaults was built so deep that enough paperwork was stacked on top of itself that the cumulative weight actually compressed it into coal.

What I'm not exactly sure about, is how tall a stack of paper would this require to compress the lower layers into the aforementioned fossil fuel? Tentatively, my vault is about three miles deep. It is not built on Earth, so we're not worried about tectonic issues here.

[Drooling Iguana]

I think time would be a pretty big factor in this. How long are these papers being compressed?

[wilfulton]

I think time would be a pretty big factor in this. How long are these papers being compressed?

I forget, but I think about 300 years. The vault was filled and sealed, and the bureaucracy continued as always. But something came up after all those years requiring papers that were conveniently buried at the bottom of this stack. When crews came in to dig through the mess, they discovered it had all compressed into coal. If heat is needed, there is no reason why it couldn't be available, as the planet could still have a warm interior.

[wilfulton]

Okay, here is what happened.

Buyg MarKoona stood ramrod straight before a furious looking Jabbs van Klummp. He had thrown down his pen from proof reading another example of bureaucratic madness. On Pinata III, a huge underground vault filled with the last three hundred years of bureaucracy had just experience a disaster. When workers entered the five mile high subterranean vault to look for some old zoning ordinances on hardcopy for whatever reason, they discovered that the vault, once full of paperwork, had settled. It had settled by almost a hundred meters. Much to their dismay, the papers they were looking for had compressed into coal. Good luck explaining that to the bureau of internal affairs, department of zoning. So something had to be done, a new initiative to prevent any further mishaps like that from ever happening again.

The vault was five miles deep and three hundred years old. If it needs more time, Anduhr has been a bureaucracy for as far back as the bureau of historical facts cares to record.

[Wyrm]

Your own beastie, I assume.

Well, coal takes somewhere upwards of a million years to form, and requires an anaerobic environment and great pressure. I'm not sure if a five-mile high stack of paper is sufficient pressure to generate 1/5 mile of coal (the approximate compaction ratio of peat to coal is about 3-7 to 1).

[Ariphaos]

Marshes form into peat and build layers of brown coal (lignite) relatively quickly and at surprisingly shallow depths (on the order of centuries and several meters), but unless there was a leak of some sort that doesn't seem to be happenning here. Bituminous (soft coal), IIRC, takes hundreds of thousands of years, and only occurs at even more significant pressures. Anthracite and diamonds would seem out of the question.

It's certainly possible that, beneath several hundred meters, in a sealed vault, the moisture in the documents (including just the ink) squeezed out, and down, forming a stinking layer of mush at the bottom that slowly grew upwards, a layer of peat shortly beneath the surface of this mush, and early brown coal before that.

One thing's for sure though, if it's anything like modern paper (made of trees), it's not just going to settle, it's going to stink, the ink is going to be unreadable on anything below a few hundred meters, and no doubt the top documents and those on the sides will be eaten into a few or more by mold.

[Ariphaos]

Ghetto edit: Err, by 'before that' I mean 'under that' - layers of brown coal could build up from the bottom. Probably wouldn't be much. Lignite formation is sometimes used to roughly date things a few thousand years old, so you might want to look into rates there.

That said, on the topic of diamonds, a fifty mile stack of papers left behind for a few million years would be hilarious. As an added bonus, wouldn't stink anymore.

[wilfulton]

Your own beastie, I assume.

Aye, and a mighty beastie it is.

Well, coal takes somewhere upwards of a million years to form, and requires an anaerobic environment and great pressure. I'm not sure if a five-mile high stack of paper is sufficient pressure to generate 1/5 mile of coal (the approximate compaction ratio of peat to coal is about 3-7 to 1)

The whole stack doesn't compress, just the last hundred meters of it.

Marshes form into peat and build layers of brown coal (lignite) relatively quickly and at surprisingly shallow depths (on the order of centuries and several meters), but unless there was a leak of some sort that doesn't seem to be happenning here. Bituminous (soft coal), IIRC, takes hundreds of thousands of years, and only occurs at even more significant pressures. Anthracite and diamonds would seem out of the question.

It doesn't need to be high grade coal or anything, it basically just needs to be enough like coal to be ironic. If worse comes to worse its possible that an underground water pipe could rupture.

It's certainly possible that, beneath several hundred meters, in a sealed vault, the moisture in the documents (including just the ink) squeezed out, and down, forming a stinking layer of mush at the bottom that slowly grew upwards, a layer of peat shortly beneath the surface of this mush, and early brown coal before that.

