Industrial Ecology in fictional worlds: The spice and water cycles on the planet Arrakis from Frank Herbert's Dune
Creators: name: Billy, Romain
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the most famous works of science fiction, with 20 million copies sold and several movie adaptations. More importantly, it is considered as one of the first science-fiction novels with a strong ecological focus. Herbert used the ecosystem of the Oregon coastal dunes as a source of inspiration to design the desertic planet Arrakis, arguably the story's main character.

Despite sharing some characteristics with the Earth, Arrakis is much warmer. The planet mostly consists of mountainous areas and a large desert. Despite its extreme aridity, this desert hosts an original ecosystem. Sandtrouts are attracted to the few underground bodies of water available and surround them, making them unavailable to the rest of the ecosystem and keeping the desert arid for their sandworm phase. Indeed, sandtrouts evolve into giant sandworms, who cannot survive in the presence of water.  The transformation from sandtrout to sandworm also releases a special substance, called spice, or mélange.

The spice is the single most important substance in Herbert’s fictional world: in addition to its geriatric properties that prolongs the lifetime of humans, it enables fast interstellar travel, which is key for the cohesion of the galactic empire. Indeed, the importance of the spice and its addictive properties have already been compared to the role of oil in our current society. However, on Arrakis, the most critical resource is not the spice, but water. The indigenous population, the Fremen, survives in the desert thanks to their extreme adaptation to this arid environment. They use special whole-body suits that allow them to recycle most of the water they consume in a closed loop. In the book, the Fremen pursue a terraforming project of Arrakis. While turning the desert into a giant oasis makes the living conditions more pleasant for humans, this also leads to the destruction of the original desert ecosystem and by extension stops the spice production, raising issues of competing interests for resource exploitation, climate change, and ecosystem preservation.

In our work, we take Herbert’s world as a starting point to showcase the use of some industrial ecology methods. We demonstrate the instability of Arrakis’ ecosystem by developing a material flow analysis model for the spice and water cycles and their interactions. We then discuss the importance of these substances at the planet and galaxy scales with a criticality assessment.

In the same way that ethical issues raised by the progress of artificial intelligence have been discussed by authors such as Isaac Asimov long before becoming reality, science fiction allows us to question the relationships between materials and society with greater freedom. Besides, we argue that this type of metaphor can be a powerful tool to disseminate industrial ecology research to students and the general population, while the potential additional media attention for this type of popular science exercise can increase population awareness on pressing earthly issues.