Its actually worked out pretty well for us, less so the indigenous life that was already there, I'm all for preservation but the thought that we can out the earth back anything like it was 10000 years ago is extremely unlikely, there are 7 billion of us and that's unlikely to change, Garden Earth is going to become a bigger and bigger thing I guess.
The really incredible thing here isn't the robot, it's the poison, this thiosulfate-citrate-bile salts-sucrose agar stuff. It isn't itself lethal, but it's a culture medium for bacteria which are:
www.int-res.com/articles/dao_oa/d097p085.pdf
So the injection basically amplifies specific members of the starfish's own microbiome to the point where they not only kill the starfish, but infect and kill its neighbours.
Will Smith.. the last man on earth.. in New York.. has to sleep in a bath tub, because everything else is covered in huge spiky starfish. He doesn't have a dog.. the dogs were the first to go.
The poison is pretty cool for sure but the integration of all the tech here is pretty amazing. It's kind of incredible to think of all the complex systems here work together so well. When I saw the video all I could say is wow. It could be that we are near a "Cambrian Explosion" of autonomous devices like this. I was skeptical when I first heard that term applied to devices but this has me reconsidering.
That does seem kind of neat, but it still doesn't make sense to me. You have to carry a poison supply that will run out. You need 12 mL per starfish.
Is that really more effective than just injecting lots of seawater? You could pump in seawater by the kL, not mL, and you'll never run out. The starfish will surely die after all bodily fluids have been washed out with seawater.
The other idea that comes to mind is a needle with an electrified tip. Depending on voltage and current, this kills in various different ways. You can heat the animal, zap the nerves, or (via electrolysis of salt) fill the animal with either chlorine or sodium hydroxide.
12 mL worth of battery ought to be able to handle most of those methods. That's about break-even, but better because you refill the same way you refill the computer and propulsion. Charge the battery and you're ready for more action, mess-free. If you can do the job with less than 12 mL of battery, it's a definite win.
Water or electricity don't lead to infection in other nearby starfish, which is probably needed here because it's going to be hard for a robot to find and kill all, or enough, of them. Which at the same point is also something to take care of: I hope the inventors checked the range of starfish etc, so that this won't lead to massive starfish death in places far away from the coral reef being meant to be protected.
Right, for that we need robots that educate people on the environmental impact of their actions, and robots that inject poison into people who bring snowballs inside a government building as incontrovertible proof that climate change is a liberal sham.
A process a little bit like that is a background detail in the book 'All You Need Is Kill' – which is the basis for the Tom Cruise movie 'Edge of Tomorrow' ("Live, Die, Repeat").
That's also the plot of Tom Cruise's previous movie where he'd been fooled into harvesting the Earth for an illegal alien tetrahedral species. Maybe he's getting typecast.
At least it's not as bad as Matt Damon who's being typecast as the lone human surviving with little hope on a faraway planet. Two movies in a row -- let's see if they can make it three.
The big threat to coral reefs is posed by ocean acidification and warming. In the long run, it's not about sea stars, it's about the very water in which corals live.
The gradual loss in hospitality of the oceans and the associated effects on marine life are among the most serious, rarely-mentioned environmental threats currently in existence.
In this case, getting injected with star fish killing bacteria nutrients is probably less harmful than stepping on one of these poison star fishes themselves...so the robots are actually preferable if one or the other has to live.
We appear to be building the things that creeped me out 30 years ago. I remember watching a robot bug inject sedative into a person in the '84 movie "Runaway" [1] and feeling chills go up and down my spine (I was working on stepping motor controllers at the time and it didn't feel so far fetched). As others have noted here, other's might use this for more nefarious purposes.
A weird thing about this article is that it doesn't mention what happens if you touch one of these sea stars accidentally: it injects poison into you. The poison isn't that serious (painful and nauseating but not deadly, unless you bleed to death, or attract a shark), but then you have to have the spines removed. Surgically.
When will I have robots that can chase invasive Argentine Ants back into the walls and ground where their queens live, and score non-toxic mechanical kills?