One thing's for sure though, if it's anything like modern paper (made of trees), it's not just going to settle, it's going to stink, the ink is going to be unreadable on anything below a few hundred meters, and no doubt the top documents and those on the sides will be eaten into a few or more by mold.

It is just like modern paper, the principality of Anduhr has at least a dozen or so planets set aside solely to the production of paper for its bureaucratic machine (that does not count those that do it as a little boost to their economy, these are whole Earth-sized planets that do it to justify their existence).

I figured that some complications might arise, that since the vault has been sealed for about three hundred years, and it settles, the pressure inside the vault would be less than that outside. But the plight of those opening the vault is not actually the primary focus, it's more of an aside.

[Ariphaos]

It doesn't need to be high grade coal or anything, it basically just needs to be enough like coal to be ironic. If worse comes to worse its possible that an underground water pipe could rupture.

Lignite is a brownish-black kind of coal that can actually get quite black, though the stuff in your vault would probably still be noticibly brown. Not everyone considers it 'real' coal, it still has a lot of moisture, it's not the stuff you typically buy for your grill, which takes a few orders of magnitude longer to form.

It's going to be covered in a lot of peat, which bears a decent resemblance to lignite, and for your purposes is close enough to the same thing. The boundry between each of peat-lignite-bituminous-anthracite-diamond is large and fuzzy, after all.

I'm king of skeptical about if the documents themselves would have enough moisture to form the bog in the first place, which is why I mentioned the water. It's also possible that, in order to prevent possible self igniting, some thinking-ahead-but-not-far-enough bureaucrat made sure the chamber had a high humidity.

It is just like modern paper, the principality of Anduhr has at least a dozen or so planets set aside solely to the production of paper for its bureaucratic machine (that does not count those that do it as a little boost to their economy, these are whole Earth-sized planets that do it to justify their existence).

Modern paper is pretty damned poor.

In that case I doubt anything below the first few dozen meters would be readable, resembling more like blank newspaper than documentation with words on it. Much beneath that, the paper will have fused into blocks of what is pretty much wood, before you get to the bog.

I figured that some complications might arise, that since the vault has been sealed for about three hundred years, and it settles, the pressure inside the vault would be less than that outside. But the plight of those opening the vault is not actually the primary focus, it's more of an aside.

Heh.

I'd hate to be on the investigative team tasked with recovering the data, that's for sure.

[Wyrm]

Well, coal takes somewhere upwards of a million years to form, and requires an anaerobic environment and great pressure. I'm not sure if a five-mile high stack of paper is sufficient pressure to generate 1/5 mile of coal (the approximate compaction ratio of peat to coal is about 3-7 to 1)

The whole stack doesn't compress, just the last hundred meters of it.

Of course it doesn't. It's just that the last 116 - 150 m of paper has compressed over time into 16 - 50 m of coal. The stuff that becomes the coal begins around 7895 - 7929 m in depth.

The Young's modulus (Y) of wood is somewhere between 1-10 x 10^9 Pa, and the density of paper (ρ) is around 0.3-0.9 x 10^3 kg/m^3, so ρD/Y << 1, and so the pressure may be approximated by ρD = 2.29e4 ~ 7.0e4 kPa. Pretty heafty, but about a third of what the same amount of granite would exert.

[wilfulton]

[quote="]In that case I doubt anything below the first few dozen meters would be readable, resembling more like blank newspaper than documentation with words on it. Much beneath that, the paper will have fused into blocks of what is pretty much wood, before you get to the bog. [/quote]

It is for this very reason that the bureau of paperwork, department of storage, is going to make some sweeping changes.

As a secondary aside, what about reams of paper being stored in hollowed out asteroids. They would be protected from hard radiation, but possibly be stored in vacuum. Would this help preserve the print or make matters worse?

As for the idea of the paperwork being compressed into diamonds, Anduhr hasn't been around long enough to accomplish that feat yet, but they would if they could I'm certain.

[Ariphaos]

It is for this very reason that the bureau of paperwork, department of storage, is going to make some sweeping changes.

As a secondary aside, what about reams of paper being stored in hollowed out asteroids. They would be protected from hard radiation, but possibly be stored in vacuum. Would this help preserve the print or make matters worse?

Ideally you'd just store them in filing cabinets, so one piece of paper isn't resting on top of another (though a 4-mile stack of filing cabinets is going to collapse under Earth gravity anyway). Obviously, sticking them in an asteroid would be 'better' all around, but I can just picture such a bureaucracy picking one with an unstable orbit...

