[ImFatYoureFat]

Why?

How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?

[moultano]

You asked what I would do, so I answered. :)

More seriously, the biggest barrier to laypeople coming up with practical solutions to this is that all of the forces involved are orders of magnitude outside of our experience. None of us has any intuitive concept of what things are like 5000 feet below the surface of the water. None of us has any idea what oil is like in that volume, let alone at that pressure and temperature.

I'd be more charitable about common sense solutions to the cleanup, since that seems like the type of thing we can have an intuition about. The bottom of the ocean however is an entirely alien environment, with (for all intents and purposes) different physics.

The only people with an intuition for this are the ones working on the solution professionally.

[hga]

Well, "the experts" are informed by the physics, mechanical engineering and chemistry that's been learned over the years WRT to oil drilling and these problems. As some of the other threads have illustrated, you certainly can't ignore the basic physics required, which I'm sure many if not most of us never learned or have long forget (or we're just very rusty at solving these sorts of problems).

If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.

[j_baker]

I can only conclude that you do surgery on yourself because you aren't willing to trust the experts.

[ImFatYoureFat]

I didn't want to side track to discussion into an argument over whether laymen can think critically about complex issues or not but this is kind of a ridicules accusation.

There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas.

I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).

[stretchwithme]

that would be as crazy as trying to fix your own blown out oil well

[wlievens]

Because nobody here knows anything about how stuff works at that depth. And a million other reasons. You can't "hack" this can you?