I've had good success around my house with cotton soaked in a combo of sugar, water and borax, then shielded from the pets by containing the cotton within a pair of used jar lids with holes poked in them. If that doesn't work, try peanut butter and borax.
Did this last year. The ants haven't even bounced back this year.
When will we learn to stop interfering with the environment? Every time we prop it up like this we just end up creating another issue. Look at cane toads in Australia for example.
The environment regulated itself just fine without us.
Did you read the article? The only reason there are so many of those sea stars is because fertilizer runoff is providing them a ton of excess nutrients.
I think you need to do both. The sea stars will continue to consume the coral until the problem is solved at the source, possibly for a long enough time that the reef is consumed in its entirety.
No offense, but why do you think you can come up with a solution after thinking about a problem for maybe 10 seconds, when tons of smart people are working on this problem and can't come up with a great solution?
The problem with fertilizer run off is that it penetrates the ground, travels very slowly, and leeches into waterways. Once the fertilizer and contaminants are in the soil, they move very slowly. Like a meter or two per year. So, right now, we are seeing fertilizer and contaminant runoff entering streams, because a farmer in the 1970s fertilized a field that was 50 meters away from a river. I don't think we have a time machine available to go back and tell them to not fertilize their fields, which is basically the only way your solution would work.
The other alternative is to wait it out, but the coral reefs will be gone by then, because they will have been devoured by the sea stars.
I think a whole lot of people who are worried about environmental damage from this robot are not realising that even though it's advertised as autonomous it only operates for a few hours before needing a recharge and as such it can be turned off very easily if things aren't going right.
The ocean is massive. Even coral reefs are massive. A fleet of these robots (which they don't have yet) would take years to affect significant areas.
This is a totally different ballgame to humans previous experiments involving introducing an organism to do pest control in a new environment.
Are star fish that worthless? I used to hope that one day someone would find some miracle life altering property they have that would make them commercially lucrative, which would solve this problem overnight I bet.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadwww.int-res.com/articles/dao_oa/d097p085.pdf
So the injection basically amplifies specific members of the starfish's own microbiome to the point where they not only kill the starfish, but infect and kill its neighbours.
That is highly ingenious, and severely creepy.
http://www.int-res.com/articles/dao_oa/d097p085.pdf
Is that really more effective than just injecting lots of seawater? You could pump in seawater by the kL, not mL, and you'll never run out. The starfish will surely die after all bodily fluids have been washed out with seawater.
The other idea that comes to mind is a needle with an electrified tip. Depending on voltage and current, this kills in various different ways. You can heat the animal, zap the nerves, or (via electrolysis of salt) fill the animal with either chlorine or sodium hydroxide.
I hope there aren't any extraterrestrials reading.
At least it's not as bad as Matt Damon who's being typecast as the lone human surviving with little hope on a faraway planet. Two movies in a row -- let's see if they can make it three.
The gradual loss in hospitality of the oceans and the associated effects on marine life are among the most serious, rarely-mentioned environmental threats currently in existence.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/
Did this last year. The ants haven't even bounced back this year.
The environment regulated itself just fine without us.
I agree that this, while clever, is patching a symptom, not addressing the causes.
The problem with fertilizer run off is that it penetrates the ground, travels very slowly, and leeches into waterways. Once the fertilizer and contaminants are in the soil, they move very slowly. Like a meter or two per year. So, right now, we are seeing fertilizer and contaminant runoff entering streams, because a farmer in the 1970s fertilized a field that was 50 meters away from a river. I don't think we have a time machine available to go back and tell them to not fertilize their fields, which is basically the only way your solution would work.
The other alternative is to wait it out, but the coral reefs will be gone by then, because they will have been devoured by the sea stars.
The ocean is massive. Even coral reefs are massive. A fleet of these robots (which they don't have yet) would take years to affect significant areas.
This is a totally different ballgame to humans previous experiments involving introducing an organism to do pest control in a new environment.