Ultimately, paper gets eaten by mold (that 'old book smell'), and any massive volume of paper is going to have a few spores or bacterium that, eventually, will take advantage of such a vast food source. Paper == cellulose pulp == sugar! Sugar good. Bacteria will have their way with it eventually, given enough time (a few thousand years, say).

'Modern' paper is worse than vellum or hemp paper in terms of long-term durability. It's going to yellow and corrode, partly due to the chemicals used in making it. This could get really bad if they decided certain portions of text had to be yellow, for some reason.

[wilfulton]

Ideally you'd just store them in filing cabinets, so one piece of paper isn't resting on top of another (though a 4-mile stack of filing cabinets is going to collapse under Earth gravity anyway). Obviously, sticking them in an asteroid would be 'better' all around, but I can just picture such a bureaucracy picking one with an unstable orbit...

The problem with filing cabinets is Anduhr could easily fill one with a single form. So they just stack piles of that shit on the floor (with a digital copy, naturally, and a digital reference as to where exactly it is in the pile) The thought of the bureau of paperwork, department of stacking accidentally putting it in an asteroid that whose orbit ends up taking it careening into a hive planet is somewhat interesting, but I think any nation with resources to waste on deforesting entire planets and hollowing out asteroids for giant filing cabinets would probably be able to correct the orbit of such a rock.

Ultimately, paper gets eaten by mold (that 'old book smell'), and any massive volume of paper is going to have a few spores or bacterium that, eventually, will take advantage of such a vast food source. Paper == cellulose pulp == sugar! Sugar good. Bacteria will have their way with it eventually, given enough time (a few thousand years, say).

I smell bad things...

'Modern' paper is worse than vellum or hemp paper in terms of long-term durability. It's going to yellow and corrode, partly due to the chemicals used in making it. This could get really bad if they decided certain portions of text had to be yellow, for some reason.

Or even better, if the chemicals used in the new and improved paper, which isn't supposed to yellow with time because it's new and improved, end up spontaneously combusting.

Anduhr, is, after all, a nation spanning a fair portion of the known galaxy.

[Wyrm]

The problem with filing cabinets is Anduhr could easily fill one with a single form.

One filing cabinet == one form?! Holy shit! It's a wonder they get anything DONE!

So they just stack piles of that shit on the floor (with a digital copy, naturally, and a digital reference as to where exactly it is in the pile)

So they, like, fill out the form on the 'puter and then print out a hardcopy with a monster high-volume dot-matrix printer?

Well, storing those things in an asteroid will get rid of the "turning into coal" problem, at least.

[Ariphaos]

The problem with filing cabinets is Anduhr could easily fill one with a single form. So they just stack piles of that shit on the floor (with a digital copy, naturally, and a digital reference as to where exactly it is in the pile) The thought of the bureau of paperwork, department of stacking accidentally putting it in an asteroid that whose orbit ends up taking it careening into a hive planet is somewhat interesting, but I think any nation with resources to waste on deforesting entire planets and hollowing out asteroids for giant filing cabinets would probably be able to correct the orbit of such a rock.

Like Wyrm said, how do they requisition the paper to print the form in the first place? :D

Well, what counts for an unstable orbit might not always be calculated. A lot of asteroid orbits between Mars and Uranus aren't stable... but would be if it weren't for Jupiter and Saturn being there. Chiron, for example, has a circularish orbit. Won't keep it from careening out of the Solar System eventually...

An efficient bureaucracy might keep a pretty fast track of such things. Your nation doesn't sound so keen :-p

Or even better, if the chemicals used in the new and improved paper, which isn't supposed to yellow with time because it's new and improved, end up spontaneously combusting. :idea:

I don't imagine there's much free space in there to burn it with, which is why I mentioned the bacteria (or any anaerobic analog lifeform that exists in your Universe). It's not as much fun if -only- the edges combust.

[Wyrm]

The Young's modulus (Y) of wood is somewhere between 1-10 x 10^9 Pa, and the density of paper (ρ) is around 0.3-0.9 x 10^3 kg/m^3, so ρD/Y << 1, and so the pressure may be approximated by ρD = 2.29e4 ~ 7.0e4 kPa. Pretty heafty, but about a third of what the same amount of granite would exert.

I just realized to make the units work out, you have to multiply ρD by g (acceleration of gravity). Silly Wyrm! When you do this, ρDg is somewhere between 23.21 and 69.93 MPa. The quantity ρDg/Y << 1 though.